Decolonizing Revelation: A Spatial Reading of the Blues demonstrates that the cultural phenomenon of the blues is an indigenous way of knowing that offsets the hidden logic of racialized dominance within modern Christian understandings of revelation. In distinction from the Christian, Religious, and racialized understandings of the blues, this dissertation focuses on the space in which the blues emerges, the Delta Region of the United States. By attending to space, this dissertation shows how critical consideration of geography and region can reveal nuances that are often veiled behind racialized and theologized ways of understanding the people of the Delta Region. Reading the blues in space discloses the ways in which the blues dislocates the confines of interpreters that label it a racialized phenomenon on one hand, and “the devil's music” on the other. By wresting the blues from colonialist and racist logics, this dissertation contends that the space that produces the blues can be recovered as a viable resource for reimagining a theology of revelation. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts; / Theology / PhD; / Dissertation;

This thesis elaborates a decolonial international political economy (IPE) as a means of examining the condition of market emergence in Indonesia. It presents the term ‘emerging market’ as the contemporary organising grammar which positions Indonesia in relation to international capital flows. This condition of market emergence is further understood in historical colonial perspective as the latest mode of producing Indonesia as an investible site for international capital. My expansion of decolonial IPE is made in this thesis through the analysis of difference-based ‘exclusion’ and ‘translation’, both as vital elements of coloniality and as processes which relate to accumulation and dispossession in an ‘emerging market’ context. I go on to make the case for bringing urban and rural terminable sites of extraction into the same frame of analysis. These are understood similarly here as internal frontiers along which social groups are materially and discursively excluded from the national emerging market project and thus rendered expropriatable. I further analyse the repeated dispossession of these expropriatable groups along with other means of enacting ‘translations’, or enforced alterations in ways of being. These translations are by no means passively accepted and my analysis further demonstrates various means by which these are negotiated and contested. This thesis therefore makes contributions to the literature on decolonial thought and IPE, at the same time as presenting an original examination of Indonesia in its present moment of market emergence. / Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

<p>The purpose of this critical ethnographic dissertation research was to explore the multiple and diverse ways in which university student activists in Honduras constructed oppositional political cultures within the institutional constraints and possibilities of the university and the broader neoliberal and authoritarian postcoup context. In this research, I considered studying up and down and anything in between a necessary task to understand the complexity of student activism in relation to the university’s complicity with the coloniality of power and knowledge (Nader, 1972; Quijano, 2000, 2007). Critical ethnography, decolonial, space and place, and collective action theory provided the philosophical, methodological, conceptual, practical, political, and ethical commitments to understand how the University Student Movement’s political culture resisted neoliberal higher education reform. This research, in addition, offers an ethnographic analysis and interpretation of the student movement’s political culture and the role it played in democratizing the university. First, I used a historical perspective to contextualize reemerging student movements in Honduras. After tracing Latin American student movement’s origin to the Cordoba Student Movement of Argentina, I examined the ways in which the student movement of Honduras adopted, reclaimed, and extended the democratic principles implemented in the former. University autonomy, ideological pluralism, democratic governance, academic freedom, and curriculum reform were salient points of analyses. Second, I examined the student movement’s horizontal organization, identified the democratic social practices and political culture that emerged after the coup of 2009, and interpreted student activists’ knowledges born in struggle through a decolonial lens concomitant with a sensitivity to space and place and collective action. Particularly, the direct participation of students in all decision-making processes within the student movement was interpreted as an act of resistance to reclaim democratic spaces within a sociopolitical context increasingly becoming dictatorial. Third, I analyzed the student movement’s impact in democratizing the university’s governance structure and resisting neoliberal higher education reform. Fourth, I shared the knowledge produced collectively by student activists. The way students conceived of the university and its curriculum and governing practices unsettled the authorial individualism still present in educational research. The knowledges born in struggle, I argued, have sociopolitical, cultural, and decolonial implications. In addition to the analytical and interpretive work which included the research, knowledges, and practices student activists shared with me during the 12 months of fieldwork and participant observation in Honduras, I highlighted how the emergence of a heterogeneously articulated student movement slowed down, at the very least, the neocolonial and neoliberal reconfiguration of the university. This dissertation thus addressed the political relationship between the global and the local. The re-localization of politics here must not to be confused with reactionary politics. It means instead to recognize how the particular is enmeshed in a more complex web of power, domination, resistance, and reexistence. To resist locally means that collective actors engage global powers, even if indirectly and unintentionally. Student activists, who were able to put a stop to the series of neoliberal reforms implemented since the coup of 2009, reminded those in power (local, national, and global) that neoliberal higher education reform within a re-politicized autonomous university with an organized student movement will be faced with resistance. This ethnographic account will hopefully reveal the ways in which student activist built a politically culture characterized by alternative forms of organizing to resist what is too often conceived fatalistically as the inevitable neoliberalization of education. These fatalistic perspectives will hopefully be unsettled throughout the dissertation. The significance of this study is that it is oriented toward an ethnographic understanding of higher education reform and student resistance in Latin America, a region with a student population which continues to be engaged in collective action. The educational significance of this work revolves around the need to rethink and rebuild universities in radically democratic terms. This rethinking involves the need to not only democratize access to higher education but rather to democratize governance, curriculum, knowledge, research, and ways of knowing and being. Transforming the university into a democratic place in which students are directly and meaningfully involved in governance and curriculum reform opens a path toward decolonial futurities where knowledge is no longer dictated from above but rather deconstructed and reconstructed from below. This dissertation research, lastly, as it works at the intersections of curriculum studies, decolonial theories, methodologies, pedagogies, and emerging university student resistance in Latin America, offers, I hope, a valuable way to do curriculum inquiry in higher education institutions within international contexts. </p>

