Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Decolonial Theory'

Museums are increasingly reckoning with their roles in the colonization of Indigenous peoples as they seek to engage diverse forms of participation and justify their social relevance. Many are turning to digital solutions to aid with these endeavors, including digital repatriation/return platforms. How users interact with these platforms to create knowledge and how these platforms contribute to a larger decolonial aspiration is not well understood. In this study, I explore these issues, drawing on postcolonial/decolonial theories and affordance theory, using the Reciprocal Research Network (RRN). The RRN was co-designed by the Museum of Anthropology, U’mista Cultural Society, Musqueam Indian Band, and Stó:lō Nation/Tribal Council to meet the need for museums to involve Indigenous communities in heritage work. With an actor-network theory approach, I interviewed nine stakeholders (users, developers, and steering group members) of the RRN and explored the platform and documents to identify RRN actors’ specific enactments of decolonial aspirations as affordances. My exploration revealed that the RRN is bound as a network by the Item Search, which allowed for multiple entry points into a vast collection of heritage objects. These multiple entryways broke down technical and cultural barriers to and allowed for plurality in interaction with heritage. The RRN also allowed a direct contestation of museums’ data ownership by allowing users to dictate how shared knowledge is used. The RRN also was deeply embedded in Vancouver, BC, and its surrounding area, where multiple points of offline/online interaction allowed for deep explorations of the histories of First Nations peoples and aided in projects aimed at their revival. However, platform logics and museums’ lack of participation in relationship-building threatened the decolonial aspirations of the RRN. Broadly, my findings indicate that the RRN, as a communal heritage platform, is a necessary step towards building relations with Indigenous communities that requires further participation on museums’ part to develop.

Narrowly conceived, this is an historical ethnographic study of the indigenous people who participated in the Kwato Mission. More broadly, it is an examination of how people responded to the arrival of the culture of whiteness and the fundamental changes to practice and consciousness that took place through the processes of missionisation and colonisation. Changes were simultaneously subjective and objective, mental and material. In what ways did the Massim peoples engage with the new introductions? How did our own history shape those engagements with whiteness? And in what ways did they respond to attempts to coerce and dominate? At an even broader level, what can the Kwato Massim people’s experience tell us about contemporary dialectics of culture and power, ideology and consciousness, such as through the process of ‘developmentisation’. Attention to power leads me to also engage with the question of knowledge production and to ask how is it possible to know the Massim without fluency in Massim ways of knowing and languages. My conceptual lens is decolonial feminist theory and critical race theory. From Luce Irigaray and Iris Marion Young I borrow the concept of wonder as a theoretical construct to shift the gaze on how Massim peoples have often been represented by whiteness. Since a balanced comprehension of the world we live in must necessarily include different perspectives, social justice must allow for epistemic difference. There is, thus, both an epistemic and ethical impulse to name whiteness and to disrupt its hegemony. Guided by this decolonial imperative I delve into the deep past of the Massim peoples demonstrating the biological indistinguishability of Homo sapiens and examining the wonder-full Austronesian migrations across millennia which more deeply inform contemporary Massim languages and culture than do missionisation and colonisation, or indeed, whiteness. The empirical part of my decolonial methodology draws primarily on oral history supplemented by archival work. I examine the disruptions presented by external forces of colonisation and missionisation and demonstrate how the Massim peoples responded to these. I delineate the Kwato-specific history into the genealogical periods of the tanuwaga, the isibaguna and the isimulita past and the isimulita present. I conclude that Kwato, the mission, could not have existed without the support of the Massim peoples and that this shaped Kwato personhood indelibly. I propose, too, that the matrilineal descent system of the southern Massim produces a distinct form of gender relations and particular structures of governance that are grounded in relational autonomy. The space of Kwato was created from this matrilineal sociality fused with missionisation. My thesis is neither an exhaustive history nor a comprehensive anthropology of the Massim in the Kwato Mission. It is certainly not the definitive work, if ever there could be such a thing. There remains great scope for other Massim people to write Kwato history from perspectives different from mine, which has been shaped by belonging to two genealogies that were influential in the politics of the Mission.

