Drawing on everyday encounters from a three year collaborative research project with young children and early childhood educators in British Columbia, Canada, the manuscripts contained in this dissertation craft and put to work practices of witnessing and a methodology of refiguring presences as modes of creating interruptions in settler colonial place relations. This work critically engages with the question of what attention to Indigenous presences, to ongoing colonialisms, and to human/more-than-human entanglements, in everyday pedagogical encounters might do towards enacting anti-colonial early childhood pedagogies. My particular interest is in the anti-colonial possibilities of (re)storying the ‘natural’ places that I inhabit with children and educators. In the first manuscript, enacting figurations of witnessing, I map the complexities of my role as a pedagogista, early childhood educator, and researcher; situating myself as an embodied and implicated presence within the research and pedagogical practices from which this dissertation is assembled. In the second manuscript, I articulate refiguring presences as an anti-colonial methodological orientation for attending to the intricacies of everyday place encounters in early childhood settings. In the third manuscript, I experiment with refiguring presences through a series of interruptive stories that attend to Indigenous relationalities, human-non-human entanglements and the settler colonial tensions that come together in the making of a mountain forest that I regularly visit with children and educators. In the fourth manuscript, I experiment with refiguring presences to pay attention to everyday encounters with a community garden. I experiment with orientations that bring attention to messy historical relations and that attend to the vitalities of specific plant and animal worlds. I discuss the interruptive effects of this noticing in generating politicized dialogues with this place, where more-than-human socialities (Tsing, 2013) disrupt and subvert colonial impositions of control, belonging and order. / Graduate

This dissertation charts how the legal regulation of Islam in colonial India fostered a conception of religion that focused on dividing it from secular economy and politics. Colonial law segregated religious law from other branches of law through intersecting binaries that pitted religion against reason and family against the economy. These binaries continue to shape both popular and scholarly approaches to South Asian religion. Unsettling these common assumptions, the dissertation reveals the close relationship between contemporary conceptions of religion and the imperatives of imperial governance. By segregating religious from secular law, the British developed a bifurcated strategy of governance that balanced contradictory commitments to preserving Indian traditions with introducing modernizing reforms. Scholars have traditionally located the origins of the colonial approach to administering Indian religious laws in the early decades of Company rule. The dissertation argues instead that the conceptual framework of religious personal laws emerged between the second and third quarter of the nineteenth century. Changing concepts of sovereignty, an evangelical commitment to spreading Christian civilization, and the integration of colonial production into global markets led colonial officials to look for ways to consolidate the authority of the colonial state. Due to the history of Mughal rule, colonial officials viewed Islamic law as posing a particular threat to colonial suzerainty, placing Islam at the center of these debates. Limiting religious laws to the sphere of domestic relations and ritual performance allowed the colonial state to maintain the rhetoric of respecting Indian religions while consolidating new bodies of criminal, commercial, and procedural law. The boundaries colonial law drew around religion, however, proved unstable. By bringing different definitions of religion into dialogue, legal adjudication in courts unsettled the boundaries between religious and secular authority that colonial legislation and legal texts attempted to solidify. The dissertation looks at legal debates occurring in different levels of the judicial system and in the wider court of public opinion, turning to newspaper coverage of trials and literature on Islamic law. The dissertation uses this broadened archive of legal contest to explore alternative understandings of the relationship between religion, politics, and economy. / History

This thesis attempts to complicate the solely positive nature most often attributed to art education. This complication occurs through a deconstruction of an episode of art education and subsequent interpretation and analysis through both poststructural literary theory and postcolonial theory. By conducting a close reading of a colonial interaction, between two artists trained in the Western canon and two Native American artists, the study begins to view the process of art education as an act of violence, manifested in the rapid shift in artistic style away from a traditional Mandan technique towards one that reflects a Western European tradition. This violence is in turn viewed as typical in the systematic destruction of the culture of a colonized group, as a means for the West to gain, and maintain, authority through the use, and the controlling, of both knowledge and education. Ultimately the field of art education is described as being central within this struggle, in that ideology is both created and promoted within the field at the expense of supplanting previous cultural knowledge. This process of ideological struggle, while inherently violent, is not automatically negative. The struggle between violence and negativity within the field of art education forms the final section of the study. / text

