Colony System Research Articles

Integrating systems of power and privilege in the study of resilience.

Although current approaches to the study of resilience acknowledge the role of context, rarely do those conceptualizations attend to societal systems and structures that include hierarchies of power and privilege-namely systems of racism, colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism-nor do they articulate how these structural realities are embedded within individual experiences. We offer critiques of the current literature from this structural lens, using the concept of master narratives to articulate the incomplete and, at times, damaging story that the discipline of psychology has told about resilience. We then provide three models that center history, systems, and structures of society that can be employed in the study of resilience. We close with lessons learned from listening to those voices who have been marginalized by mainstream society, lessons that require us to redefine, broaden, and deepen our conceptualization of resilience. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Reproducing and reformulating categories of skill in regional and global migration governance: evidence from India and Bangladesh

ABSTRACT Approximately one-third of the world’s 169 million migrant workers come from the Asia and Pacific region, primarily working in temporary, low-wage jobs in the Gulf, where they face human and labor rights issues. In 2003, 12 Asian migrant-origin states formed the Colombo Process to address these labor concerns. This article examines and contrasts two major emigrant-origin states’ – India and Bangladesh –behavior in the Colombo Process, a regional consultative process, and other multilateral migration governance fora, focusing on the social construction of skills. Both countries inherited a colonial legal system of emigration regulation which distinguished emigrants into “high-” and “low-skill” categories, which India continues to reproduce, while Bangladesh aims to reformulate their categorization. This article investigates the how, where, and when of the countries’ emigrant categorization processes by tracing the categories’ origins, their reproduction, and reformulation. This article highlights the significant role migrant-origin states play in the politics of skill.

The physical well-being of Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest: Anthropometric evidence from British Columbia’s jails, 1864–1913

This paper documents the height of Indigenous men from the Pacific Northwest who were incarcerated in British Columbia’s jails during a period of colonization and increasing market access. The average height of adults from a given community reflects the standard of living in that community at the time the adults were growing to maturity. After correcting for the impact of sample selection arising from prisoners’ personal attributes, their home communities’ access to market opportunities, and unobserved height determinants associated with exposure to the colonial criminal justice system, we find that Indigenous men were positively selected into incarceration based on their height. Moreover, the tendency for the tallest men to be incarcerated became stronger over our period of study. Our results suggest that Indigenous communities in the Pacific Northwest were at a severe bioeconomic disadvantage during the nineteenth century, and their well-being did not improve as market access and colonial institutions spread through the region.

The assimilatory impact of professional Identity formation on racial and ethnic minority doctor of pharmacy students

The ideology of professional identity formation (PIF) is trending in pharmacy education. Therefore, we must initiate conversations about how the PIF framework impacts minoritized students. PIF is applied at default through the white racial frame, which is why making PIF inclusive is difficult. The concept of PIF itself is Eurocentric and relies on normative colonial systems, order, and viewpoints. Due to white centering, the PIF framework then becomes a tool of assimilation. This socially conditions marginalized and minoritized individuals to participate in the dominant culture's society according to those norms. Here we review the capitalistic angles of PIF, how PIF encourages assimilation, the interplay of role modeling on student development, and how to adjust the PIF framework to be more inclusive for minoritized learners.

Settler Midwifery: A Colonial Tool in Canada's Reproductive Healthcare System.