Jean Piaget s'appliqua au développement d'une épistémologie génétique qui prit la forme d'une psychologie dont l'objectif était de saisir les structures cognitives des sujets dans leurs différents stades de constitution. Concentrant ses recherches sur le développement des structures cognitives chez l'enfant il montre qu'elles s’organisent par la relation que l'enfant entretient avec la communauté épistémique dans laquelle il évolue. Cela implique que les normes qui régulent cette communauté se trouvent dans les procédures de formation des connaissances. Nous avons analysé les comptes rendus des expériences de Piaqet, leurs modalités d’exécution et de restitution en partant du présupposé qu' en tant que pratique sociale la recherche scientifique n'échappe pas aux relations qui organisent l'espace social. L’anthropologie cognitive, l'ethnographie de l’apprentissage et la théorie de la cognition distribuée ont fourni des modèles de compréhension des dynamiques socio-cognitives qui permettent de rendre compte du contexte épistémique de l'épistémologie génétique. A l’aune de cette lecture, les savoirs situés issus des épistémologies féministes et décoloniales apparaissent comme une forme paroxysmique du modèle piagétien. Cette recherche montre que l'épistémologie génétique est porteuse dune réflexion implicite sur la distribution sociale des connaissances qui a nourri les épistémologies critiques. Elle soutient que la co-formation des structures et des communautés épistémiques, loin de constituer une limite au projet de connaissance humaine dessine simplement le contexte de son émergence en tant qu'expérience psychique
Jean Piaget sought to produce a genetic epistemology, that is a psychology that allowed for a qrasp of subjects' cognitive structures at different stages of their devetopment. As such his work provides a new understanding of structuralism, one grounded not in language but in action. Focused on the emergence of cognitive structures in children, his researcn shows how these structures are organized by the retationship the child entertains with the epistemic community in which he or she grows This implies that the rutes and standards that regulate this community are inseparable from processes though which knowledqe comes into beilng.This thesis proposes an analvsis of Piaqet's experiments, their protocols and accounts, that proceeds from the assumption that as a social practice scientific research is not immune to the relationships that organize social space. Cognitive antnropology, the ethnography of learning and theories of distributed cognition provided rnodels for understanding the socio-cognitive dynamics that can account for the epistemic context of genetic epistemolgy. ln this light, situated knowledges denvlnq from feminist and decolonial epistemotogies appear as paroxysmal versions of Piaget's model. Indeed, this research shows that genetic epistemology contains an implicit reflection on the social distribution of. and differential access to knowledge which nurtured critical epistemologies. It argues that the co-creation of epistemic structures and communities far frorn beinq a limit to the constitution of human knowledge may be seen as simply circumscribing the context of its emergence as a psychological experience

