Abstract: My research interrogates the role of the thrifty gene hypothesis in Canadian settler colonial history. This hypothesis – which holds that Indigenous peoples are genetically predisposed to type-II diabetes – has been roundly critiqued and rejected as fallacious by the scientific community in general and the originators of the hypothesis in particular; however, federal Indian policy, clinical guidelines, and state literature continue to reproduce racist iterations of the thrifty gene hypothesis. Recalling the now infamous nutrition experiments performed upon Indigenous children in residential schools by Canadian scientists, my project insists that the chapter in Canada history wherein malnourished and captive Indigenous populations are studied by scientists remains very much open. Looking closely at epidemiological and genetic studies on Indigenous communities in northern Canada with high rates of type-II diabetes throughout the 1990s, my project brings attention to the persistence of what Mosby (2014) called ‘colonial science’ in Canada and critiques the geneticization or naturalization of Canadian colonial genocides. Put simply, then, my dissertation demonstrates how colonialism causes diabetes and how settlers use science to pretend otherwise.

Abstract: It has been over a decade since Amnesty International’s Stolen Sisters report first documented the mass killing of indigenous women in Canada. Little attention has been paid to the homogenizing, essentializing, and appropriative roles that the discourse of missing and murdered Aboriginal women has played in reproducing the innocence of Canadian settler colonialism while claiming to remember, protect, and care about indigenous women. In Dying from Improvement, Sherene Razack describes a killing indifference as the central feature emerging out of inquests and inquiries into numerous indigenous deaths during police custody. I seek to expand the depth of Razack’s study by examining the gendered and sexed hierarchies of political economy and colonialism. In my dissertation, I ask: what does the discourse of missing and murdered Aboriginal women as a gendered, racialized, sexualized set of affective discourses mean for indigenous social reproduction and the reproduction of the Canadian settler colonialism, and how are these settler structures being contested? Hence, I propose to examine the role essentialism plays in reproducing white settler capitalist-heteropatriarchy as well as the material, economic, and social impacts of the Tackling Violent Crime Act and the $25 million Government of Canada Action Plan to Address Family Violence and Violent Crimes against Aboriginal Women and Girls are having on indigenous women and men. I read Michel Foucault’s studies of governmentality and discourse analysis alongside Sara Ahmed and Jasbir Paur’s study of necropolitical-affective-representation in order to unpack these contemporary discourses of colonial power. Overall, I argue that these processes are ongoing.

Abstract: With over 2.9 million Canadian citizens living abroad, expatariate voting rights remain an important but neglected citizenship issue. The presence of large numbers of recent immigrants and of many Canadians living abroad raises the question of how the "political nation" is constituted, and how one of the basic rights of membership in the political community, the franchise is granted. This paper seeks to explain expatriate voting rights in the understudied case of Canada. The research in this paper will examine the Canadian case of disenfranchising expatriates and how this is playing out in the countries politics followed by examination of alternative systems used in other settler countries. Drawing from unique data on expatriate voter turnout in Anglo-American countries, the research in this paper demonstrates that expatriates abroad seldom influence domestic election outcomes, but are important in battleground ridings.

Abstract: Implementing durable policies that seek to provide broad public benefit, while generating powerful losers, is difficult. My research compares two policies of this type - the British Columbian carbon tax (which survived) and the Australian carbon tax (which did not). Taking the work of US Political Scientist Eric Patashnik as a starting point, I ask why the outcomes were different. The research is based on qualitative interviews with politicians, political staffers, business leaders, lobbyists, environmentalists and journalists, in Canada and in Australia. It is hoped the research findings may help inform policymakers seeking to implement durable public-interest reforms which will likely create powerful losers - in areas such as climate change, tackling obesity, and gun control.