Our writings
Taking Up the Work: Settler Colonial Governance, Discretion, and Public Sector Workers
Abstract
In this article, we bring together findings from our qualitative study of provincial public sector workers (n = 32) on Treaty 6, 7, and 8 (Alberta) and unceded Coast Salish territories (British Columbia) in which we consider how these workers are socialized to reproduce settler colonial structures and resist them. Provincial public sector workers (PPSWs) do not simply represent the white settler colonial state but functionally are the system as they negotiate the violence of the relationship between the state and Indigenous Nations and communities in their day-to-day work. The provincial level that we spotlight has jurisdiction over what are known as “the helping sectors” of education, health, and child welfare. These sectors directly govern the most intimate parts of life, making the capacity to cause harm insidious. State interventions into the lives of systemically targeted families and communities are often authorized through notions that the public sector serves “the public good” and knows “what’s best.” We specifically interrogate the relationship between the exercise of discretionary power and the logics underscoring white settler colonial institutions like the public sector. Our contention is that discretionary power is core to how PPSWs as state actors learn to conduct their work and justify their authority to do that work, as well as how they learn to both enact and challenge the authority and jurisdiction of the state.
Antiracist Interventive Interviewing: Subverting Colonial Interventions with Public Sector Workers
Abstract
What does it mean to intervene in antiracist interviews with public sector workers? What do interventions look like in research seeking to name complicity in settler colonial violence and imagine otherwise relationships between non-Indigenous and Indigenous people? How might we methodologically define interventions and their pedagogical purpose(s)? In this paper, we share our experience of adopting a dual-pedagogical antiracist interventive research methodology in our qualitative research with public sector workers on settler colonial socialization. Building on antiracist interventive interviewing method, we map out our conceptualization of interventions as multidirectional and multiscalar. We narrate how we see interventions as dual pedagogical moments of disruption and possibility occurring at three scales, where we intervene to support our participants’ learning and they intervene to support ours. Our approach is illuminated through illustrations from our transcribed data of virtual interviews with 32 public sector workers in BC (n = 23) and Alberta (n = 9), and through our reflections on our research process. Our analysis demonstrates that interventions have three key effects. First, they are generatively disruptive in that they offer better access to understanding processes of settler colonial socialization. Second, interventions create junctures for antiracist and anticolonial learning. Third, interventions with participants open up opportunities to imagine otherwise beyond the strictures of settler colonialism, and orient towards anticolonial praxis rooted in recognition of Indigenous sovereignties. We conclude with a vocabulary of interventions meant to offer other qualitative researchers possibilities for how to intervene to better access and disrupt sites of deep colonizing.
Citation
Allen, W. S., Nath, N., & Georges, T. (2023). Antiracist Interventive Interviewing: Subverting Colonial Interventions with Public Sector Workers. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 22. https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069231166655.
Settler Colonial Socialization in Public Sector Work: Moving from Privilege to Complicity
Abstract
In this piece, we ask, what are the risks of a pedagogy and politics that begins and ends with privilege? What does it mean to declare privilege when embedded in institutions of the settler colonial state? These questions are raised through an ongoing project where we interview provincial public sector workers on Treaty 6, 7 and 8 (Alberta, Canada) and Coast Salish Territories (British Columbia, Canada) about their implications in settler colonialism through public sector work. In the project, we articulate the interdisciplinary framework of settler colonial socialization to consider the space between individuals and structures – the meso-space where settlers are made by learning how to take up the work of settler colonialism. For these reasons, in our research we ask, “what do the pedagogical processes of settler colonial socialization tell us about how systemic colonial violence is sustained, and how it might be disrupted or refused in public sector work?” In this paper, we narrow our focus to the declarations of privilege that many of our interview participants are making. We reflect on these declarations and consider whether focusing on settler complicity and Indigenous refusals can better support a decolonial politics for settlers working in the public sector. We argue that declarations of privilege risk reproducing settler-centric logics that maintain settler colonialism, settler jurisdiction, and settler certainty, and we reflect on how to orient participants (and ourselves) towards the material realization of relational accountability and towards imagining otherwise.
Citation
Nath, N. & Allen, W. S. (2022). Settler Colonial Socialization in Public Sector Work: Moving from Privilege to Complicity. Studies in Social Justice. 16 (1). https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v16i1.2648.