Welcome!

Welcome to the project, The Puzzle of Discretion: interrogating change with public sector workers in white settler colonial institutions. We are Willow-Samara Allen (she/her) and Nisha Nath (she/they), the project’s Co-Principal Investigators. We are investigating how provincial public sector workers (PPSWs) are learning to witness, engage and mobilize discretionary power in their work. We want to understand how discretionary power shapes the ways in which settler colonial jurisdiction and authority are enacted and resisted and how change and accountability get articulated and foreclosed in public sector institutions.

The purpose of the website is to share what we are doing and learning in this project. This space will continue to evolve as we move through this research to include knowledge mobilization materials aimed at interrupting settler colonial beliefs, practices and impacts in daily work.

This project is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and supported through Athabasca University and Roads University