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O presente trabalho tem por objetivo analisar em que medida a teoria crítica dos direitos humanos de Joaquín Herrera Flores pode relacionar-se com os aportes do pensamento descolonial, com a finalidade de se buscar elementos epistemológicos e metodológicos para a fundamentação dos direitos humanos a partir das especificidades da realidade latino-americana. A investigação pretende enfrentar ás ambiguidades e paradoxos que envolvem os discursos dos direitos humanos, sistematizados a partir de duas faces. A primeira consiste na dimensão reguladora, que assenta suas bases no universalismo europeu e nas concepções idealistas que definem os direitos humanos como valores a priorie inerentes a todos os seres humanos. A segunda expressa-se a partir da visão só cio-histórica e contextual desses direitos, que os identifica a partir de processos de luta sociais capazes de congregar experiências evivências de empoderamento político dos seres humanos na desconstrução de realidades opressoras e restritivas do fazer humano. A partir do referencial teórico descolonial e da teoria crítica dos direitos humanos de Herrera Flores, destaca-se em que medida a primeira dimensão, fundamentada nos pressupostos do liberalismo e da noção de sujeito moderno, concedeu legitimidade aos processos de expansão do capital nos países periféricos e, ao mesmo tempo, impôs barreiras à afirmação e a sobrevivência de outras modelos de sociabilidade não pautados pela lógica capitalista. Por meio de uma análise bibliográfica e documental, promove-se um diálogo entre os aportes do pensamento descolonial e a proposta de reinvenção dos direitos humanos de Herrera Flores para se buscar uma fundamentação não imperialista dos direitos humanos, que seja capaz de enfocar os processos de luta pela dignidade no século XXI. Diante da funcionalidade do discurso dos direitos humanos no contexto de reprodução da colonialidade do poder nos países periféricos, pretende-se desenvolver em que medida e a partir de que pressupostos é possível reinventar o discurso dos direitos humanos de acordo com uma práxis que camin he na direção de uma concepção crítica dos direitos, capaz de responder aos processos de lutas anticapitalistas e anticoloniais.
The objective of the present study is to analyze in which ways can the Joaquín Herrera Flores’s critical theory of human rights be related with the decolonial thinking, in a way to search for epistemological and methodological elements that reflects the specificities of Latin American reality in a substantiation of human rights. The investigation intends to face the ambiguities and paradoxes related the discourses of human rights, systematizing them in two different aspects. The first is located in the regulatory dimension of human rights, that is based on the European universalism and on the idealistic conceptions that define human rights as aprioristic and inherent values that belong to all human beings. The second one is expressed by a socio-historical and contextual vision of these rights, which identify then as struggle process that are able to congregate different experiences of political empowering, in a way to destroy oppressive and restrictive visions of the human. By using the reference of decolonial thinking and Herrera Flores’s critical theory of human rights, the first conception of human rights, that is based on liberalism and on the notion of modern subject, can be criticized as a notion that gave space and legitima cy to the expansion of capital in the peripheral countries. At the same time, with descolonial thinking, it can be said that this vision impeded the affirmation and the live of diferent forms of socializing that do not reproduce the hegemonic logic. A bibliographic and documental analysis allowed a dialogue between decolonial thinking and the Herrera Flores’s proposal of reinventing human rights, in order to search for a non imperialistic substantiation of human rights that can better read the struggles for human dignity in XXI century. Despite the functionality of human rights discourse in the reproduction of the colonilaity of power in the peripheral countries, this search intends to analyze how critical and decolonial theory can reinvent the discourse of human rights according to a praxis that is centered in a critical conception of rights, able to offer some responses to the anticapitalists and anticolonials struggles.

This thesis examines elements of the conceptualization of literature within literary studies and literary production in a UK context, considering the concept of exclusionary practices based on the negligence of intersectional categories of identity such as race, gender, class, sexuality, etc., in the practice of understanding and interpreting literature. The methodologies I employ are close reading of various narratives, such as literary texts, as well as a narrative analysis aimed at a holistic understanding of my material. The second part of this thesis envisions a decolonised approach to literature in which we situate our positionalities when we read and interpret literary works. I demonstrate this through the analysis of several poems, informed by decolonial concepts and sensibilities. The results show that the maintenance of these exclusionary practices advances a grand-narrative of Western civilisation, ignoring the multiple sites people inhabit both from within, and outside, the West and that these practices are effectively harmful. I argue that through the project of decolonising literature there is a possibility of disrupting the perpetual macro-narrative of Western domination and universality.

In October 2019, a wave of massive demonstrations took place in Santiago de Chile and this movement was stamped in several newspaper covers worldwide. People shouting against the Chilean neoliberal system, holding posters with anti-imperialist sayings, and organizing artistic interventions on the streets went viral in social media. The message was clear – for several consecutive months, people in Chile were actively questioning the political, economic, and societal systems as well as the power struggles faced in the country. Relying on the 2019-2020 Chilean Uprising as a case study, this research investigates the consistency of the Santiago de Chile demonstrations by connecting its social claims to the field of urban studies for the understanding of social and spatial constructions. The thesis relies on postcolonial, decolonial, and critical urban theories, a critical perspective of the neoliberal system, the Lefebvrian Right to the City concept, and Manuel Castells' grassroots movements definition, as well as semi structured interviews and newspapers articles as empirical data for the enhancement of the debate.

