Colonial Logics Research Articles

The Colonised Self: The Politics of UK Asylum Practices, and the Embodiment of Colonial Power in Lived Experience

This paper draws on empirical data generated in the ‘Everyday Bordering in the UK’ project, with a focus on the experiences of people seeking asylum and hoping to establish a safe life in the UK. Specifically, we show that during the process of claiming asylum, people’s experiences of waiting and displacement—practices inherent in UK immigration policies—work as time- and space-based dimensions of power that are imbued with colonial logic. Existing studies apply the lens of Foucault’s governmentality approach to politics regulating people seeking asylum. In particular, the international literature describes the policy of dispersal, and associated periods of waiting, as a dynamic of power used by governments to control and regulate behaviours. However, these time- and space-related experiences are often considered separately, focusing on the rationalities underpinning these politics. This paper, by contrast, develops Foucault’s theories by examining how these two characteristics interconnect in the lived realities of people waiting for an asylum decision in the UK to create racialised politics of power and privilege that reproduce the colonial origins of European migration governance. In doing so, we contribute by illustrating how practices within the UK asylum system can be embodied by people seeking asylum to create a subject that modifies behaviours in response to being positioned as ‘less deserving’ than UK citizens—the ‘colonised self’.

Refusing the Gift of Welfare: Syrians’ Encounters with the Danish State

This paper traces the colonial logics embedded within Western states’ welfare and workfare programs. The imperial and capitalist underpinnings of Western welfare states have been well elaborated. Less research has focused on the colonial logics and strategies at work in their administration of welfare and ‘integration’ programs targeting newly arrived refugees. Drawing on ethnographic work with Syrian refugees living in Denmark, I examine Syrians’ encounters with the Danish welfare state and the five-year mandatory ‘integration’ program. Through Syrians’ accounts, I argue that we can begin to re-narrate the nature and meaning of contemporary welfare states and the colonial and racialized policing logics that structure and sustain them. More specifically, Syrians’ accounts draw attention to the often-overlooked roles that welfare regimes perform in maintaining colonial, racialized hierarchies of humanity as well as extractive and dispositive processes typically understood as economic aid and sustenance. Moreover, Syrians’ experiences of the Danish welfare state help to unpack the centrality in un- and under-paid forms of labor that refugee communities are required to perform, thereby enabling capital to materially benefit from stigmatized Others living in Denmark. Thus, by centering racial capitalism, this article contributes to scholars’ emerging attention to the coloniality of ‘integration’ and how this imperative manifests in practice.

The settler roots of Plurinational Bolivia: state-sponsored indigenous colonization on Bolivia’s Amazonian ‘frontier’

ABSTRACT This article analyzes a land conflict in Latin America through the lens of settler colonial studies. I focus on an area of the Bolivian Amazon known as the Alto Beni, where a government-sponsored colonization project settled indigenous colonists from the Bolivian highlands in territories occupied by the Mosetén people. This project has led to conflicts over land that continue to this day. I argue that this project continues to reflect the settler colonial logics of the development professionals who designed it, particularly their ideas about the role of Bolivia’s Amazonian ‘frontier’ in the production of a national identity. This involves the circulation of ideologies that cast the settler frontier as a key step on the path toward modernization, both for settlers (who are to be incorporated as citizens of a modernizing Bolivia) and for Mosetenes (who are to be eliminated in order to make room for this process). I conclude by challenging the stark distinction that scholars of settler colonialism make between settler colonialism (particularly as it depends on Anglocentric ideologies of racial classification) and other experiences of colonial oppression (particularly those which involve the circulation of ideas and the production of knowledge).