The Swedish education system reflects the multicultural society in Sweden, therefore there is a need of school textbooks that pupils can identify themselves with to create meaning and value in their learning. According to the Swedish Education Administrations (Skolverkets) report (2006) and Selander (2003, s. 198) the school textbooks are the main source of education in class. There has been an implicit message in the older textbooks that is associated with the belief that non-Europeans are "seen" as victims, and that Europeans are privileged with a "good life". Many school texbooks has been analyzed from different points of perspectives, however, analysis from a postcolonial perspective on home economics books has practically been nonexistent. Analysis in this study are focused on how non-western people are been portrayed in six different textbooks in the subject to conclude if the colonial discourse is still maintained and reproduced in the school. To answer the question of formulation an image analysis is made of the six, previiously mentioned, textbooks. The result shows that since 1976 school textbooks are consistently reproducing the same image of non-Europeans as victims and underdeveloped- the way of portraying them as said has merely shifted from images of starved children to helpless victims of environmental disasters and occidental abundance but are held equally responsible for their underdevelopment, in anticipation of occidental aid.

I argue that competing visions of development guided the interventions of the United States and France in the West African country of Ivory Coast during the late colonial and early independence periods from 1946 through the 1960s. Indeed, the postwar arrival of American modernity provided an opportunity for nationalist leaders to triangulate the relationship between metropolitan France and colonial Ivory Coast. The ensuing politics of triangulation forced French colonial officials, diplomats, and development experts to “dub” modernization in order to bolster (neo)colonial ties between France and the Ivory Coast. By dubbing I mean the effort to translate and adapt for French purposes development concepts and techniques first elaborated in the United States. I explore these issues in case histories of the port of Abidjan, Kossou dam, and San Pedro development projects. I highlight the discursive as well as institutional frameworks that shaped the development of Ivory Coast. In the early twentieth century, French colonialism’s mission civilisatrice and mise en valeur posited that the colonizers were rational and productive, while the colonized were backward and incompetent to exploit their natural resources. After the Second World War, the ascendant American modernization paradigm added a new level of valuation to colonialism’s moral economy. It proposed a dynamic and progressive teleology in which the colonized could become modernized and actually “work by themselves” to reproduce hegemonic U.S. technological, economic, and political norms. Modernization was a civilizing project as well, but in contrast French (neo)colonialism now appeared static and paternalistic. French attempts to recuperate their position in the Ivory Coast deployed the epistemic memories of decades of work in the colony but ironically involved promoting forms of regional planning pioneered by the Tennessee Valley Authority. To reach these insights, I have used an interdisciplinary historical methodology that is multiarchival and multisited. My dissertation is based on research in numerous French and American archives as well as oral histories with French and American actors who participated in the (post)colonial development drive in the Ivory Coast.

This thesis investigates the politics of representation of Indigenous peoples in Canadian media. Using a case study of the 2011 housing crisis at Attawapiskat First Nation, I argue that emergency on reserve is constructed as Indigenous failure in mainstream print media and that these discourses work to construct a racialized national imaginary. Canadians are produced as benevolent through learning about Indigenous failure, and through their own capacity to assist and care for them. I have argued that this is a nation building practice of settler colonialism; it is inextricably linked to reclaiming ownership of land, and manufacturing legitimacy for the Canadian nation. This thesis traces these constructions through both mainstream, and alternative and independent media, and follows how these discourses invite white Settlers into a position of racial superiority. Examining ideas of goodness and innocence that condition Canadian identity, I offer strategies and limitations for anti-colonial engagement with Indigenous emergency.

On April 1, 2011, the Maa-nulth Treaty went into effect. Negotiated between five First Nations, the province of British Columbia and Canada, the Treaty concerned territories never before ceded on the west coast of Vancouver Island. This study utilizes the Treaty as a point of departure to explore contemporary Indigenous-Settler relations. Using digital storytelling, youth from one of the five signatory First Nations identified their priorities for their Nation in a post-Treaty era. These stories are contrasted with a discourse analysis of mainstream media coverage surrounding the Treaty and a survey of local (mainly Settler) residents’ perceptions to explore dominant perspectives pertaining to this comprehensive land claims agreement. While youths’ ideas for the future were anchored to their Indigenous cultural identity, albeit integrating technology and novel art forms, Settlers’ perspectives remained statically centered upon ill-informed strains of colonial thought premised upon socio-political and economic stereotypes. Colonialism continues to be (re)produced structurally and individually; these findings point to the need for Settlers to engage in their own processes of decolonization.

