Colonial Logics Research Articles

Decolonization and public administration: Frustrated ramblings of a spoilsport

As the public administration community prepares to pick up the mantle of decolonization as guided by our American colleagues, a killjoy points out that this new wave of decolonization is simply another way in which the disciplinary colonial logic of the division of labor between the empire and its periphery are being reinforced. The spoilsport then presents their own vision of decolonization of the discipline, apparently too naïve to see the irony of such an endeavor. The killjoy then comes crashing back to earth with a scathing self-critique finishing the pointless journey of a naively idealistic critique.

Unsettling Migrant Reintegration: The Serial Risk‐Taking of Returning Overseas Filipino Workers (OFWs) to Cordillera, Philippines

AbstractIn 2017, the Philippine government boosted its campaign on Overseas Filipino Worker (OFW) reintegration, a set of programmes designed to aid returning Filipino labour migrants. In this paper, I examine migrant reintegration through the case of returned migrants to the province of Benguet, Philippines. Rather than use “sustainability of return” as main focus of assessment, I foreground instead the historical geographies undergirding the current reiteration of this migration policy. By doing so, I demonstrate how the “gambling” practices of returned migrants can be read as not an easy acquiescence to the neoliberal imperative for self‐entrepreneurship encouraged by the Philippine state. In highlighting gambling as an embodied strategy emerging from and through imperial histories, I argue that migrant reintegration gets revealed as rehearsal of certain colonial logics that have oriented certain peoples to the labour of serial risk taking for survival. Close attention to return migrants’ gambling practices raises urgent questions regarding the relentless push for entrepreneurship as development solution.

Eliminate all illegal births

In 2021 state statistics demonstrated that for the first time in modern history the Uyghur population itself has begun to recede. This demographic shift is the result of both endemic family separation and the implementation of systematic gynecological exams, IUD insertions, and surgical sterilization. This article places this negative eugenics campaign in conversation with older colonial systems that strove to maintain control over women’s bodies by considering anthropological scholarship on hygiene and reproduction. It contends that contemporary eugenics in China should be seen as related to the history of racial and colonial logics, and the normalization of public health discourse in Europe and North America, even as it is adapted to new “counterterrorism” purposes in Northwest China.

Tech-Colonialism: Gentrification, Resistance, and Belonging in San Francisco's Colonial Present

This article theorizes tech-led gentrification in San Francisco as a form of what I call, "tech-colonialism." Drawing on my ethnographic work with movements organizing against eviction and displacement, this article grapples with the critique from activists and protestors that gentrification and the tech-industry are "colonizing" the city. Taking this seriously, I argue that the analytic of "colonialism" provided San Francisco residents and activists with an important framework for political organizing, identity-making, solidarity-work, and forging belonging amidst the city's on-going "eviction epidemic." Beyond the discursive deployment by activists of "colonialism" as a concept, I also trace the material continuities between historical forms of colonial dispossession and present-day tech-colonialism, in which technology companies enclose the "commons," operate above laws, invest surplus capital in speculative urban racialized property regimes, and treat governments themselves as outdated and archaic institutions to be "disrupted." Ultimately, I define tech-colonialism as the social and spatial strategies of the technology industry that operate through colonial logics of racialized dispossession and materially extend and reproduce the colonial present.

The settler colonial rootsand neoliberal afterlife of Problem Behavior Theory.

Problem Behavior Theory (PBT) is an influential psychosocial theory that has shaped-and continues to shape-much research on adolescent development in the United States and abroad. It is the product of over a half-century of research conducted by psychologists-cum-behavioral scientists Lee and Richard Jessor. This article engages two striking features of the history of PBT. First, it tracks how, and to what effect, a theory elaborated to explain the so-called "deviant behavior" of a group of Native Americans was extended to explain the "problem behavior" of white, middle-class, settler youth, before coming to circulate as a universal theory of adolescent behavior. Second, it explores how a theory that was meant to explain individual behaviors by connecting them to their larger social contexts came to be embraced by researchers who have been criticized for doing precisely the opposite. To do so, this article draws from Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies scholarship and sheds light on how the logics of settler colonialism and neoliberalism have participated in the coproduction of PBT and its reception.