Pitfalls and Possibilities of Reciprocal Community Engagement: A Call to the Academy as a Platform for Activism

Abstract What does it mean to be a critical, community-engaged scholar as a full-time academic? In the process of developing mutual and subversive community-engaged scholarship, what dilemmas and difficulties does an early-career academic deal with? This paper taps into these questions by reflecting on my experience of developing a community program and colonial logics embedded in prevalent narratives around community engagement and research. I joined academia with the purpose and hope of making an impact on social inequity beyond the boundary of the academy by engaging with local communities, particularly working-class immigrant communities. During my transition from a K–12 teacher to academia, I learned how community practices are distinctly shaped and defined in relation to research and service in the academic discourses. With predominant research practices and community service that re-inscribe colonial relations and maintain the status quo, becoming a community-engaged scholar does not simply mean a scholar who works with or for communities. It entails a strong intention to subvert the hierarchical relationship between the academy and community, challenge the colonial politics of knowledge production, and re-define the academy as a platform for social change and activism.

Cutting colonial losses: imperial ideology in media coverage of the 1878 transfer of Saint Barthélemy in Sweden and France

ABSTRACT During the last several decades, important new research has been published on the Swedish Caribbean colony of Saint Barthélemy, but this has almost exclusively focused on its early years, during the early modern period. By the time it was returned to France in 1878, its heyday was long past. Nevertheless, this article argues that press coverage of the island’s transfer to France in the 1870s provides a useful window into colonial mentalities during an era that constituted the apex of global imperialism, even as it marked the end of Sweden’s small tropical empire. What did Swedes think about imperialism in the 1870s, and how was Sweden’s role as a colonial power viewed from abroad? Investigating a representative sample of Swedish and French newspapers, this article argues that while the peaceful transfer of Sweden’s last formal colony during the high age of empire could be described as exceptional, this did not reflect exceptional humanitarian or anti-imperial attitudes in Sweden. Rather, Swedes subscribed to the contemporaneous European logic of successful colonialism as a source of national pride, but were eager to divest themselves of Saint Barthélemy since the island’s poverty was understood as a national humiliation within this same colonial discursive framework.

“Misreading” Calvin: The Question of World-Making in the Texts of Settler Colonialism and Theology

ABSTRACT Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s account of European settler colonialism in the United States notably focuses on Calvinist communities as a primary catalyst in rationalizing land seizure, identifying covenantal theology as supporting settler claims to sovereignly held indigenous lands. This article argues that while she rightly identifies a correspondence between divine providence and a settler colonial logic of replacement, a vertical orientation, her analysis of theology as settler colonialism can be completed through a recourse to a rhetorical and literary analysis of Calvin’s Institutes. That is, settler colonialism also possesses a horizontal component, a logic of replicability that describes the temporal and spatial movement of settler colonialism. To make this argument I turn to Michelle Sanchez and Ford Lewis Battles’ respective explorations of literary genre and the language of accommodation. My analysis points to how Calvin’s covenantal theology can conjure the “imagined community” that is then embodied as settler colonialism. I end by suggesting that further careful articulation of the nexus between theology and settler colonialism is necessary for us to reckon the present and ongoing possibilities of inhabiting space and sharing life together, settler and indigenous alike.

Interconnectivity and Power Subversion: Enacting the Rhetoric of According-With

ABSTRACT In comparative rhetoric, interconnectivity emerges as a frame to conceptualize power struggle, one that specifically counters othering and the underlying essentialist and colonial logics. Interconnectivity stands for a third space where difference and connection coexist and where interdependence characterizes the relationship among interlocutors. This essay addresses how to forge interconnectivity and argues for the rhetoric of according-with. According-with refers to a threefold act, namely, to navigate, use, and refigure established and emergent discursive circumstances. In re/contextualizing practices of according-with in China’s pre-Qin period and various other places and time, I specify resourcefulness and situatedness as two epistemes exercised by according-with. The rhetoric of according-with, then, nuances the particular doing-thinking-be(com)ing that disenfranchised people enact to reshape power differentials. The rhetoric of according-with functions as a critical apparatus to cultivate interconnectivity as one pathway toward subverting power.

What nursing chooses not to know: Practices of epistemic silence/silencing.

