No description available.

No description available.

This research examines how disability is conceptualized, responded to and experienced by prisoners within the federal prison system of canada , by attending to the constructs of disability and criminality as they relate to racial and colonial hierarchies. Drawing on anti-colonial theory and the concept of subalternity, this research aims to resist essentializing identity in a way that would limit ‘disability’ or ‘race’ to a particular spatial/temporal context. The constructs of race and disability will be attended to simultaneously, while engaging with how these identity categories have been co-constructed in relation to ‘criminality’, for the furthering of colonialism. Accordingly, this research contextualizes the mass-incarceration of racialized/disabled individuals within a broader, historic, colonial project of confinement and removal. I draw on 4 in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted for this study, with individuals who are living with disabilities and have been incarcerated in canadian federal prisons. Throughout this thesis, I couple my analysis of the ‘problem’ in question with attention to ‘how’ the problem is often discussed in dominant critical research and discourse, particularly attending to eurocentric articulations of race, disability and incarceration. / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)

This thesis examines Indian author Raja Rao’s critically neglected work. I read Rao’s production as a strategic, yet problematic, negotiation of hegemonic narrativizations of Indian history, which attempts both to propose alternative histories and deconstruct the ontology of modern western historiography. Rao’s often criticised use of essentialism in his works is here examined as a strategic deconstructive tool in the hands of the postcolonial writer. More specifically, I wish to show how his early novels Kanthapura and Comrade Kirillov resist colonial depictions of India through both linguistic and cultural structures. Rao’s stylistic negotiation is effected through a use of the English language mediated by the Indian writer’s sensibility. Both novels enforce strategies working through opposition. They provide alternative accounts counterbalancing strategic absences in the records of colonial Indian historiography while attempting to recover the voice of protagonist subalterns. In my examination of his later novels The Serpent and the Rope, The Cat and Shakespeare and The Chessmaster and His Moves, I argue that a more effective strategy of intervention is at work. It attempts to disrupt from within the discursive features of post-Enlightenment European modernity, more specifically the premises of Cartesian oppositional dualities, homogeneous ideas of linear time, and the centrality of imperial spaces, while problematising the hybrid and heterogeneous character of Rao’s narrative.

Canadian processes such as the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and Comprehensive Land Claims as well as flashpoint events (Simpson & Ladner, 2010) such as the Kanien’kehaka resistance at Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke (the “Oka Crisis”) and more recently, the Idle No More movement, signal to Canadians that something is amiss. What may be less visible to Canadians are the 400 years of colonial oppression experienced and the 400 years of resistance enacted by Indigenous peoples on their lands, which are currently occupied by the state of Canada. It is in the context of historical and ongoing Canadian colonialism: land theft, dispossession, marginalization, and genocide, and in the context of the overwhelming denial of these realities by white settler Canadians that this study occurs. In order to break through settler Canadian denial, and to inspire greater numbers of white settler Canadians to initiate and/or deepen their anti-colonial and/or decolonial understandings and work, this study presents extended life narratives of white settler Canadians who have engaged deeply in anti-colonial and/or decolonial work as a major life focus. In this study, such work is framed as living in Indigenous sovereignty, or living in an awareness that we are on Indigenous lands containing their own protocols, stories, obligations, and opportunities which have been understood and practiced by Indigenous peoples since time immemorial. Inspired by Indigenous and anti-oppressive methodologies, I articulate and utilize an anti-colonial research methodology. I use participatory and narrative methods, which are informed and politicized through words gifted by Indigenous scholars, activists, and Knowledge Keepers. The result is research as a transformative, relational, and decolonizing process. In addition to the extended life narratives, this research yields information regarding connections between social work education, social work practice, and the anti-colonial/decolonial learnings and work of five research subjects who have, or are completing, social work degrees. The dissertation closes with an exploration of what can be learned through the narrative stories, with recommendations for white settler peoples and for social work, and with recommendations for future research. / February 2017

This thesis provides an anti-colonial analysis of how Indigenous knowledges have been studied and conceptualized through ethnographic research in the field of development studies. In this analysis I apply meta-ethnography within an anti-colonial discursive framework, a combination that I argue has great potential in the study of power relations in qualitative knowledge production. Firstly, this approach allows me to provide a synthesis of purposively selected ethnographies from the development studies literature; secondly, it requires that I refer to Indigenous scholars’ critical writings in the education literature to analyze development studies ethnographers’ approaches to Indigenous knowledges. The results of this analysis provide a starting point for questioning epistemological racism and colonial power relations at play in knowledge production on Indigenous knowledges in the field of development studies, with important implications for how we teach, study, and conduct research in development.