Recent calls from progressive, subaltern and postcolonial geopoliticians to move geopolitical scholarship away from its Western ontological bases have argued that more ethnographic studies centred on peripheral and dispossessed geographies need to be undertaken in order to integrate peripheralised agents and agencies in dominant ontologies of geopolitics. This thesis follows these calls. Through empirical data collected during a period of five months of fieldwork undertaken between October 2014 and March 2015, it investigates the ways through which an Indigenous community of the Canadian Arctic, Tulita (located in the Northwest Territories' Sahtu region) represents geopower. It suggests a semiotic reading of these representations in order to take the agency of other-than/more-than-human beings into account. In doing so, it identifies the ontological bases through which geopolitics can be indigenised. Drawing from Dene animist ontologies, it indeed introduces the notion of a place-contingent speculative geopolitics. Two overarching argumentative lines are pursued. First, this thesis contends that geopower operates through metamorphic refashionings of the material forms of, and signs associated with, space and place. Second, it infers from this that through this transformational process, geopower is able to create the conditions for alienating but also transcending experiences and meanings of place to emerge. It argues that this movement between conflictual and progressive understandings is dialectical in nature. In addition to its conceptual suggestions, this thesis makes three empirical contributions. First, it confirms that settler geopolitical narratives of sovereignty assertion in the North cannot be disentangled from capitalist and industrial political-economic processes. Second, it shows that these processes, and the geopolitical visions that subtend them, are materialised in space via the extension of the urban fabric into Indigenous lands. Third, it demonstrates that by assembling space ontologically in particular ways, geopower establishes (and entrenches) a geopolitical distinction between living/sovereign (or governmentalised) spaces and nonliving/bare spaces (or spaces of nothingness).

Globalization asserts increasing pressure on marginalized cultures and languages. While faced with the pragmatic, often economic, need to communicate via global languages such as English and Chinese, communities of non-dominant language users struggle to maintain or reestablish their own cultural and linguistic practices. This thesis considers three areas of theory to further inquiry into how revitalization contexts may operate within an increasingly borderless world. The specific focus is the CHamoru/Chamorro revitalization context on Guåhan /Guam. First, readers enter the discussion through the conduit of narrative theory which focuses on how legends spanning generations may lend insight into how the dispositions of local inhabitants developed. Second, affect theory is considered to illustrate how narratives are constructed about the future through fear and anxiety. Third, revitalization rhetoric and the emergent theory of translingualism are addressed as they lie at the intersection of narratives about the past and future. The thesis works to initiate conversations between theories which previously worked apart from one another in a context infrequently considered in an effort to establish a foundation for future research and activism on the the island of Guåhan