Drawing from a keynote panel held at the hybrid 25th International Philosophy of Nursing Conference, this discussion paper examines the question of epistemic silence in nursing from five different perspectives. Contributors include US-based scholar Claire Valderama-Wallace, who meditated on ecosystems of settler colonial logics of nursing; American scholar Lucinda Canty discussed the epistemic silencing of nurses of colour; Canadian scholar Amelie Perron interrogated the use of disobedience and parrhesia in and for nursing; Canada-based scholar Ismalia De Sousa considered what nursing protects in its silences; and Australian scholar Janice Gullick spoke to trans invisibility in nursing.

Chakachua Pharmaceuticals and Fugitive Science.

Chakachua Pharmaceuticals and Fugitive Science.

Blagoustroistvo: Infrastructure, Determinism, (Re-)coloniality, and Social Engineering in Moscow, 1917–2022

AbstractBlagoustroistvo is an archaic Russian word used today primarily to refer to urban public works. This article, a collaboration between an anthropologist and a historian, focuses on aesthetics, rhetorics, and concrete practices of blagoustroistvo in Moscow during two temporal junctures: the first decade following the October Revolution (ca. 1917–1930), and the decade of Sergey Sobyanin’s Moscow Mayoralty (2010–). Our juxtaposition reveals striking continuities and contrasts. Both in the 1920s and 2010s, we show, blagoustroistvo was characterized by a semiotically-intense presence in the city; associated with an emphasis on deterministic socio-psychological “engineering”; ideologically framed by a “vernacularized” form of Marxism-Leninism; and invested with a powerful role in reconfiguring society’s spatial hierarchies, political geometry, and class consciousness. In the former period, social transformation referred to the inversion of class hierarchies and a partly illusory reconfiguration of power between center and periphery. In the 2010s, however, blagoustroistvo became a project that sought a reversion to class categories and the re-colonial reconstitution of the center’s coercive domination of the fringes. Our analysis proffers blagoustroistvo—a high-modernist, deterministic “infrastructural ideology” that has endured into and flourished in the twenty-first century—as a uniquely illustrative concept for understanding the shifting ideologies of Soviet and post-Soviet infrastructural modernity and its winding but stubborn colonial logics. Moreover, our explication of blagoustroistvo’s trans-epochal meanderings brings comparative nuance to current global debates around the alleged “return” of “social engineering” to urban governance and design in the guise of artificial intelligence, big data, smart cities, and “surveillance capitalism.”

Legal Pluralism on Dyarubbin: Country-as-Lore/Law in Western Sydney, Australia

In Australia, urbanisation is synonymous with ecological and cultural fragmentation. In places that became cities through deeply colonising processes, this destruction is imbricated with the relegation of Indigenous Lore/Law below English-derived law. In this article we argue for appropriate recognition and respectful intercultural engagements with Country-as-Lore/Law as a counter to the conception of land as a passive subject of anthropocentric law. Weaving together autoethnography, historical research and more-than-human geographies we identify the colonial practices that perpetuate ecological and cultural fragmentation in Sydney, Australia, while providing a novel, situated engagement with the humans, animals, plants, lands and waters that co-become to co-create particular and overlapping more-than-human legal landscapes. We show how Indigenous-non-Indigenous collaboration grounded in Darug Country-as-Lore/Law refracts and disperses the colonial logics of the state on urban Country that is ostensibly held, yet certainly neglected, by the Crown.

Disruptive exhibitionism - a performance methodology for surveillance art

ABSTRACT Recent years have seen an increase in work that critically names surveillance as a colonial logic, technology, and practice (see Browne 2015; Maynard 2017; Cahill 2019; Cahill 2021). To contribute to this turn, we propose ‘disruptive exhibitionism,’ a theoretical and methodological concept for surveillance performance art developed through the lenses of anti-colonialism, anti-racism, and queer positivity that center practices of care and pleasure as forms of resistance against surveillance structured by the violence and exploitation of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. The aim of this article is to develop disruptive exhibitionism as a methodology for surveillance performance art and research-creation that offers a way for marginalized identities and bodies to engage with visibility, where public visibility may be fraught or even dangerous. Disruptive exhibitionism builds on Koskela’s (2004) important concept of ‘empowering exhibitionism,’ which suggests that individuals might resist surveillance by using surveillant technologies to self-represent and publicly ‘expose’ oneself voluntarily. Disruptive exhibitionism expands empowering exhibitionism to consider (a) those subjectivities and bodies whose public visibility has been erased and/or rendered dangerous and (b) how contemporary corporate culture, white feminism, and postfeminism have co-opted ‘empowerment’ (Banet-Weiser 2018; Beck 2021).