This thesis provides an anti-colonial analysis of how Indigenous knowledges have been studied and conceptualized through ethnographic research in the field of development studies. In this analysis I apply meta-ethnography within an anti-colonial discursive framework, a combination that I argue has great potential in the study of power relations in qualitative knowledge production. Firstly, this approach allows me to provide a synthesis of purposively selected ethnographies from the development studies literature; secondly, it requires that I refer to Indigenous scholars’ critical writings in the education literature to analyze development studies ethnographers’ approaches to Indigenous knowledges. The results of this analysis provide a starting point for questioning epistemological racism and colonial power relations at play in knowledge production on Indigenous knowledges in the field of development studies, with important implications for how we teach, study, and conduct research in development.

Thesis advisor: Jon M. Wargo / Recent critical literature on science and art education highlights a shift from engagement with disciplinary canons toward expansive, equity-oriented disciplinarity. Efforts to integrate the science and art disciplines, especially under the acronym STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math), have not sufficiently engaged with such within-discipline critique. Left unchallenged, proposals for disciplinary integration cannot meet the transformative potential to which they aspire. Therefore, this 3-paper dissertation adopts an anti-colonial lens to explore conceptualizations of art and science inter- and transdisciplinarity as a collection of interconnected stories of disciplinary reimaginings. Drawing from multiple theories and methods, this dissertation aims to demonstrate the possibilities of transdisciplinarity conceptually, methodologically, practically, and personally. The first paper critically examines current discourse trends that mention transdisciplinarity efforts in K-12 schools, specifically in curricular activity that seeks to expand science learning through the arts. It offers a critique against flattened ways of being and knowing present in schooling and aims to put forward considerations for critical and creative transdisciplinary curriculum development. The second paper presents a vertical case study that investigates how the purposes of art and science transdisciplinarity are defined by multi-level actors: from the macro national and city policy level to that at the microlevel of an art and science museum. Using critical discourse analysis alongside Bakhtin’s concepts of centrifugal and centripetal forces, this study identifies how the purpose of transdisciplinary learning is reproduced and reimagined through discourse at multiple scales. Tensions arose in the pull of how transdisciplinarity was conceptualized, particularly between board members and staff who felt different responsibilities for aligning with national discourse. Finally, the third paper is an autoethnographic study weaving together personal narrative, theory in the arts and cultural studies, and student work from one summer art and science program. Grappling with the art/science disciplinary dichotomy, this last paper troubles framings of the human-nature divide through material inquiry into place. In the discourse of critique and iterative making, the class community follows one student’s movement in a relational encounter with an ant as a disruption of enduring dualisms that signify Cartesian logic. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2022. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction.

In this study, I hope to challenge the absolute belief in academia, which assumes that the perception of reality or visualities; in terms of culture, nature, truth and so on, by definition should be understood according to the Western philosophical character and genealogy as developed from a positivist paradigm. It seems to me, that the dominant methodological frameworks as I know them now, tacitly follow this scientific, quantitative, material, mechanical, positivist paradigm that draws from Western philosophical development and positions, pervasively held as the only basis for knowledge production. In turn, this philosophical position delegitimises any other epistemologies or methodological frameworks from elsewhere. In many cases, the methods of teaching and assessing subscribe, impose and perpetuate these same protocols as the only recognised epistemological and methodological approaches for critical inquiry inside tertiary educational institutions. By far, fine art as a discipline has inherited this epistemological position. To define this field in the context of decolonisation (meaning the undoing of colonisation), it requires us to look beyond disciplinary knowledge. This research is primarily an epistemological critique; and does not simply seek to “Africanise” the study of art, but to condemn the pervasive institutionalised cultural dominance. To frame my discourse, I have adopted an anti-colonial perspective, and a qualitative method to help define this phenomenon through a wide range of techniques. These include grounded theory; propositional logic; case study, narrative inquiry and auto-ethnography as possible tool for collecting, coding and analysing of data.

This qualitative case study examines the way in which six adult learners and their teacher in a university language classroom narrativise their identities while reflecting on experiences in and outside of the classroom. This study determined that the identity positions of the student participants were strongly influenced by notions of normative cultural, national and religious identity categories, as well as the students’ experiences in environments that were characterized by high-stakes grading, and “native speaker” norms. Drawing on poststructural identity theories (Norton, 1995, 1997; Gee, 2001) and anti-colonial and anti-racist scholarship (Kubota and Lin, 2009), this research contributes to the growing body of knowledge that addresses the effects of subjective notions of identity and structural power relations on the experiences of adult learners. Additionally, it outlines some possible actions for teachers and policy-makers to counter some of the structural inequalities that negatively impact the identity negotiation of students.