The land we call Canada is a settler colonial country where reproductive healthcare is used as a mechanism to control, subjugate, and erase Indigenous people and to advance the White settler state. Healthcare providers play an integral role in the healthcare system and contribute to Canada's colonization. In this piece, we critically analyze how settler midwifery is complicit with colonialism in reproductive healthcare by exploring the history of midwifery in Canada, midwifery education, and contemporary settler midwifery. European settlers omitted the history of Indigenous midwifery in Canada and to justify their erasure, they conceptualized Indigenous Peoples as uncivilized and their birthing practices as substandard. To establish a colonial healthcare system, settler midwives replaced traditional Indigenous birth attendants. When midwifery became regulated, midwives were required to train in formal post-secondary institutions that sustain colonial logics, systems, and practices. Midwifery education programs maintain colonialism by reinforcing medicalized Western practices and sustaining barriers to the growth of Indigenous midwifery. As a result, Western birthing practices are widespread among settler midwives and Indigenous Peoples face barriers to comprehensive and culturally sensitive care. To decolonize Canadian midwifery, we must dismantle stereotypes about Indigenous Peoples and their birthing practices in historical narratives, implement an anti-colonial approach to midwifery education, support Indigenous midwives in returning birth home, and improve the provision of culturally sensitive care. Settler midwifery in Canada is complicit in colonialism; building anti-colonial alliances can help support Indigenous midwives in leading a decolonial future for reproduction and birthing.

Engaging Indigenous communities in research to inform practice: The multisite implementation evaluation of Tribal home visiting.

Community engagement (CE) is widely acknowledged as a way to enhance the ethics, rigor, and impact of research. Additionally, CE is a demonstrated way to integrate Indigenous and colonial (western) research systems. For these reasons and others, designers of the Multi-site Implementation Evaluation of Tribal Home Visiting (MUSE) used a community-engaged approach to study the implementation of federally funded home-visiting programs across 17 Indigenous communities throughout the United States. This paper describes MUSE's community-engaged approach and its practical applications from the perspective of the MUSE study team. The paper highlights key outcomes attributable to CE, addresses barriers to CE, and details responses to these barriers and their impacts. Adding to the rich evidence base demonstrating the value of community-engaged approaches, MUSE demonstrates that in-depth CE is feasible and valuable in multisite studies done in partnership with Indigenous communities.

Ambiguity, consciousness, and plantation afterlives in Brazil’s racial capitalism

ABSTRACT This paper studies racial ambiguity and consciousness to advance debates on labor and discourse in racial capitalism and the plantationocene. I examine how the historical co-constitution of race and class shapes ideology and discourse, and how non-white workers perceive racial discrimination in a context where race and class strongly overlap. Focusing on sugarcane in Northeast Brazil, my methods include interviews with workers and union officials, and ethnographic observations at plantations and sugarcane municipalities. I argue that structural racism and class exploitation were forged through colonial plantation systems and that respondents both uneasily follow and openly challenge ideologies of racial ambiguity.

The Relevance of Kwame Nkrumah’s Education for Pan-Africanism in Decolonizing the Nigerian Educational System.

It is often contended that the system of education which the colonial masters brought to Nigeria was not entirely for the good of the citizens. It was a system of education that was meant to serve the colonialists without adding any meaning to the individual. The formulators of Nigerian Educational system, instead of formulating a unique policy of education that integrates our indigenous African educational system with essential elements from colonial education system, still continued with the structures of colonial elements which are not of great benefits to the Nigerian educational system like, the use of the English language as mode of communication in schools, the acceptance and inclusion of the Colonizers’ cultures and religion in the curriculum with the neglect of the indigenous cultures and religions, the too much emphasis on theoretical academic certification rather than merging both the theoretical and practical technical knowledge together for better development. This article presupposes the relevance of Kwame Nkrumah’s Education for Pan-Africanism in Decolonizing the Nigerian Educational System. It acknowledges the legacy of Nkrumah’s education for Pan-Africanism and contends that it can be used as a paradigm in recommending ways of decolonizing the Nigerian educational system. The article contends that with Nkrumah’s education for Pan-Africanism we can remove the colonial educational elements in the Nigerian Educational system that neither edify the indigenous educational system nor efficiently address the needs and problems of the people of Nigeria.

