Abstract: Comparisons to the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission haunt most post-1990s institutional attempts to address historical injustice, building on the wide familiarity and perceived success of that body. In the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, the South African TRC was a common, but vague and indiscriminately deployed referent. Comparing these two bodies, Nagy (2012) notes that “loose analogizing” has hampered the application of important lessons from South Africa to the Canadian TRC – namely, the discovery that “narrow approaches to truth collude with superficial views of reconciliation that deny continuities of violence.” Taking up her important specification of the Canada-South Africa analogy, we expand Nagy’s recent findings by *gendering* the continuum of Settler colonial violence in both locations, and by outlining the implications of these TRCs (and the potential for reconciliation) for Black and Indigenous women in particular. We begin by uncovering how Nagy’s ‘narrowness’ and ‘superficiality,’ acting synergistically, also serve to ‘desect’ intersections, prioritizing race over gender as a category in analysing both the acute and the structural violence of apartheid, residential schooling, and Settler colonialism. We discover that, in both the Canadian attempt to grapple with the legacy of residential schools and the South African effort to deal with a history of apartheid, institutional approaches to truth have been both narrow *and androcentric.* We conclude that the simultaneous historical bounding and social consolidation of experiences of abuse and injustice has produced a ‘double Settler denial’ in the case of Black and Indigenous women today.

Paper / Communication

Abstract: On December 11th 2012, protesting the slow-moving environmental violences facing Indigenous peoples in her home community of Attawapiskat and beyond, Chief Theresa Spence began a hunger strike. Subsisting on tea and broth, for 44 days, she sought recognition of a nation-to-nation relationship for her peoples and with the Crown. Her body’s symbolic sacrifice mirrored the livelihoods of many Indigenous communities across the country. This paper applies an ecofeminist and intersectional lens to problem of everyday gendered and colonial violence in Canada (MacGregor 2007; Shiva 2005; Simpson 2011). Informed by biopolitical theory, this paper examines the political implications of Chief Spence’s hunger strike. It assesses how the hunger strike reveals the political stakes at play when life, reduced to bare life, may not be worth living without recognition of a radically different kind of politics (Agamben 1998; Arendt 2001; Aristotle 1955; Kristeva 1982; Foucault 1990). While dominant narratives pertaining to Chief Spence’s hunger strake portrayed Spence as lacking transparency and accountability, this paper hypothesizes that there is a missing narrative that necessitates further political investigation. Notably, during her protest, Chief Spence demanded recognition of treaty relationships from the state. Drawing upon relevant literature in settler-colonial studies and interpretive research methods, this paper assess the political significance of Chief Spence’s request for the recognition of treaty relationships (Coulthard 2014; Hankivsky et al. 2012; Yee 2011). This paper employs a multi-layered critical discourse approach that includes a discursive analysis of text and speech over 5 years (2011-2016).

Paper / Communication

Abstract: In Canadian society we are bombarded with mixed messages about the state of contemporary feminism. The confusion about the state of feminism in our society in general and the marginal place of feminist work in our discipline are not unrelated phenomena. This confusion can facilitate overly simplistic understandings of feminism that further marginalize the varied and complex approaches that fall under the feminist rubric. While this marginalization may be indicative of outright and purposeful resistance by some members of the discipline it is, at least in part, facilitated by the fact that "feminist" political science has to date been done by "feminist" political scientists and taught in "feminist" courses, and, at least, in part, by the fact that the term "feminism" has many different meanings and interpretations. The variety of existing feminisms and the dominant perception that feminism is somehow in "crisis" begs the question, "What is the future of feminist political science?" This paper offers one possible answer to this question by outlining and defending an expansionist agenda centered on challenging the male-female binary that has been upheld and replicated in the discipline to date. Such an approach draws heavily on the insights of intersectional analyses, transgender, queer and gender fluid articulations of identity, and requires that the field of political science investigate the varied and complex gendered experiences of "men". Overall, this paper will argue that such as expansionist agenda is key to responding to the interrelated challenges presented by the perceived "crisis" of feminism and the ongoing "masculinity" of the discipline of political science.

Paper / Communication