University of Victoria Journals
Not a member yet
13485 research outputs found
Sort by
WITNESSING, GRIEVING, AND REMEMBERING: LETTERS OF RESISTANCE, LOVE, AND RECLAMATION FROM DAUGHTERS OF IZZAT
No full textThis article challenges public and private constructions of honourrelated violence as they impact second-generation South Asian women and girls in Canada. While much has been written about the victims of honour killings, including high profile cases of young women killed by their families in Canada, considerably less attention and space has been given to second-generation South Asian Canadian women and girl’s stories of survivance and resistance against honour-based violence (HBV). This paper moves towards storying processes of grieving and of witnessing public stories of HBV, and documents a collective writing process I undertook in collaboration with survivors of HBV. We shared narratives of grief and pain, and the power of collective storywork. The paper includes two letters that speak to the context in which second generation South Asian women are embodying resistance and reclamation, and witnessing stories of grief, loss, love, and acceptance
PIETY, TRANSGRESSION, AND THE FEMINIST DEBATE ON MUSLIM WOMEN: RESITUATING THE VICTIM-SUBJECT OF HONOR-RELATED VIOLENCE FROM A TRANSNATIONAL LENS
No full textWhile I strongly endorse anti-imperialist feminist attempts to uphold devout Muslim women’s gendered agency, I am concerned that these arguments fail to disrupt the intransigent association of freedom, particularly individual freedom, with secularism, and communitarian restraint with Islam. It is not surprising, therefore, that victim-subjects of honor-related violence, whether in a secular state such as Canada or an Islamic state like Pakistan, are discursively installed within the universal secular sphere and reevicted from the religious and cultural community. I propose the notion of transgressive piety rather than the dichotomy of secular society versus pious community within which to problematize gendered Muslim subjects. The transgression of ritualistic and institutionalized practices is associated with practices termed Sufism. Muslim feminists may use the idea of transgressive piety to offer faith-based support to those gendered subjects whose transgressive acts, appearance, or practices define them as legitimate targets of family, community, or state-based violence. In so doing, we may also challenge doctrinaire and narrow definitions of the Muslim Ummah, the all-encompassing and transcendent community of Muslims
QUEER (RE)VISIONS OF ARCHIVE, AFFECT, AND PLACE IN CHILD AND YOUTH CARE
No full textThis article presents an autoethnography that interweaves the queering of archive, affect, and place using an object-oriented method. Engaging with a hundred-year-old antique photo album found in a thrift store, this article brings forth queer (re)visions of past, present, and future that (re)imagine queer (be)longing, which expand spheres of ancestral consciousness in 2SLGBTQIAA+ communities. Situated in the United States, this work traces the entanglements in this object-oriented autoethnography through a mapping of queer identity in the Pacific Northwest, capturing temporal reflections that reach from the present back into 1918 and back further still into the early English colonies. In orienting towards the realm of queering child and youth care this work seeks to contribute to a cultivation of discourse of collective (re)visions of past, present, and future that uproots the enshrined settler-colonial, white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, capitalist ethos that continuously crafts the layered erasures of sex, gender, and sexually diverse people in the United States. I endeavour in the threading of autoethnography, both as a white settler and in my being and continually becoming, a genderqueer, trans person struggling and thriving, to critically query the implications of this history within the present and to (re)affirm the possibilities for queer and trans youth in the future
RADICAL CARE AND DECOLONIAL FUTURES: CONVERSATIONS ON IDENTITY, HEALTH, AND SPIRITUALITY WITH INDIGENOUS QUEER, TRANS, AND TWO-SPIRIT YOUTH
No full textThe spirituality and health of Indigenous queer, trans, and two-spirit people occurs within and responds to contexts of extreme colonial violence. However, few studies have examined the relationships among the identity, health, and spirituality of Indigenous queer, trans, and two-spirit youth and their perspectives and activism work in relation to the context of this violence. This study aims to better understand the importance of the connections among identity, health, and spirituality and their role in supporting Indigenous queer, trans, and two-spirit leadership in the enactment of care practices to promote health amidst colonial violence and the worlding of decolonial futures beyond and outside it. Informed by key insights from the grassroots movements and fields of Indigenous feminism, Indigenous queer thought, and radical resurgence, this study brings these insights into conversation, via qualitative interviews with five Indigenous youth activists (18 to 35 years old) from across the part of Turtle Island now known as Canada. Our analysis results in four themes: (1) identity, (2) spirituality, (3) the multidimensional nature of colonial violence, and (4) radical care. We delineate activating practices for decolonial futures, and signal the value of grounded, context-reflective, culturally safe, and intersectional health and youth services. This research demonstrates that spirituality is constitutive of and foundational to the identity and health of Indigenous queer, trans, and two-spirit youth, and shows that health promotion and youth services must address the multidimensional nature of these needs if they are to truly support Indigenous young people, their movements of radical care, and the creation of a decolonial elsewhere marked by belonging, love, self-determinism, responsibility, and joy
Constructing the American Migrant Crisis: Securitization amidst Polarization
No full textUsing the Copenhagen School’s (1998) securitization framework and Scott Watson’s (2009) amendments, this paper demonstrates how Donald Trump used securitizing language to construct a national crisis, emanating from the southern border of the United States, that resisted saliency in a starkly polarized political climate. Key facilitating factors, including the frame resonance of xenophobic attitudes towards Mexican migrants and the institutionalization of migrant securitization throughout US history, caused his rhetoric to resonate with the far-right. However, political opposition and public opinion polls showed significant audience rejection of Trump’s securitization efforts. The conclusion notes consequences of migrant securitization and prospects for the Biden administration
