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What and Who Are “Essential”? A Disability Justice Perspective on COVID-19 Measures and the Diverse Disability Communities in Ontario
No full textCentral to Ontario’s COVID-19 response was defining, supporting, and protecting essential services and, by extension, essential people – often through decision-making processes that were ad hoc and lacking in meaningful public engagement. This paper examines the Ontario government’s public health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, from the early steps taken in 2020 by provincial officials to develop a triage protocol for hospitals that would discriminate against those who fall outside of the narrow view of essential people – especially disabled and older people – to the implementation of public health measures that also disadvantaged diverse disability communities in a multitude of settings and far-reaching, multiple, and intersecting ways. Selectively drawing on online local and national newspapers across Canada that mentioned COVID-19 and people with disabilities from March 2020 to June 2020, we examined the ways in which disabled people have been rendered invisible, invaluable, disposable, and “non-essential” as they struggle to survive the pandemic largely outside of provincial COVID-19 response frameworks. Through this analysis, we craft a contrasting understanding of “essential” that attends to the principles of disability justice, shifting interdependencies, and the diversity and mutuality of human needs. Drawing on examples of mutual aid and caregiving in diverse disabled communities, we also explore disability justice as an alternative framework that leaves no one behind
Sovereignty’s Sonic Limits: Music and Spectacle at the Border
No full textDespite the wide proliferation of bordering processes across places, platforms, and populations, movements for border justice often maintain a materialist and geographically narrow focus. Activists draw public attention to the border’s physical infrastructure, challenging the use of barriers, policing, and incarceration to violently prevent and punish transnational migration. To counter this “border spectacle” enacted by the State (De Genova, 2013), protest against contemporary border regimes may take its own spectacular form, whether as sabotage, blockading and disruption, or as humanitarian interventions. Border resistance may also manifest as artistic interventions, including musical concerts, competing with the State over regimes of representation. In this article I consider what these situated interventions reveal about the nature of borders in an age defined by the State’s paradoxical efforts to both materialize (as in the form of barrier building) and dematerialize (as in the form of data driven surveillance) state borders in defense of an increasingly elusive national sovereignty. To do so I examine a quartet of musical concerts staged at (or across) four national borders – Mexico/US; East/West Germany; North/South Korea; Columbia/Venezuela – to demonstrate how artists, activists, and even governments have attempted a type of performative spectacle which simultaneously stages and challenges sovereignty, undermining the border’s function as a limit and temporarily enacting a world without borders
Medical-Legal Alliances: Encounters with Excited Delirium in Ontario Coronial Law
No full textThis theoretical paper analyzes Ontario coroner inquest reports that reference excited delirium from 1996 to 2023. The author argues that coroner inquest reporting engaged medical experts in work to exonerate law enforcement of white supremacist violence. Excited delirium as a racializing assemblage illustrates how the coroner inquest functions as a medico-legal tool that pulls focus from, and in so doing is designed to maintain, the violent institution of policing. To that end the author describes the anti-racist abolitionist theoretical approach driving this paper’s analysis, to show the limitations of reliance on what is ultimately a reformist response to death-by-police. Through this lens the author explains the invention and development of excited delirium in medical scholarship. Then in a review of Ontario coroner inquest reporting, the author shows how the causes of death identified and the summaries of death presented come to constitute excited delirium, both by focusing on conditions located in the body-mind of the deceased, and by reframing – and ultimately displacing legal scrutiny away from – restraint use and other patterns of violence found in police encounters. Further, jury recommendations and coroner elaborations related to training and research align with a reformist ethos that enlists medical authorities in the work of keeping institutions of policing intact and beyond meaningful reproach despite the violence they continually enact
Hate Speech on Trial
No full textDespite the increasing diversity of our online and offline communities, hate speech continues to divide us deeply. We urgently need to examine its ghastly omnipresence and our growing numbness to its harms. This article aims to identify mechanisms that exploit the right to free speech as a cover for the proliferation of hate speech in contemporary society. Chief among these is the manipulative tactic of equating resistance to today’s culture of uninhibited expression – which includes hate speech – with censorship. To begin with, I demonstrate that the idealistic “marketplace of ideas” endorsed by free speech absolutists becomes as repressive as the tyrannical censorship it fears when participants are constantly pressured into conformity. Next, I show that in this unregulated market, the idea of open dialogue gains more traction when participants are divided by hate. Finally, I examine how digital technology fosters seemingly benign habits that enable the online and offline amplification of harmful speech
Foreword
No full textProfessor Colin Rose provides insight into the 10th edition of Brocks "The General," an academic undergraduate history journal. His commentary on the current affairs of Canadian autonomy in the face of political uncertainties provides a harrowing account of the struggles of modern-day Canadians. Rose\u27s forward addresses numerous articles with a prompt commentary to introduce the new edition.