Eugenics, Admixture, and Multiculturalism in Twentieth-Century Northern Sweden: Contesting Disability and Sámi Genocide

This article examines twentieth-century northern Swedish geographical isolate studies in Norrbotten Province involving Torne-Finns and northern Sámi, who have historically shared pronatalist Laestadian religious beliefs pathologized by mainstream eugenicists. Deemed a sign of religious fanaticism, Laestadianism was associated with the eugenic stigmatization of Torne-Finns and Sámi people and beliefs were conceptualized as an early sign of schizophrenia. Geneticists, as an outgrowth of early twentieth-century eugenics, structured schizophrenia as a genetic disease caused by first-cousin marriage. These consanguineous marriages that were reported as prevalent in Tornedalian and Sámi reindeer-herding communities practicing Laestadianism, legitimated race-based sterilization of psychitrized Torne-Finn and Sámi women. Similarly, the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology, established in 1922 by Herman Lundborg, advanced reorganizing race along family lines and populations, which supported gendered disability and Sámi genocide. Torne-Finn, as well as Sámi, religious minority women, who were sterilized at first admission to psychiatric facilities, require redress for colonial violence. Current academic and direct-to-consumer admixture research on Finnish and Sámi peoples is recognized as upholding colonial logics of difference in Swedish multicultural policies. This, in turn, results in ongoing gendered genocide. It is concluded that in a radical break from eugenic theories, major psychoses associated with common infections lie in the neglected half of the human genome rather than according to classical genetic rules.

Sankara Is Not Dead, dir. Lucie Viver

<i>Sankara Is Not Dead,</i> dir. Lucie Viver

4Ecocriticism

Abstract Much ecocriticism scholarship published in 2021 sought to tackle the question of environmental emergency. The work considered in this essay covers a considerable range of topics, temporalities, and spaces, ranging from British histories of industrial extraction to Canada’s polluted waterways in the present, and draws upon an array of disciplinary contexts, including work from literary theory, media studies, the environmental humanities, waste and discard studies, Black studies, feminist theory, and Indigenous studies. I examine works that suggest new ways of understanding our current ‘crisis’ through a reframing of timescales and an emphasis on infrastructures; works that think explicitly about extraction and extractivism by considering what critical and cultural theory can offer to help better conceptualize both the climate crisis and the structures of racial capitalism on which it is grounded; and works that employ and develop experimental, hybrid forms of creative-theoretical research methods, operating outside the bounds of what we might traditionally understand as ecocriticism. I conclude by suggesting that these experimental modes of theory exemplify how ecocriticism and the environmental humanities are increasingly turning to new forms to imagine possible routes out of contemporary intersecting crises. The essay is divided into four key sections: 1. Introduction: Code Red for Humanity; 2. The Colonial Logics and Infrastructures of Environmental Crisis; 3. Theorizing Extraction and Extractivism; 4. Finding New Forms.

Cultural transformation of university social work curricula: Black Lives Matter and the Spanish colonial past

The Spanish colonial past permeates the institutions of higher education, configuring the contents and forms of disciplinary knowledge production that constitute it, as is the case of social work. In this article, we visit different scenarios where colonial memories are disputed in the context of the commemorations of 12 October (also called ‘Hispanic Day’ or ‘Race Day’) in Barcelona. Although multiple articulations of anti-racist movements, such as those related to Black Lives Matter, question the material and semiotics that sustain structural racism, colonial cultural layers are still predominant in the Spanish state. Analysis shows how colonial logics nest in social work practice by: first, contributing to the definition of subject positions – such as ‘migrant’ – as problematic and needy of integration policies and intervention; and, second, making structural racism invisible through the avoidance of radical analysis and action regarding the cultural layers that sustain and perpetuate institutional racism.