PhD (African Studies)
Centre for African Studies
The aim of this study is to examine existing secondary material to determine whether there is agreement concerning the acclaimed migration of the Africans across the Limpopo River into South Africa. This is done by determining, in an interwoven analytical manner, whether there is possible existing credible evidence that could be applied to examine the claim espoused by Sir George Mc Call Theal. The cause of the disparity amongst the whites and blacks in the country seems to have an historical origin that dates back to the epochs of colonialism and imperialism, which spanned centuries. These movements resulted in the apparently unfair foreign land ownership, which was carried out at the expense of the African blacks, such as the Bakone, Vhangoṋa and Banguni, to date. For one to determine the validity of foreign land acquisition in a foreign country like South Africa; research is required in order to find the genesis, credibility and justification of the total soil ownership by foreigners; which as stated, was conducted at the expense of the majority of Africans who possess no land, living in abject poverty, suffering from unemployment and treated with inequality. The brutal colonial efforts and the untested African migration remains an elusive problem that should be tested scientifically to confirm or negate, when precisely the Africans came; who saw them come, and what made them leave their original countries, if any. This in a perpetual cardinal point of the ‘north’ being occupied moving in ‘waves’ with no witnesses. This study seeks to examine why the naturalised foreign Europeans are better off in the country, in everything.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
This thesis brings an embodied and affective analysis to existing critiques of volunteer tourism: one that demonstrates intercultural encounters as messy and complex yet also hopeful. In order to comprehend the intangible aspects of embodied encounters in the volunteer tourism experience, the study mobilises the affective turn in the social sciences including hopeful geographies and hopeful tourism literature, alongside decolonial critiques of Eurocentric and universalist ways of understanding the social world. This thesis, including the four published papers that partially comprise it, presents the volunteer tourism experience as more nuanced, ambivalent and complex than much of the existing critical research on volunteer tourism. It argues that while intercultural encounters are embedded in colonial relations, they are nonetheless filled with moments of empathy and connection. The thesis argues for a remaking of how we analyse, measure and come to know the everyday in volunteer tourism. It is a remaking that is attuned to the importance of affect and emotion in these embodied intercultural encounters. This study offers new insights into how conceptualising the future as ‘not-yet-become’ disrupts Eurocentric temporalities that perpetuate development aid discourses and linear structural notions of social change, opening up parameters of possibilities for hopeful decolonial futures in volunteer tourism. The decolonial approach that frames this thesis demands a situated perspective and attentiveness to my positionality within the geopolitical landscape. Through autoethnography, I draw on my embodied positionality as a key source of knowledge production and as a way of problematising subjectivities as fixed binary categories. A methodological positionality of ‘in-betweeness’ underlies the research trajectory, where I move in-between the (b)orderlands of minority world researcher and ‘privileged other’, woman/gringa/traveller/volunteer/researcher. I argue that it is within the embodied, affective and emotional lived experience of volunteer tourism, that binaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ can be transgressed. Ethnographic fieldwork from two organisations in South America: Otra Cosa Network Peru (a non-government organisation) and Arte del Mundo Ecuador (a not-for-profit organisation), are two examples of ‘decommodified’ volunteer tourism. Qualitative data including field notes and reflective diary records of participant observation of the volunteering spaces, alongside semi-structured interviews, reveal that while many of the volunteers themselves drew on development aid discourses to frame their experiences, these particular organisations provide a context where fixed helper/helping dualisms can be subverted. This is because the organisational activities and programs engender intimate relational exchanges between local community members and volunteers. One example is the connectedness and mutuality accompanying language exchange through the medium of Spanglish (a mixture of Spanish and English). In these intercultural encounters volunteers are challenged as their ‘helper’ subjectivities are questioned and their limited cultural and linguistic understandings exposed. These moments of ambivalence represent opportunities for empathetic intercultural communication and understanding. Drawing together theories of emotion and affect with decolonial theory, this thesis contributes to both the ‘hopeful tourism’ and ‘hopeful geographies’ research agenda by attending to practices of mutuality between ‘different others’, highlighting particular stories of intercultural encounters and affective connections. Hope in volunteer tourism is defined within these intangible processes and relationships.

abstract: Arguing for the importance of decolonial pedagogy in human rights education, this research is located at the intersection of human rights education, pedagogy, and justice studies, and is situated in the context of a contested neoliberal university in order to learn about and understand some of the challenges in implementing pedagogical change inspired by decolonial theory. This research focuses on pedagogical approaches of human rights professors to understand how and to what extent they are aligned with and informed by, incorporate, or utilize decolonial theory. This is accomplished through a content analysis of their syllabi, including readings and pedagogical statements, and semi-structured interviews about their praxis to draw attention to the what and how of their pedagogical practices and the ways in which it aligns with a decolonial pedagogical approach. This research calls attention to the specific manner in which they include decolonial pedagogical methods in their human rights courses. The findings determined that a decolonial pedagogical approach is only just emerging, and there is a need to address the barriers that impede their further implementation. In addition, there is a need for research that will further investigate the pedagogical approaches professors are employing, particularly those in alignment with decolonial criteria; the impact of decolonial and non-decolonial approaches on students’ epistemologies, and how to overcome barriers to advance implementation of a decolonizing pedagogical approach.
Dissertation/Thesis
Doctoral Dissertation Justice Studies 2018

