Faculty Research and Publications

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Browsing Faculty Research and Publications by Subject "Canada"

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    Intervening in the context of white settler colonialism: West Coast LEAF, gender equality, and the Polygamy Reference
    (Onati International Institute for the Sociology of Law, 2016) Lenon, Suzanne
    In November 2011, the British Columbia Supreme Court released its judgement in Reference re: s.293 of the Criminal Code of Canada, upholding the prohibition on polygamy as constitutional. The Polygamy Reference, as it is known, concluded that the pressing and substantial objective of s. 293 is the prevention of harm to women, to children, and to the institution of monogamous marriage. This paper analyzes the submissions made by the feminist legal education organization, West Coast LEAF, one of the few feminist 'voices' taken seriously by the court. The apprehension of polygamy's harms was central to the Reference case. West Coast LEAF offered one of the most nuanced interpretations of how the criminal prohibition on polygamy should be interpreted with respect to harm. Yet as this paper argues, its position conceals and is underpinned by racialized relations of power that, however unwittingly, give weight to and indeed require the racial logic of white settler state sovereignty articulated in the Polygamy References' overall narrative.
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    Studying with, without guarantees: reflections on the risks of taking learning from the classroom to the land
    (Institute for Critical Education Studies, 2020) Granzow, Kara; Lenon, Suzanne; Kirbyson, Emily
    In this paper, we discuss an assignment we developed whose goal was to “unsettle” settler consciousness and critically foster a grounded politics of location amongst our postsecondary students. We analyze some of the important and sundry risks of taking learning from the classroom to the land, focusing on some of the assignment’s assumptions, effects, contradictions and complications. Drawing upon Moten & Harney’s urging of a “studying with and for,” Stuart Hall’s “politics without guarantees,” and Leanne Simpson’s “land as pedagogy,”we present our experiment in teaching as an exciting opportunity for learning – one that though rooted in aspirations towards more decolonial presents in our classrooms, is still always also deeply implicated in who gets made as a subject with access to the goods and protections of the colonial present within and outside of the university.