Les relations entre l'État canadien et les Autochtones sont, depuis 1876, principalement régies par la Loi sur les Indiens. Le 9 octobre 2001, le ministre des affaires indiennes et du Nord canadien présente à la Chambre des communes la Loi sur la gouvernance des Premières nations (LGPN), projet de loi qui, d'affirmer le ministre, constitue une politique charnière en droit fédéral canadien. En effet, la LGPN a pour objet de compléter et de modifier la Loi sur les Indiens afin de préparer, selon les dires du ministre, les communautés autochtones à leur éventuelle émancipation politique. Le discours du gouvernement canadien suggère que la LGPN ouvre la voie à la décolonisation du droit fédéral autochtone puisqu'elle rompt avec l'approche coloniale inhérente à la Loi sur les Indiens. Une grande majorité d'Autochtones s'oppose toutefois à l'adoption de ce projet de loi, l'interprétant comme une reconduction de la politique colonialiste fédérale. L'objectif du présent mémoire est de déterminer si la LGPN annonce véritablement la fin des rapports coloniaux entre le gouvernement canadien et les Autochtones ou si, au contraire, elle n'est que l'expression moderne d'une mesure législative colonialiste. Notre analyse se fonde sur une grille d'identification du colonialisme que nous aurons préalablement établie. Après avoir démontré que la Loi sur les Indiens constitue un exemple paradigmatique de colonialisme, nous tenterons de déterminer si la LGPN se distingue véritablement de la Loi sur les Indiens. Nous conclurons que, bien que comportant certaines mesures positives, la LGPN témoigne de 1'hésitation du gouvernement canadien à changer la nature des relations qu'il entretient avec les Autochtones. / Since 1876, relations between Aboriginals and the federal Crown have always been defined by the Indian Act. On October 2001, the First Nations Governance Act (FNGA) was introduced in the House of Commons by the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northem Development. According to the Minister, the bill is pivotaI in seeking to amend and complement the Indian Act in order to prepare Aboriginals for their future political emancipation. The purported purpose of this new policy is to operate a fundamental shift away from the colonial approach ofthe Indian Act. However, the majority of Aboriginals are opposed to the enactment of the bill since, in their view, it only entrenches the colonial approach embraced by the federal govemment's policies. The purpose of this thesis is to determine whether the FNGA will in fact shift away from the colonial approach of the govemment toward Aboriginals or if, on the contrary, is about modemizing colonialism. Our analysis begins with a definition of a framework using indicators to identify colonialism which we will have previously drawn up. Using this framework, we will first demonstrate the colonialist nature of the Indian Act, to then determine whether the FNGA in fact distinguishes itself from the Indian Act. While the FNGA contains sorne steps in a direction of shift away from the colonial approach, it largely reveals that the Canadian govemment still hesitates to change the nature of its relationship with Aboriginals. / "Mémoire présenté à la faculté des études supérieures en vue de l'obtention du grade de maître en droit". Ce mémoire a été accepté à l'unanimité et classé parmi les 5% des mémoires de la discipline. Commentaires du jury : "Excellent mémoire qui formule clairement la problématique pertinente et qui l'utilise très efficacement dans l'analyse des résultats de la recherche, laquelle est très impressionnante par ailleurs."

Modern Japan established three kinds of national identification (ID) systems over its population: Koseki, Alien Registration, and Juki-net. The Koseki system is a patriarchal family registration of all citizens. It began in the 1870s when Japan’s nation-state was developed under the emperor’s rule. Koseki used traditional patriarchal hierarchy and loyalty to construct subjects for the Japanese Empire and reify a fictional unity among the “Japanese” people. Until today, this disciplinary element has functioned as the norm for organizational relations in Japan. The Alien Registration System requires non-citizens to register and carry an ID card to distinguish “foreigners” from “Japanese”. This system stems from surveillance techniques used over the colonial populations in the early twentieth century: the Chinese in the colony of “Manchuria”, in northeast China, and the Koreans on the Japanese mainland. Although the empire collapsed after World War II, the practice was officially legislated to target Koreans and Chinese who remained in post-war democratic Japan. Juki-net is the recently established computer network for sharing the personal data of citizens between government and municipal authorities. Juki-net attaches a unitary ID number to all citizens and gives them an optional ID card. Juki-net uses digital technology to capture individual movement, so the system is direct, individualistic, and fluid. It has expanded the scope of personal data and shifts the foundation of citizenship to state intervention. This thesis examines how these three systems have defined the boundary of the nation and constructed categories for its subjects, which have then been imposed on the entire population. Drawing on the theories of Foucault’s bio-power and Agamben’s bare life, I explain how the national ID card systems enable the state to include and exclude people, use them for its own power, and produce subjects to support the state. Although this process is often hidden, the scheme is a vital part of the current proposal to use national ID card systems in the global “war on terror”. I argue that the national ID card systems impose compulsory classifications on individuals, threaten the public’s rights against state intervention, and spread “bare life” across the population. / Thesis (Master, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2008-05-29 13:58:26.233

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