Felon Disenfranchisement and Citizenship Rights in the United States
No full textThis paper discusses the evolution of felon disenfranchisement in the United States as well as its implications for the nation as a whole. First, the history of felon disenfranchisement in the United States is explored, with a particular focus on the deliberate disenfranchisement of Black Americans. The continued disenfranchisement of felons has the capacity to compromise the ability of marginalized communities to exert political influence, reduce the citizenship rights of current and former felons, and brings into question the United States’ status as a modern liberal democracy. This paper argues that the continued disenfranchisement, particularly of Black Americans, who have been previously convicted of a felony demonstrates the United States’ inability to be classified as a liberal democracy as it removes the fundamental citizenship rights that should be awarded to all citizens of the state
The 2011 Israeli Housing Protests: the Occupation of Public Space & the Decentered State
No full textIn 2011, a live-in protest was held on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv, Israel, to protest against drastically rising housing prices in Israel and the occupied territories. The broad coalition of support this protest garnered was a reflection of the historical saliency of the housing issue for a variety of groups living in Israel. Using Warren Magnussen’s theory on the decentred state, and Margaret Kohn’s populist view of the public, I argue that the 2011 Israeli housing protests represent a conscious decentering of the Israeli state through the formation of such a diverse coalition, which included Zionist Jews, Palestinian Israelis, and others
A Case study of using we for speaker affiliation in a first-year-composition writing conference talk
No full textThis research study attempts to qualitatively investigate the indexically situated functions of one person deixis in English, we, vis-à-vis the establishment of speaker roles, voices, and affiliations in a one-on-one writing conference talk (WCT). By appropriating the analytic model of speaker roles and voicing in narratives—narrator, character, and interlocutor (e.g., Koven, 2011, 2016)—informed by Bakhtinian view grounded in dialogic notion of voice (Prior, 2001), this research study furthers the discussion of how co-participation in and of a one-on-one WCT itself is tethered to the deployment of we that is and becomes heteroglossic. The participants’ voicing and their speaker roles illuminated through a grounded and narrative methodology adopted in this study offer a radical alternative to structuralist, systematized notions of fixed form-referentiality typologies of English person-deictics. What is discovered in the study regarding the indexical meanings of we include: heuristics for evaluation and suggestions, device for the bridging of epistemic asymmetry, apparatus for time-travel, and proposal of hypothetical scenarios. Thus, the one-dimensional, structuralist view of an indexical linguistic sign engaged in a complex writing conference interactional talk belies a more complicated, re-occurring narrativization (Wortham, 2001) that permits co-participants therein to straddle past, current, and hypothetical expressions of trains of thoughts, engagements, and identities through the intertextuality of we and its indexical traces. This research study concludes by discussing theoretical considerations and implications specifically for WCTs and globally for writing studies scholarship.
Keywords: Writing conference talk; dyadic interaction; voicing and speaker roles; identity co-constructio
The syntax and discourse function of you see
No full textThis study of the syntax-discourse interface investigates the form and function of you see, which has been analyzed as a fixed and movable expression displaying discourse functions in spoken English (Erman, 1987; Fitzmaurice, 2004; Hale, 1999; Ranger, 2010). Based on the data excerpted from British National Corpus (BNC), the primary discourse function of you see is to manage common ground (CG). Specifically, the function of you see as an agreement seeker is available at both sentence peripheries, but the sentence-initial you see co-occurs with a phonological unit such a stress. Sentence-medial you see serves to check mutual knowledge. Following the Universal Spine Hypothesis (USH) (Wiltschko, 2014), two functions involved in the use of you see are grounding and responding (Wiltschko & Heim, 2016). It is shown that sentence-initial you see and the phonological unit it co-occurs with are linked to different layers in the spine. In this context, you see is associated with the grounding layer (GroundP) involving Speaker’s (S) and Addressee’s (A) commitment (Ground-S and Ground-A) to the proposition (p) (Thoma, 2016), and the phonological unit is associated with the responding layer (RespP), requesting a response from A. The sentence-final you see is dedicated to grounding and responding layers independent of the co-occurrence of phonological elements. You see in medial and negation contexts is less related to the A’s propositional attitude and solely accesses to S’s ground. Specifically, the negation not values the coincidence feature [ucoin] associated with GroundP as [-coin] (Wiltschko, 2018), thereby illustrating that p is not in S’s set of beliefs. The results suggest that the syntactic positions of you see can be organized on a continuum, each showing a different degree of intersubjectivity.
Keywords: Discourse marker; spoken English; Universal Spine Hypothesi
Seeing Justice Done: Increasing Indigenous Representation on Canadian Juries
No full textThe underrepresentation of Indigenous people on Canadian juries threatens public confidence in the criminal justice system, particularly in cases involving Indigenous accused or defendants. Despite being the subject of many high-profile legal cases, inquiries, and reports, the problem endures today, and meaningful reform has been elusive. This paper considers the ways in which Indigenous people are excluded at each of the three stages of the juror selection process. It critiques the Supreme Court of Canada’s ruling on the issue in the 2015 case of R v Kokopenace and concludes with several recommendations including that citizens be allowed to volunteer for jury duty in order to remedy the race-based disparity in representation on juries