Irish Immigrants in Colonial Port Cities of Cuba: Havana, Santiago, and Cienfuegos

Abstract The port city of Havana, central to the Spanish colonial fleet system since the late sixteenth century, remained an important nexus for nineteenth-century Atlantic trade networks of sugar, coffee, tobacco, and the slave trade. Positioning Irish immigrants in this global hub allows us to examine their presence in Cuba and their participation in global circuits of commodities, trade, and labor. Drawing on local colonial sources, we evaluate the opportunities and experiences of Irish immigrants as social actors in the multi-ethnic urban spaces of Havana and other strategically located port cities of Santiago and Cienfuegos. The Irish who converged on Cuba rarely came directly from Ireland. Hence, we explore three migration trajectories mediated through the British West Indies, the Spanish metropole, and globally connected cities of North America. The most prominent were high-ranking military men who arrived in Cuba in the eighteenth century through Iberian-Irish connections; a smaller number of propertied Irish who migrated from the West Indies; and lastly, distinct flows of largely anonymous nineteenth-century immigrants who came through emerging Atlantic networks of colonial labour via the United States. This study explores the entangled histories of Irish, African, and European diasporas in the social and political worlds of three Spanish Caribbean port cities. Through an analysis of how Irish immigrants negotiated processes of class, religion, race, and gender in colonial Cuba, we highlight their participation in key economic and social dynamics of white colonization strategies, plantation slavery, and the Atlantic slave trade.

Solidarity as subversion: Attempting climate justice practice within the Neoliberal University

The neoliberal higher education model has often co-opted efforts from justice-based movements to disrupt academic complicity in a capitalist and colonial system of exploitation. Higher education institutions have already begun looking to, and appropriating, language and ideas from the climate justice movement to perform a response to the injustices that have led to and resulted from the climate crisis. As one way of subverting this appropriation, this article articulates, and reflects on, a specific approach to the Vertically Integrated Program (VIP) model, an educational idea originally developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology where undergraduate students work as researchers with faculty and graduate students. The approach put forth in this article is one based on the experience of the authors in developing a VIP that aims to foster and practice a culture of solidarity with an organisation that is addressing the causes and effects of historical injustices facing the community from which it grew. The practice of solidarity at a time of climate crisis offers a potential solution, showing students that it can be used to break down the walls of higher education, to practice solidarity with those excluded outside of it, and to remind us all of our humanity.

How might Apple, Freire, and hooks redesign the modern school as a site for social transformation?

In Western society, schools have largely been designed to reproduce capitalist, patriarchal, white supremacist, colonial systems and values. Numerous structural elements—from redlining and modern segregation to scripted curricula and high-stakes testing—work to ensure that schools solidify existing social inequalities, produce good worker bees, and keep hegemonic powers in place. Shaped within these forces of reproduction, our schools are fraught with grave problems: racism and discrimination in every form, physical and emotional bullying, hunger and food insecurity, technology addiction, sexual harassment, teen suicide, conflicts and gang violence, drug use, mindless consumption, and ecological destruction. The modern school is a perfect microcosm and reflection of an unhealthy society. How might we redesign schools such that they become sites of social transformation, rather than reproduction? How might we cultivate kind, ethical, empowered global citizens within our classrooms? In this paper, I will explore how Michael Apple, Paulo Freire, and bell hooks might address these questions. I will explore each scholar’s theories in an attempt to imagine what a school based in their pedagogical philosophy might look like—one that nurtures kind, ethical, and empowered global citizens.

Transactional pathways: Institutional possibilities for status and wealth under racial/caste capitalism

I introduce the concept of transactional pathways, coined by anthropologist Jane Guyer, to trace the institutional processes that contribute to uneven and unjust patterns of wealth and status distribution under systems of colonialism and racial/caste capitalism. Transactional pathways employ historical perspectives to reveal how divergent economic institutions and sources of valuation relate to social hierarchies. This approach links everyday economic transactions with patterns of wealth accumulation that are based not only on class, but intersectional social groups including race, caste, and/or ethnicity. Transactional pathways account for the fact that not only do different groups receive different amounts of valuable resources because of uneven distribution, but they have variable access to the symbolic power required to define which resources are deemed valuable in the first place and to monopolize them accordingly. The article briefly surveys foundational concepts from the economic anthropology literature before detailing transactional pathways. It introduces the case of attempted formalization of waste collection and recycling in Delhi, India, using the related concepts of thresholds and conversions to analyze key moments when wealth and status accumulation becomes especially possible in institutionally plural contexts.

