A Decolonial and Anti-Racist Transformative Autoethnographic Journey toward Reconciliation


Book Description

While many non-Indigenous academic researchers have introduced the concept of reconciliation in their work, they have not adequately explored what it means for transnational immigrants and refugee communities to view reconciliation as a source of knowledge and understanding. How can assuming responsibility for reconciliation empower immigrant and refugee women communities? Why should immigrant and refugee communities embrace decolonial and anti-racist ways of knowing and acting to foster meaningful relationships with Indigenous communities? What does it entail to comprehend 'decolonial and anti-racist learning and practice'—as a system of reciprocal social relations and ethical practices—as a framework for reconciliation? Decolonial and Anti-racist Transformative Autoethnographic Journey toward Reconciliation: A Racialized Immigrant Woman’s Empowering Stories aims to address these interdisciplinary questions. It endeavors not only to challenge our static comprehension of reconciliation but also to demonstrate how assuming responsibility for relearning decolonial and anti-racist meanings in our everyday practices is essential. These include: cultivating respectful relationships with Indigenous peoples, honoring Indigenous Treaties, taking steps to decolonize our ways of knowing and acting, understanding the impacts of colonial education processes, preserving our Land and environment, ensuring food security and nutritional adequacy, fostering intercultural spaces for social interactions, and promoting transnational empowerment.




Bosnian Refugees in Chicago


Book Description

Bosnian Refugees in Chicago: Gender, Performance, and Post-War Economies studies refugee migration through the experiences of survivors of the 1990s wars in former Yugoslavia as they rebuild home, family, and social lives in the wake of their displacement. Ana Croegaert explores post-1970s Yugoslav-era socialism, American neoliberal capitalism, and anti-Muslim geopolitics to examine women’s varied perspectives on their postwar lives in the United States. Based on more than a decade of fieldwork, Croegaert takes readers into staged performances, coffee rituals, protests, memorials, homes, and non-governmental organizations to shine a light on the pressures women contend with in their efforts to make a living and to narrate their wartime injuries. Ultimately, Croegaert argues that refugee women insist on understanding their wartime losses as simultaneously social and material, a form of personhood she labels “injured life.” At a time of mass displacement and heated political debates concerning refugees, Croegaert provides an engaging portrait of a lively and diverse group of women whose opinions on citizenship and belonging are needed now more than ever.




Refugee Crises and Migration Policies


Book Description

This edited volume investigates European approaches to migrants, European Union migration policies, and the EU-Turkey refugee agreement. The contributors also analyze issues related with migration in Turkey and Syria and specifically study the Syrian refugee crisis.




Unsettling the Settler Within


Book Description

In 2008 the Canadian government apologized to the victims of the notorious Indian residential school system, and established a Truth and Reconciliation Commission whose goal was to mend the deep rifts between Aboriginal peoples and the settler society that engineered the system. Unsettling the Settler Within argues that in order to truly participate in the transformative possibilities of reconciliation, non-Aboriginal Canadians must undergo their own process of decolonization. They must relinquish the persistent myth of themselves as peacemakers and acknowledge the destructive legacy of a society that has stubbornly ignored and devalued Indigenous experience. Today’s truth and reconciliation processes must make space for an Indigenous historical counter-narrative in order to avoid perpetuating a colonial relationship between Aboriginal and settler peoples. A compassionate call to action, this powerful book offers all Canadians – both Indigenous and not – a new way of approaching the critical task of healing the wounds left by the residential school system.




Decolonizing Methodologies


Book Description

'A landmark in the process of decolonizing imperial Western knowledge.' Walter Mignolo, Duke University To the colonized, the term 'research' is conflated with European colonialism; the ways in which academic research has been implicated in the throes of imperialism remains a painful memory. This essential volume explores intersections of imperialism and research - specifically, the ways in which imperialism is embedded in disciplines of knowledge and tradition as 'regimes of truth.' Concepts such as 'discovery' and 'claiming' are discussed and an argument presented that the decolonization of research methods will help to reclaim control over indigenous ways of knowing and being. Now in its eagerly awaited second edition, this bestselling book has been substantially revised, with new case-studies and examples and important additions on new indigenous literature, the role of research in indigenous struggles for social justice, which brings this essential volume urgently up-to-date.