Grief as Response-Ability: Rethinking Mourning in a Multispecies World
No full textThis reflection piece examines how we mourn nonhuman beings and why it matters. Traditional mourning practices have focused on human loss, often overlooking the ethical significance of nonhuman death. This exclusion reinforces the idea that animal lives are less important, particularly in industries such as factory farming, scientific research, and environmental destruction. Expanding our understanding of mourning beyond human-centered perspectives allows us to challenge these assumptions and recognize the value of all life
The Cambridge Introduction to Literary Posthumanism by Joseph Tabbi: A Book Review
No full textJoseph Tabbi’s The Cambridge Companion to Literary Posthumanism offers a comprehensive and insightful exploration of a question central to our times: What does it mean to be human? The book is not merely a study of a new cultural development or an intellectual fad or a new literary period; it is a challenge to the very premise called human exceptionalism borne out of enlightenment reason which has for over half a millennium kept humans in a hierarchical arrangement with the non-human. Tabbi comprehensively traces posthumanism’s present entanglements, its ancestral beginnings and speculative futures vis-a-vis a literary tradition interminably extending from the Epic of Gilgamesh to more contemporary works like Gibson’s Neuromancer. By incorporating text boxes, interchapters, etc., the book’s own structure mirrors the kind of rhizomatic existence which posthumanism posits for the humans in the altered circumstances of the 21st century. The review argues that the ontology of existence characterised by the interconnectedness of beings, inclusivity, etc., which posthumanism provides, is not different from what literature has been arguing for centuries
The Role of Football and Stadia Construction in Institutional Ascension: A Case Study of the Transition of Boise Junior College into Boise State University
No full textThe present case study offers a descriptive history on the construction and renovation of Boise State University’s football athletic grounds and stadia from 1932 through 1975 to better understand their contribution in the institutional history of the school. In particular, the current study uniquely shows the role football and stadia played within the ascension of the institution from a private junior college to large public state university. Boise State is one among several institutions that transitioned from junior college to state college and then university status. To realize the goals of the current study, information was sought on important stakeholders and groups, environmental or contextual factors, and decisions that influenced the construction of various football grounds and/or stadia at Boise State. Next, the present work examined how football and competition grounds or stadia at Boise State impacted the perception of the institution and facilitated its transition from junior college to major university status. Overall, the current essay legitimizes previous assumptions offered by other institutional histories that football and its stadia helped to ensure school survival. Moreover, football and stadia could serve as a strategic asset within an institution’s ascension from institute, normal college, community college, junior college, and state college to university status
Unsettling the South Asian settler: Decentring (non-Indigenous) racial oppression An anti-colonial autoethnography
No full textSeveral scholarly works have opened discourse around the complicity of non-White settlers in continuing the oppression of Indigenous Peoples through their ideological adoption of and material participation in White supremacist neoliberal capitalist structures, structures set in place through settler-colonial possibility (Chen, 2021; Pulido, 2018; Saranillio, 2013; Tuck & Yang, 2012; Upadhyay, 2016). This anti-colonial autoethnography (Laurendeau, 2023) attempts to add to this existing body of scholarship, by further considering the nuances and specificities of settler identities. More specifically, it is an exploration—without territorialization—of this author’s struggles as a racialized settler, scholar, and outdoor enthusiast involved in social justice work. In holding the twin rope tensions of being the subject of oppressive forces, while reinscribing oppression through these same forces, I attempt to engage in the on-going process of unsettling a settler self, as a means to support decolonization (Steinman, 2020)