Over the past decade, the Ontario Ministry of Education has committed to increase relevant teaching material for Indigenous students. While seemingly significant, a mere “increase” in “Indigenous content” is not enough to combat the racist and colonial mentality inherent within the Ontario history curriculum. Canadian history is steeped with idealistic, imperialist discourses organized around keywords such as peacekeeping and multiculturalism, as well as progress, development, identity, and nation building. The latter serve to not only erase, but also to legitimize the atrocities of Canada’s colonial past. At the 2009 G20 meeting, Prime Minister Stephen Harper stated, “Canada has no history of colonialism.” In keeping with scholars such as Smith and Alfred and Corntassel, I argue that not only does Canada have a history of colonialism, but the mainstream curriculum must be decolonized if Canada is to move towards an equal and just society. The theory guiding this research is decolonial theory. In addition, Fairclough’s conceptualization of Systematic Textual Analysis provides the methodological basis for this project. I analyse three textbooks approved by the Ontario Ministry of Education for the grade ten history curriculum, as well as supplementary curriculum documents. Considering two objectives, change and a colonial mentality, I find only modest change between 2000, 2006, and 2008 in Indigenous content in the curriculum. Further, a colonial mentality continued to be deeply entrenched within all three textbooks and the history curriculum itself. This research seeks to open up the questions and responsibilities pertaining to the wrongs of the past and contribute to the burgeoning field of decolonized knowledges and education.
Graduate

This dissertation examines the transformative and decolonizing potential of Indigenous art-making and creativity to resist ongoing forms of settler colonialism and advance Indigenous nationhood and resurgence. Through a transdisciplinary investigation of contemporary Indigenous art, aesthetics, performance, music, hip-hop and remix culture, the project explores indigeneity’s opaque transits, trajectories, and fugitive forms. In resistance to the demands and limits imposed by settler colonial power upon Indigenous artists to perform indigeneity according to settler colonial logics, the project examines creative acts of affirmative refusal (or creative negation) that enact a resistant force against the masked dance of Empire by refusing forms of visibility and subjectivity that render indigeneity vulnerable to commodification and control. Through extensive interviews with Indigenous artists, musicians, and collectives working in a range of disciplinary backgrounds across Turtle Island, I stage an Indigenous intervention into multiple discursive forms of knowledge production and analysis, by cutting into and across the fields of Indigenous studies, contemporary art and aesthetics, performance studies, critical theory, political philosophy, sound studies, and hip-hop scholarship. The project seeks to elaborate decolonial political potentialities that are latent in the enfolded act of creation which, for Indigenous artists, both constellate new forms of community, while also affirming deep continuities within Indigenous practices of collective, creative expression. Against the colonial injunction to ‘represent’ indigeneity according to a determinate set of coordinates, I argue that Indigenous art-making and creativity function as the noise to colonialism’s signal: a force capable of disrupting colonial legibility and the repeated imposition of the normative order. Such force gains power through movement and action; it is in the act of turning away from the colonial state, and toward one another, that spaces of generative indeterminacy become possible. In the decolonial cypher, I claim, new forms of being elsewhere and otherwise have the potential to be realized and decolonized.
Graduate
0357
0413
0615
martij@uvic.ca

In the United States, rural culture is frequently thought of as traditional and “authentically” American. This belief stems from settler colonial histories in which Native lands are stolen and “settled” by white colonial communities. Through this process, the rugged “frontier” becomes a symbol of American identity, and rural communities become the home of “real” Americans. Because settler colonization is invested in maintaining systems of white supremacy, sexism, and heteropatriarchy, these “real” Americans are figured as normatively white and straight. This dissertation analyzes the rhetorical construction of rurality in the United States, specifically focusing on the ways in which settler colonial histories shape national discussions of rural sexuality. I theorize a rhetorical practice I call rural drag, a process by which individuals in settler society can assert membership in white heteropatriarchy by performing “rurality.” I trace the development of this rhetorical practice through three case studies. In the first, I analyze 19th-century Texan legislative writings during the creation of Texas A&M University. These writings and related correspondences reveal a baseline of white supremacist and settler colonial rhetorics upon which the university established its ethos. In the second, I look at how these rhetorics continue to inform performances of sexuality and gender at Texas A&M. These performances derive from earlier rhetorical practices designed to create a space for white settler privilege. Together, these two case studies suggest that rhetorical practices shape and are shaped by the spaces in which they are practiced and the rhetorical histories of these spaces. In my final case study, I interrogate national discourses of rurality through an analysis of country western music to show how rhetorics of rurality are simultaneously local and national. I conclude by challenging scholars of rhetoric and queer studies to recognize that the relationship between rhetoric and place is key to recognizing our relationship to privilege and oppression in the United States. To further this, I propose a decolonial queerscape pedagogy that accounts for the multiple overlays of sexual identities and practices that travel through the academy while challenging the colonial histories and actions upon which the academy is built.