Hallucinations of the Spanish Imaginary and the Idealized Hotel California

Focusing on the Mission Inn and the Sherman Indian Boarding School in Riverside, this article analyzes an idealized “Hotel California” as a component of what I have called “the Spanish Imaginary.” Just as the Eagles’ song of the same name examines both the mythmaking of Southern California and the American dream, this article describes how that imaginary shapes our collective hallucinations of a time that rightfully should be mourned instead of celebrated. The Mission Inn, which opened in 1902, architecturally portrays the Spanish Imaginary and the mission themes of spirituality, hinting as well at the secular benevolence of the Mexicans and Americans who succeeded the Spanish. This article argues that the pervasive Mission Revival style of architecture that is synonymous with Southern California is a physical manifestation of the anti-Indian ideology that informed the greed and violence of European and American settlement. The newcomers eviscerated the future state’s environment, introducing a genocidal architecture that combines capitalistic culture with an historical imaginary, one that succeeded in drawing millions of settlers to California and became the embodiment of both the American dream and the American nightmare. Both continue to exert their influence: while the Sherman Indian Boarding School has moved away from its Spanish mission roots, today’s Mission Inn presents visitors with the idealized “Hotel California” version of the Golden State’s past, wrapping the reality of Indian slavery and genocide in a distinctive form of plantation nostalgia. Perhaps no other structure in California better illustrates the colonial desires of Spain (then of Mexico, then of the United States) to “civilize” Indigenous peoples than the Sherman Indian Boarding School, whose original design illustrates the collective delusion of the Spanish Imaginary. Opening its doors in 1903, Sherman intentionally drew its design from mission architecture. The choice makes sense, given that both missions and Sherman were designed to transform Native peoples. Both utilized Native bodies for their labor. Both drew sustenance from Native peoples’ difference, and from their availability as a threatening “Other” requiring physical as well as cultural control. The Sherman Indian Boarding School provides a potent site of analysis of the ways that twentieth-century Americans used architecture to harness a mythical past and then bend it to capitalist goals. Moreover, implicating Mission Revival–style architecture in American processes of mythmaking illustrates how colonizers’ notions of race undergirded their spatial colonial logics, in ways that devalued Native peoples in the past and continue to obscure their physical and cultural persistence today.

Word rich or word poor? Deficit discourses, raciolinguistic ideologies and the resurgence of the ‘word gap’ in England’s education policy

ABSTRACT Educational linguists across England and the USA have long critiqued deficit-based language ideologies in schools, yet since the early 2010s, these have enjoyed a marked resurgence in England’s education policy as evident in discourses, funding, and pedagogical materials related to the so-called ‘word gap.’ This article conceptualizes the word gap as a realization of raciolinguistic ideologies in which the language practices of racialized, low-income and disabled speakers are characterized as deficient, limited, and indeed, full of gaps because they fail to meet benchmarks designed by powerful white listeners. With a genealogical approach, I trace how word gap ideologies and interventions are tethered to colonial logics and have (re)intensified in England’s education policy in recent years. I draw on a cluster of data, including education policy documents, Hansard records, political discourse, textbooks for teachers, research reports, media coverage and the work of Ofsted, the schools inspectorate. I discuss the durability of the word gap in England, newly marketed under seemingly benign guises of scientific objectivity, social justice and empowerment – despite decades of criticism exposing how it perpetuates racial and class hierarchies whilst blaming marginalized speakers and their families for their apparent failure to use the right kind of words.

Problematizing Access to Higher Education for Refugee and Globally Displaced Students: What’s the Problem Represented to Be in Canadian University Responses to Syrian, Afghan and Ukrainian Crises?