Horizontes de decolonização em marketing: uma proposta com base na crítica à colonialidade da teoria da globalização de mercados

Abstract The most recognized theories in marketing were mostly written by authors from the Global North, who were revered within the field for their ideals. Among these, one that deserves to be highlighted is Theodore Levitt, with the theory of globalization of markets, which is considered relevant to this day. However, when analyzing the theory of globalization of markets and the interpretations made about it through a decolonial perspective from Latin America, one can see how much it reproduces coloniality. Therefore, this article analyzed, from the decolonial perspective, with particular attention to the concept of coloniality of power - and its derivations, the coloniality of knowledge, and the coloniality of being - how coloniality is present in the theory of globalization of markets developed by Theodore Levitt. This theory stands for a racial asymmetry between peoples, positions itself as a superior epistemological perspective, and promotes a convergence toward ways of Being associated with the Eurocentric world. However, knowing that this is just one of the theories that make up marketing and reverberate the same colonial logic, the decolonization of marketing in Brazil is proposed. We suggest incorporating the thoughts of authors such as Lélia Gonzalez and Ailton Krenak, who critically debate issues related to globalization, capitalism, and markets. The use of subaltern knowledge outside the area is a theoretical dare necessary to construct a marketing discipline that is less asymmetrical and more consciously oriented to deal with the complexities and challenges of this context.

Dominant Development Indexes’ Construction of Gender and Challenges for Recognizing Everyday Activism for Peace and Security

Developed organizations have increasingly garnered numerous indicators to measure gender and development outcomes. Yet, measurements themselves reflect a logic of the arenas where development occurs and can be captured, and therefore reflect where women are imagined to predominantly exist. Based on the analysis of 1,298 indicators across 15 major development databases covering African countries, this article argues that mainstream development organizations predominantly understand gender in terms of institutional sites. Sometimes these were sites for intervention, or a place for institutional ‘betterment’ (a hospital, a work place, and a school). Other times, these sites were conceptualized as natural places where women would be (the family and the nation state). We identify the spatial logics underpinning these development indicators, and link them to larger historical gendered and racialized colonial logics organizing diverse social, economic, and cultural lives, where economic and institutional sites are promoted, a more nuanced and relational one is displaced. Ultimately, these spatial imaginings extend to the larger context of where debates about peace and security are situated—namely in largely individual, state-driven, and institutional-centric ways.

PLATFORM VISIONS AND INVASIONS: SPATIAL (RE)IMAGINATIONS IN BIG TECH DISCOURSE

This panel analyzes the textual and audiovisual discourses in which big tech companies envision social spaces and their platforms’ roles in relation to those spaces. The panel asks: What are the visions of human life and technology that big tech companies narrate in relation to public and social spaces? And how do these tech-generated visions compare to current insights in and critiques of how these companies intervene in and disrupt social spaces? Situated within the field of critical platform studies, the panel’s premise is that the discourses produced by tech companies form an integral part of these companies’ interventions in people’s relations with themselves, others, and their environments. In order to develop a critical understanding of the platform society, it is crucial to examine those discourses through which tech companies present themselves almost as state-like powers that can be trusted with “public” services. Employing methods of textual and visual analysis, this panel offers such perspective. In its analysis of big tech’s spatial visions, the panel moves between different scales of spaces (domestic, educational, urban, extraterrestrial). In relation to these spaces, the panel articulates a discrepancy between the visions of life produced by tech companies and big tech’s invasive, perhaps even extractivist and colonial logic.