With Islamophobia on the rise in Canada, it may reasonably be expected that social work, a seemingly care-oriented profession, would have effective support readily available for the Muslim community. However, rather than the Muslim community experiencing social services as a place where such support can be accessed, their interactions with these services demonstrate the ways that Islamophobia seeps into social work settings amidst discriminatory assumptions about Muslims and a lack of religiously informed care. In response, informed by an Islamic worldview and drawing upon decolonial thought and community-based participatory research principles, this study aims to centre Islamic ways of knowing, being, and doing in considering how mainstream social services and social work practice can most effectively support the Muslim community. Emerging from interviews with five Muslim community leaders and scholars were four key themes: the role of Islam in the lives and well-being of Muslims; anti-Muslim sentiment and the devaluing of Islamic identity in mainstream social work education and practice; the need for Islamically informed care; and reimagining social work from an Islamic worldview. The findings reveal significant challenges for the Muslim community in accessing and receiving effective support from mainstream social services, while also underscoring important considerations for enhanced social work practice with Muslims. Implications and recommendations for the social work profession, social work education, and the Muslim community are discussed, alongside suggestions for future research and action, with an emphasis on the importance of contributions from Islam and Muslims to elicit meaningful change. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)

The concept of development has been extensively researched, and it isa key topic in political and economic international and domestic agendas.Modernization and globalization theories have been the most prevalentanalytical approaches to development, but from a postcolonial and decolonialperspective, these theories are Western-centric, overgeneralized, andoverused. As a result, Political Studies have struggled to comprehend andlegitimate the local knowledge from the Global South and face moderncolonialism, as uncritical transfers of science, technology, and knowledgefrom the Global North take place. For this, the goal of this thesis was to raiseawareness of the OECD's development discourse through a transformationaland critical lens. Decolonial thinking, which asserts an epistemology from thesouth, specifically from Latin America, was employed for this work as atheoretical-epistemological, ethical-political, and methodological framework.This investigation is a pilot and desk study with abductive reasoning thatexamines discourses characteristic of the OECD, supported by a qualitativeresearch approach. In response to coloniality and modernity -building theoriesof development-, a content and critical discourse analysis through categorieswas conducted. Along with the instrumentalization of concepts and discursivetactics, the findings demonstrate and explore a productive, economical, andbusiness-like logic in the OECD discourses. In conclusion, colonial narrativesare found in the modernization and globalization approaches that take the formof utilitarian, neoliberal, universal, and emotive narratives in the twodevelopment reports by the OECD where the epistemic postulates are builtupon the idea of growth and a natural need to evolve.