The UNHCR’s 15by30 campaign to increase refugee student enrolment in higher education to 15% by 2030 is a lofty goal. Canadian higher education institutions have a role to play in contributing to this policy goal, along with advocacy efforts from refugee student groups, community-based organizations, government, and international organizations. The aim of this study is to look critically at how the issue of access to higher education for refugee and globally displaced people is represented through Ontario’s universities’ responses to federal government initiatives to crises in Syria, Afghanistan and Ukraine. In this study, we use Bacchi’s (2009) “What’s the problem represented to be?” approach to policy analysis and, drawing on Dillabough’s (2022) critique of modernity in higher education, we argue that university responses related to refugee and globally displaced student access to higher education offer the possibility to reflect on the paradoxical tensions of the problem space in Canadian higher education. In our findings, we discuss how the problem of refugee and displacement crisis was represented differently in response to differences in geopolitical conditions and government policies, as we demonstrate how representations of material problems and categories of “citizenship” and “geographical location” in the universities’ responses contributed to creating boundaries of inclusion and exclusion for access. Finally, we show how the creation of educational programs for “globally displaced people” during the period related to the Ukrainian crisis perpetuates the logic of colonialism in the universities’ responses.

Raising children: Discussing and practicing modern/colonial family education in Colombia

This paper focuses on how a colonial logic shaped ideas and practices about childhood in the modern/colonial interplay between family members, knowledge, activities, and goods that combined difference, structural subordination, and modern adult-child relations in Colombia. Based on a local magazine directed by elite women, it refers to the cultural mechanism that merged northern and central perspectives with the regional and national modern/colonial horizon of family, public and private sex roles, children, and the broader framework of modernization between 1926 and 1940.

The speaking citizen: language requirements and linguistic neoliberal colonialisms

ABSTRACT This article concerns contemporary common-sense politics around language, integration, and citizenship that pervade Western European countries, where language is at the basis of a new model of citizenship – jus linguarum. I situate jus linguarum as the product of two seemingly different logics: the logics of neoliberalism and the logics (and legacies) of colonialism. I argue that jus linguarum obscures the fact that ‘national language’ is a historically constructed category with roots in imperialism, and allows for the disappearance of other categories, such as whiteness and middle-classness. The chapter shows how a form of ‘provincialised national languages’ arise from the tensions between the inevitability of multilingualism in today’s global world, on the one hand, and the insistence of one-nation-one-language, on the other. The analysis of jus linguarum developed in this paper forces a new understanding of citizenship where regimes of seeing and regimes of hearing combine in definitions of citizenship and citizens, through intersecting inequalities of language, race, and class.

The Democratic Limits of Populist Politics

The Democratic Limits of Populist Politics

"This Has Nothing to Do With Clouds": A Decolonial Approach to Data Centers in the Node Pole

The environmental impacts of Big Tech fall disproportionately on economically poor people and countries, meanwhile material wealth concentrates to the few at the top. This essay examines how cloud computing uses the logic of coloniality and extractivism to conclude that ‘post-extractive modernity’ is a conceptual fallacy. Using Facebook’s sprawling data center in the ‘Node Pole’ region of Sweden as an example, we’ll find how the data center’s waste heat effectively serves as a foil to Big Tech’s promise of a post-extractive vision. Furthermore, this will challenge the country’s veneer of colonial neutrality by underscoring how the data centers subsist on the ore fields of Norrbotten, effectively staging their progression from an industry that widely contributed to colonization. In sum, this discussion highlights how cloud computing is a form of dissociation from the materiality of data, that creates distance from the impact of cloud consumption in deliberate, albeit dangerous, ways.

Connecting across difference in environmental governance: Beyond rights, recognition, and participation

This paper explores the significance of current paradigms for connecting across difference in environmental governance, with a focus on dominant practices and the erasures that occur in the process. It focuses on three core concepts and corresponding practices: rights (adhering to both persons and property, procedural, and substantive); recognition (of harms done, of those harmed, or of those deserving of special recognition); and participation (in which information, decision authority, and/or benefits are shared with affected populations). The paper begins with a literature review on the history and purported benefits of each of these concepts, the environmental arenas where they occur, and the critiques that are leveraged against them. To envision what it might look like to connect across difference differently, we situate these critiques in the literature on coloniality and use this to develop a conceptual framework for evaluating efforts to connect across difference in environmental governance. We then illustrate the application of this framework in the environmental arenas of biodiversity conservation and extractivism to crystalize through lived experiences what it means to operate inside of these paradigms and to move beyond them. The paper highlights how current paradigms for connecting across difference are deeply situated in (settler) colonial logics of hierarchies of value, state sovereignty, and Indigenous erasure. We conclude with a vision of how environmental governance can move beyond its current colonial hegemony by centering decolonial and abolition ecologies scholarship that decenters settler ontologies in favor of more radical alternatives for relating with the so-called “natural” world.