In Australia people of African heritage are subjected to racialised structural exclusion grounded in ideologies of white supremacy. However, resistance can be enacted through the creation of alternative settings that through self-determination foster greater control over symbolic and material resources and to imagine more just ways of knowing, being and doing. Next in Colour (NiC) is a self-determined initiative in Naarm (Melbourne) led by Colour Between the Lines, a collective of creative artists of African heritage. The initiative developed networks of support, opportunities and vocational pathways to the creative industries for people of African heritage; and engaged community arts approaches to foster critical conversations about identity, belonging and community and surface counter- narratives about the African diaspora in Australia. This study documented how self- determination came to be understood and enacted through the alternative setting of the NiC initiative and how self-determined outcomes were constrained and facilitated through the organisations CBTL sought support from. Informed by decolonial and critical race frameworks data from semi-structured interviews, participant observation and archival research was collected drawing on community-engaged approaches and analysed through a frame of critical narrative analysis. The findings show that NiC served as a homeplace for healing and deconstruction, and a site to reimagine relationships and ways of working that supported decolonial actions of counter-storytelling, authentic visibility and building of solidarities. However, whilst CBTL looked to key organisations to support the initiative and build capacity, forms of racialised structural exclusion NiC was responding to were reproduced in these organisational relationships, constraining self-determination and contributing to hidden labour as CBTL navigated and resisted these dynamics of control and exclusion. The findings of this study show the importance of self-determination and community arts practice within the creation of alternative settings towards liberation and structural inclusion for racialised communities. Further, it highlights the necessity of a contextualised analysis of power and ideology to understand how such settings can best be supported.

My study is a theoretical intervention of the South African contemporary visual art of Mary Sibande. It focuses on the figure of Sophie representing the maid in three series; namely, Sophie-Elsie, Sophie-Merica, and Sophie-Velucia. The study applies Frantz Fanon’s thought to the understanding of the figure of Sophie while emphasising the themes of naming, the human subject, and presence-absence. The theoretical framework of this thesis is a decolonial epistemic theory, which is used as a lens to understand Fanon’s political thoughts. I argue that the themes of naming, human subject, and presenceabsence are inherent in Fanon’s thought. These thematic areas give a better understanding of the existential questions of the figure of Sophie in the antiblack Manichean world. It is important to unpack the figure of Sophie as a Manichean figure who represents the crossing of two different worlds – the white world and the black world, Africa and Europe. The study highlights the importance and relevance of reviving Fanon’s thought concerning decolonial contemporary African art and establishing other tools of interpretation necessary to understand decolonial aestheSis. The thrust of this thesis is to deploy decolonial epistemic theory as a theoretical framework to the Fanonian understanding of the figure of the three Sophies that embody the modern/colonial predicament of the figure of the maid and blackness.
Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology
Ph. D (Art)

Western archival institutions have both silenced and misrepresented Indigenous peoples in Canada for more than a century. These actions have in turn assisted in the colonization and subjectification of a myriad of Indigenous communities within the colonial construct of Canada. This institutional complicity in the colonization process has recently come under fire. Questions have arisen about how these institutions can be decolonized and how they can be used in partnership with Indigenous peoples to strengthen the Indigenous voices they once silenced. The institutional decolonization of archives becomes especially important when the archival institution in question has been given the responsibility to care for records that relate to gross human rights abuses perpetrated against Indigenous peoples. This is the case for the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) at the University of Manitoba, which has a mandate to preserve and share the truths of Residential School Survivors.
May 2017