Elizabeth Acevedo, Laura Esquivel, and the Politics of Multilingualism

AbstractA number of bloggers, journalists, teachers, and librarians have compared Elizabeth Acevedo’s 2019 young adult novel With the Fire on High with Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate (1989), recommending that fans of Esquivel’s work pick up Acevedo’s—and vice versa. These suggestions echo Acevedo’s own comments about the narrative, which she has characterized as “parecido a ‘Como agua para chocolate,’ pero en el barrio” (Acevedo & Pichardo, 2019). This article takes this recent reception history as an invitation to think through how With the Fire on High deepens and course-corrects the revolutionary path of Esquivel’s earlier text. More specifically, I interrogate how Acevedo and Esquivel engage with linguistic identities and with multilingualism in particular as source material for political resistance and healing. Acevedo, like Esquivel before her, represents multilingual identities in ways that disrupt and resist the neocolonial violence of the United States. However, whereas Como agua para chocolate’s references to minoritized languages are executed in a manner that threatens to reinscribe traumatizing ethnoracial and class hierarchies passed down via colonial history, multilingualism in Acevedo’s novel works more systemically to intervene in and undermine such established matrices of power. Acevedo participates in a project of linguistic resistance and healing that involves reclaiming a heritage language for a multiply marginalized protagonist and, through that act of reclamation, rejecting the received cultural wisdom propagated by both colonial and neocolonial systems.

OptiCare: Transforming Senior Healthcare Scheduling through Ant Colony System Algorithm Optimization

OptiCare: Transforming Senior Healthcare Scheduling through Ant Colony System Algorithm Optimization

Kutafuta Maisha: Connections Between Agency and Structure in Makonde Migratory Labour from Mozambique to Tanzania (ca. 1907-1964)

The drive for making colonial territories “profitable” through various means, such as commodity extraction, got entangled with complex events that stood well beyond the intervening capacity of colonial administrators, and labour migration was no exception. This article analyses Makonde migration from Northern Mozambique toward sisal plantations in neighbouring British Tanganyika during the twentieth century and argues that the interweaving of written and oral sources renders two contrasting pictures: one of an orderly planned commodity sector mediated by industrial pundits and sustained by a rhetoric of colonial “development”; and another of spontaneous, haphazard yet rational life decisions undertaken by migrant men and women. We challenge the conventional take on African labour migration by discussing a much more complex picture that shows how the colonial labour migration system had to address the migrants’ needs and how migrants successfully subverted coercive structures for their benefit, and by doing so, Makonde migrants established their own transformative connections with global phenomena that outreached their participation in commodity production chains

African Migration at a Crossroads: The Social and Theoretical Implications of Emerging International Migration Trends

This study examines international migration trends in Africa since the mid-1960s. It argues that African international migration trends are at a turning point that could significantly affect the future of migration studies. New African immigrant communities are emerging in Asia, South America, and other world regions, while the influence of state and non-state institutions is increasing. Moreover, interstate migration in Africa is now more disconnected from the legacies of the continent's colonial labor migration systems. By 2050, Africa is also expected to have the world's largest population in the age-groups that typically have the highest probabilities of migration, while per-capita incomes will increase in ways that could reduce the costs of migration. Although Africa's influence on future migration research is likely to increase, progress in developing theories to examine its emerging trends has been limited. With few exceptions, studies on migration in Africa focus on theory application rather than theory building. New theoretical approaches are therefore needed to adequately situate Africa's emerging migration trends within the larger context of migration studies. The building blocks for developing these theories include decolonial approaches that highlight African perspectives and the integration of the substantive influences of future migration trends into theory-building processes.