Making Relatives: The Poetics and Politics of a Trans-Indigenous Teacher Collective

We write this article as educators working at Sahasatsuksa school, an urban Indigenous school in Thailand, who also maintain ties with related Redes de Tutoría work in Mexico. This article engages the stories of our trans-Indigenous teacher collective to illustrate how poetic ways of making relatives across time advanced our intellectual, ethical, and political work. We ground our reaches for Indigenous futures in the Mekong through a lens of relative-ness—specifically how making relatives toward enacting more poetic forms of teaching and learning held political possibilities to disrupt colonial logics implicit in global schooling for Indigenous children. While the extension of schooling worldwide is deemed important for development, rhetorics of modernity have largely suppressed the rich family-based knowledges that Indigenous children bring into classrooms, contributing to the debilitation of human communities’ intellectual and socioecological health. Our interest here is then: How can educational movements travel in regenerative ways for Indigenous peoples and their lands instead? With a focus on tracing the relational commitments of our trans-Indigenous design research, we illustrate how ongoing acts of making relatives occurred across two timescales—both within our educational design and within moment-to-moment interactions among teachers and students. First, we illustrate how making relatives occurred within 3 years of growing the collaboration across grassroots educators in Mexico, where the Tutoría pedagogical movement in which we were working originated. Second, we present a microanalysis of a teacher-student dialogue to show how poetic forms of relating within everyday interactions expanded political possibilities of schools living in right relationships with families at Sahasatsuksa. Finally, we suggest that making relatives, a deeply trans-Indigenous practice, is an alternative frame to “comparison” and can open up possibilities for more generative, decolonial forms of edgework across comparative education and the learning sciences, teaching, learning, and research.

The “White middle-class farming woman”: Instagram and settler colonialism in contemporary rural Australia

In nations where colonialism persists such as Australia, scholars have identified the hegemony of a morally infused white farming imaginary. While this construction has traditionally been invested in heteropatriarchal ideologies our aim in this paper is to demonstrate how, in recent years, white middle-class farming women have been woven into this narrative through settler colonial logics. We take up this contention in the Australian context examining 100 posts to two major institutional Instagram accounts that feature farming women: @invisfarmer and @agrifuturesau. Using the lens of settler colonialism, and a visual and textual analysis, we identify how the “white middle-class woman farmer” is framed by discourses of white feminism and invisibility/visibility. We reveal the emergence of a narrow farming woman aesthetic which is bolstered by narratives which celebrate the “successful female farmer” and the “successful female farm leader”. In concluding the paper, we discuss the implications of the gendering of the white farming imaginary, and make a call for gender and rural studies scholars to de-centre and disaggregate the “white middle-class settler farming woman” subject position, through attending to settler colonialism and Indigenous scholarship in understandings of Australian rurality.

Cartesianism, Feminism, Coloniality: Rethinking Gender Formation from Astell to Lugones

This essay will examine both Mary Astell’s proposal for women’s education as a protofeminist project and Descartes’ meditations on rationalism and the mind-body duality to understand how Astell’s project functions as liberatory in her immanent approach to the Cartesian method. I argue that while Astell uses Descartes’ rationalist philosophy to justify the rational capacities of women, Descartes’ philosophy may in principle be used to justify the further subjugation of women and colonized peoples through the separation of mind and body. In addition, I will employ Maria Lugones’ “Coloniality of Gender” to further evaluate the historicity of the claims made by Astell and her use of Descartes. Through Lugones, I contend that the gender dichotomy, a colonial imposition, is essentialized by Astell through the logic of modernity. I, thereby, show the necessity of a decolonial analysis for undoing the presuppositions of a colonial logic with the purpose of abolishing the gender binaries imposed by coloniality.