Advancing Radical Food Geographies Praxis through Participatory Film

The academic field of geography is deeply embedded within capitalist and settler colonial logics and has played a major role in suppressing and concealing Indigenous histories along with rights claims, cultures, and practices. While geography’s origins are deeply problematic, over the past decades, many scholars and practitioners have offered counter theoretical and practical perspectives and approaches. Radical food geographies praxis is one such example that is rooted in engaged and socially relevant theory, practice, and reflection. In this article, we present reflections from our experience with radical food geographies research praxis through a collaborative food sovereignty, action-oriented project co-developed and co-led by two settler academics, a documentary filmmaker, and the Chief of Batchewana First Nation. From 2018-2022, we embarked on an effort to share stories of Batchewana First Nation’s historical and current fishing practices, culture, and governance through the co-creation of a feature length documentary film titled, Lake Superior Our Helper: Stories from Batchewanaung Anishinabek Fisheries (https://www.batchewanaungfish.ca). To write this paper, we engaged in a process of collective autoethnography that involved documenting our individual reflections on the project and then bringing these perspectives into dialogue. Emerging from this process, we share our insights for an engaged research praxis, focusing on meaningful and authentic relationships and partnership building, participatory film as a tool for collaborative research, and radical food geographies. We present these insights with the aim of improving our own individual and collaborative practice and to share our learnings with other scholars, activists, and community practitioners engaged in similar partnership-based and praxis-oriented geographic research.

Social Licence to Operate

In this intervention article, we cultivate an anti-colonial critique of the ideational genealogy and conceptual materialisation of the social licence to operate (SLO) in the extractive industries in order to open a conversation about the racialised and colonial logics underlying its enactment and discursive practices. SLO functions to restrict the emergence of imaginary political potentials within communities impacted by extractive projects. We focus on the role of academics and social science researchers within and beyond the space of the university in engineering, shaping, and promoting dominant SLO frameworks, and endorsing the power and mythology of SLO. We do so in conversation with decolonial orientations that simultaneously analyse the colonial logics within corporate practice and galvanise epistemic justice beyond colonial and epistemic extractivism. The university, as a site for the refinement and promotion of hegemonic concepts like SLO, is an important space for post-extractive struggles.

Reading silences/silent readings: Disrupting the hegemony of voice in research with disabled children

By referring to an example from my doctoral research with children labeled and diagnosed with intellectual disabilities, I make a case for the ways that reading silences and silent readings within research are not only necessary but integral to refusing the claims of western colonial logics while also attending to the circulation of power imbalances within research processes. One of the key aims is to consider how embodied knowledges might increase access and inclusion of disabled children in knowledge production.

Praxis of the undercommons: rupturing university conviviality and coded formations of diversity

ABSTRACT The concept of the undercommons offers a lens for complicating the discourse of conviviality in education. In this paper, the authors draw on learning experiences opened through black feminisms, decoloniality and anti-coloniality, and new materialisms in an experimental graduate course. Presenting stories drawn from a shared educational space, they theorise fugitive convivial praxis and elucidate insurgent opportunities for intellectual study that nurture decolonial undercurrents of the university apparatus. Such engagements allowed for radical vulnerability in coming together through processes of ethical care, place-making, and counter-expressive thinking especially when coded formations of diversity insist on colonial logics and modes of operation in higher education. With curiosities and questions emerging in the undercommons, the authors also consider remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic toward future possibilities.

Logics of Elimination and Settler Colonialism: Decolonization or National Liberation?

: This article engages with Patrick Wolfe’s theoretical underpinnings and programmatic consequences of his settler-colonial theory. It contextualizes the renaissance of the settler-colonial paradigm, scrutinizing its theoretical innovations. In doing so, the article traces Wolfe’s work back to its origin in the work of Marcel Mauss and his notion of total social facts, discussing this theory’s political orientation around anti-racism and liberal subjectivity. It then shows how Wolfe applies his theory to Palestine, erasing class divisions and imperialism, militating against the theory and practice of national liberation. In conclusion it reflects on the use and limits of this theory for supporting anti-systemic struggle.