Sex Work Activism in Canada


Book Description

Serving as a history as well as a rare and valuable reference, Sex Work Activism in Canadabrings together the narratives, histories, expertise, and teachings of sex work activists across the country. Through texts and testimonials from the grass-roots level it explores the past and present work of sex work activists and advocates in our own words.




Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy


Book Description

Drawing from mindfulness education and social justice teaching, this book explores an anti-oppressive pedagogy for university and college classrooms. Authentic classroom discussions about oppression and diversity can be difficult; a mindful approach allows students to explore their experiences with compassion and to engage in critical inquiry to confront their deeply held beliefs and value systems. This engaging book is full of practical tips for deepening learning, addressing challenging situations, and providing mindfulness practices in anti-oppression classrooms. Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy is for all higher education professionals interested in pedagogy that empowers and engages students in the complex unlearning of oppression.




New Framings on Anti-Racism and Resistance


Book Description

This collection of essays generates important enquiries into the teaching and practice of anti-racism education, by way of working through conversations, contestations, and emotions as presented by a diverse group of strong women committed to social justice work in their own right. Throughout the collection, contemporary educational issues are situated within personal-political, historical and philosophical conversations, which work to broach the challenges and possibilities for students, educators, staff, administrators, policy makers, and community members who engage in critical anti-racism education. This work diverges from the existing scholarship by way of bringing new insights to the theoretical possibilities of resistance and futurity as voiced through pedagogues, practitioners and scholars in anti-racism. In this book the authors speak to the importance of anti-racism discursivity in a time when even those who desire to engage this framework struggle to be heard; in a time when there are anti-racism policies in institutions, yet to speak anti-racism philosophy remains dangerous; and in a time when, to speak race and anti-racism, is considered to be stirring up trouble in the face of post-racial discourses.




Decolonization and Anti-colonial Praxis


Book Description

Decolonization and Anti-colonial Praxis presents research on contemporary forms of decolonization and anti-colonialism in practice. It pertains to the ways in which individuals, groups, and communities engage with the logic of epistemic colonial power within areas of citizenship, migration, education, Indigeneity, language, land struggle, and social work. The contributions in this edited volume empirically document the conceptual and bodily engagement of racialized and violated individuals and communities as they use anti-colonial principles to disrupt criminalizing institutional discourses and policies within various global imperial contexts. The terms ‘Decolonization’ and ‘Anti-colonialism’ are used in diverse and interdisciplinary academic perspectives. They are researched upon and elaborated in necessary ways in the theoretical literature, however, it is rare to see these principles employed in applied forms. Decolonization and Anti-colonial Praxis provides a much needed contemporary and representative reclamation of these concepts from the standpoint of racialized communities. It explores the frameworks and methods rooted in their indigeneity, cultural history and memories to imagine a new future. The research findings and methodological tools presented in this book will be of interdisciplinary interest to teachers, graduate students and researchers. Contributors are: Harriet Akanmori, Ayah Al Oballi, Sevgi Arslan, Jacqueline Benn-John, Lucy El-Sherif, Danielle Freitas, Pablo Isla Monsalve, Dionisio Nyaga, Hoda Samater, Rose Ann Torres, Umar Umangay, and Anila Zainub.




Black Feminist Anthropology


Book Description

In the discipline's early days, anthropologists by definition were assumed to be white and male. Women and black scholars were relegated to the field's periphery. From this marginal place, white feminist anthropologists have successfully carved out an acknowledged intellectual space, identified as feminist anthropology. Unfortunately, the works of black and non-western feminist anthropologists are rarely cited, and they have yet to be respected as significant shapers of the direction and transformation of feminist anthropology. In this volume, Irma McClaurin has collected-for the first time-essays that explore the role and contributions of black feminist anthropologists. She has asked her contributors to disclose how their experiences as black women have influenced their anthropological practice in Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, and how anthropology has influenced their development as black feminists. Every chapter is a unique journey that enables the reader to see how scholars are made. The writers present material from their own fieldwork to demonstrate how these experiences were shaped by their identities. Finally, each essay suggests how the author's field experiences have influenced the theoretical and methodological choices she has made throughout her career. Not since Diane Wolf's Feminist Dilemmas in the Field or Hortense Powdermaker's Stranger and Friend have we had such a breadth of women anthropologists discussing the critical (and personal) issues that emerge when doing ethnographic research.