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In this thesis I explore the theoretical, ethical, and practice-based implications of doing research with Indigenous, racialized, and LGBT2SQ+ youth and young people. This research traces participant conceptualizations of decolonial love, through arts- and land-based methods, within the context of ongoing settler colonialism. Through an Indigenous-led and participatory research project called Sisters Rising, I engaged in intimate conversations and facilitated research workshops with young Black, Indigenous, and people of colour (BIPOC) who reflected on their understandings of decolonial love as related to their own experiences, knowledges, and teachings. Their conceptualizations of decolonial love as inextricably tied to land, sovereignty, and resurgence disrupt settler colonial narratives that attempt to violently displace and disenfranchise BIPOC communities and undermine Indigenous intellectual knowledges as inferior or simplistic, particularly in Euro-Western academia. Through this research BIPOC young people’s understandings of decolonial love guide my praxis and ongoing learning as a frontline practitioner who is committed to cultivating and nurturing a politicized ethic of decolonial love in my child-, youth-, and family-centered praxis. / Graduate / 2022-07-05

As former colonies and newly independent states of the ‘Third World’ organized internationally around anticolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s, Ghana became a key site in debates over development at the height of the Cold War. Contributing to the new economic and political history of postcolonial Ghana, this study examines the national development visions and international political-economic connections of the Nkrumaist state 1957-66 and the first year under the post-coup National Liberation Council through the lens of translocality. Translocality refers to the entanglement of different localities and communities, and in this context, how the idea and practice of national development is co-constituted with these connections. Kwame Nkrumah situated national development as a resource in uniting the African continent against foreign political and economic influence. The Nkrumaist state played a leading role in the formation of the Organization of African Unity, non-alignment, nuclear non-proliferation, and attempts at harmonizing national development continentally. The movements of individuals to Ghana seeking participation within the Nkrumaist project were also racialized and gendered. Women Pan-Africanist activists organized conferences and made internationalist commentaries, making claims for inclusive economic development and participation. Furthermore, Ghanaian national development, dependent on mixed-planning foreign capital, markets, and technologies to finance projects, became increasingly subject to non-national departmental debates and an emerging liberal disciplinary politics through 1962-1966. The International Monetary Fund, Britain and the United States came to a consensus regarding a balance of payments and foreign reserve crisis in Ghana. After a military coup d'état in 1966, the NLC introduced an IMF reform package and embarked on a program of unmaking Nkrumaism. This study contributes to understanding the translocal dynamics of postcolonial development and development discourses. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / I argue that Ghana’s national development from 1957 to 1968 was conceived of, practiced, and situated within, transnational and international connections that can be best understood through the concept of translocality. Translocality refers to the entanglement of different localities and communities, and in this context, how the idea and practice of development cannot be separated from these relational connections. The research supporting this concept contributes to understanding African postcolonial national development in tension and co-constituted with non-national dynamics. As an idea and policy mandate dictated by Kwame Nkrumah, national development was defined as a resource in the struggle for Pan-Africanism but also entangled with the politics of Pan-Africanism, the Cold War and international creditors. These translocal connections are explored through the activisms and commentaries of women Pan-Africanists, activists, and political moderates travelling to Ghana as well as the formal Pan-African diplomacies in pursuit of the economic unification of Africa. Ghana’s development future was also subject to the interdepartmental politics of international creditors and an emerging liberal economic consensus. This study is necessary because it changes our understanding of how the politics of postcolonial development is understood, as co-constituted with non-national political, economic and social dynamics.

This thesis' focal presentable object – to swim in air – is a mythosystem comprising six iteratively malleable experiential systems of intermedial musical and visual performance works composed by myself between the years 2018 and 2023. Conceived through the lens of Jennifer Walshe's New Discipline, created within my practice cycle's nodal context, and connected by a sub/conscious structure of perceptual timbre, the mythosystem and its parts form the centerpiece of this discussion of context, process, and method. As described in this document, the creative practice of nodal context and the adaptive intermedial methods used in the conceptualization and composition of to swim in air were developed through a personal and pragmatic application of feminist writer and independent scholar Sarah Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others, and composer, musicologist and trombonist George Lewis' curatorial decolonization guidelines as outlined in his "8 Difficult Steps to Decolonizing Music" towards the creation of presentable cultural objects which invite variable and continuous interaction from their participants through the exploration of the reciprocity of community, multi-practice creative strategy and malleable forms. Throughout this document I discuss how through the exploration of the reciprocity of community, multi-practice creative strategy and malleable forms I have addressed concerns of cost, access and participation in living culture with regards to my own work creating cultural objects. I also discuss phenomenological and practical issues to do with cost, access and living culture present within the creative, curatorial and institutional spaces and communities in which this work was created and is initially intended to exist, and how these concerns impact the pedagogical, practical and experiential potential of my own work. This document also reflects on how the pragmatic and personal adoption of these concepts of cultural object phenomenological ephemera and decolonized curatorial practice as presented by Ahmed and Lewis by other composers, artist, curators, educators, and other creative professionals might impact the nature of artistic institutional spaces, might encourage the engagement of new, speculative and/or more colloquial spaces, and how these spatial reorientations might encourage a more fluidic approach to creative practice, community cultivation and engagement.

Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 86-90-Xx).

published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

The Taiwanese middle class has experienced two waves of crisis over the past three decades in the context of a colonization transition involving globalization and democratization as primary catalysts. On the economic front, Taiwan’s economy has become increasingly integrated into the Chinese market, resulting approximately one million of the Taiwanese middle class relocating to China. Moreover, neoliberal economic reforms have led to a downsized state sector of the Taiwanese economy. These economic changes affect the growth and stability of the Taiwanese middle class. Meanwhile, on the political front, an ongoing democratic consolidation and decolonization efforts have brought about significant political changes in Taiwan that have deepened Taiwanese nationalism. While economic and political processes appear to be opposite, however, in reality they have been mutually reinforcing, causing increasingly differentiated middle class. The political economy dynamics conditioned in a colonial context suggest that the swing voters of a differentiated middle class play a pivotal role in determining electoral outcomes, and electoral outcomes reshape the differentiated middle class.