Weapons of Theory

Abstract This article critically engages with central tenets of decolonial thought. While sympathetic to decolonial thought's anti-colonialism and critique of Eurocentric universalism, the article argues that decolonial thought's understanding(s) of knowledge relies on an essentialising centralisation of origins and roots. Against decolonial thought's assertion that a knowledge's relevance for anti-colonial struggle results from its position of exteriority vis-á-vis colonial systems of domination, the article suggests that we need to look at the dialectical and hybrid processes through which bodies of knowledge are made agentic in relation to concrete contexts of political conflict. To discern a body of knowledge's meaning and relevance for anti-colonial struggles, we need to understand that it is continually shaped and reshaped from recurrent practices of reading, dissemination and re-articulation, through which the theory or knowledge body becomes hybridised and reformulated in relation to incessantly evolving contexts.

A parallel social spider algorithm based on population mining

The social spider algorithm is a meta-heuristic algorithm inspired by the foraging behavior of biological social spiders, and is initially used to solve optimization problems with continuous functions. There exist many challenges when dealing with discrete combinatorial optimization problems. Therefore, a novel parallel social spider algorithm based on population mining is proposed. Its starting point is to mine dynamic heuristic information from the population of social spiders that cause vibrations to guide the spider’s next walk. It proposes the concept of vibration candidate sets and enhances the behavior of artificial spiders. Furthermore, it is implemented in parallel on the graphics processing unit. According to our investigation, it is the first parallel social spider algorithm. The classical traveling salesman problem is solved as an example. By solving 30 small-scale and medium-scale problems and comparing with other algorithms, it shows that its solution quality is significantly better. By solving 17 large-scale problems, compared with the parallel ant colony system and parallel iterative hill climbing algorithm on the GPU, it is found that both the solution quality and performance are also significantly better. Codes are available at https://github.com/BuptCIAGroup/P-SSA.

Normalistas-Teachers and Coloniality of Power in Mexico

This paper examines how the work of normalista-teachers in Mexico illuminates what Lucio Cabañas Barrientos termed the ‘new colonial system’ in 1972. There exists an ideological hegemony which asserts that colonialism ended in most Latin American nations, including Mexico, by the first decade of the nineteenth century. However, as this paper argues, the experiences of normalista-teachers demonstrate that colonialism is far from a relic of the past. Drawing upon the concepts of hegemony and coloniality of power, this study explores how normalista-teachers challenge the notion of ‘modernity’ and the myth of a bygone colonial era. It focuses primarily on the specific cases of teachers Margarita Chávez, Salvador Hernández, Antonio Gaytán, María Mendoza, José Lundez Martínez, Hernández, Ibarra, Elena Torres, Del Palacio, and Montiel. Additionally, it examines the social movements and guerrilla groups led by Genaro Vásquez Rojas and Lucio Cabañas Barrientos. This holds significant weight for critical pedagogy. If, through their lives and work, normalista-teachers are able to reveal how material and symbolic inequalities rooted in colonialism continue to shape Mexico, then this suggests they are not merely educators, but rather epistemic providers of critical pedagogy from a Latin American perspective.

Research on Modeling Method for Optimal Allocation of Wellhead Targets in Large Well Clusters

The paper proposes a genetic ant colony algorithm that integrates genetic and ant colony algorithms, enhancing the heuristic function of the latter, to address target point distribution issues in large well clusters. This algorithm utilizes genetic algorithms for initial pheromone distribution and employs the ant colony algorithm to achieve rapid convergence. Introducing genetic operators in each iteration addresses the ant colony system’s drawbacks, including scarcity of initial pheromones, susceptibility to local optima, and slow convergence speed. The model aims to minimize the sum of horizontal displacement and intersections in line connections from wellheads to target points as its dual-objective function. It validates the effectiveness of the genetic ACO algorithm in optimizing target point allocation at wellheads through a case study, highlighting its advantages over traditional methods in reducing displacement, ensuring result stability, and preventing collisions.