Ethno-National Colonialism in South Africa

The purpose of this dissertation is to answer the question: why do ostensibly similar ethno-national conflicts within a system of settler-colonial domination see such wide variation in their outcomes? How they emerge from conflict through power sharing and social integration versus the endurance of separation and systems of domination and control? The study identifies causal paths that resulted in the decline of domination systems of this type. Ethno-national conflicts that feature certain similarities develop in different trajectories due to certain conditions that culminate in transforming the structures of these conflicts towards integration (the establishment of a single political entity) or separation (independence in separate entities). The goal of the dissertation is to examine the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through a comparative lens in order to specify the conditions that led to the persistence of the two-state solution and to examine the prevalence or lack of necessary and sufficient conditions for the emergence of a one civic-democratic state. Building on the comparative approach I argue that ethno-national territorial underpinnings of the conflict and the “regimes of territorial legitimation” of the dominant group are the most crucial explanatory factor in determining the trajectory and outcome of the conflict. “Regimes of territorial legitimation” are the practices, procedures, systems of meaning, and institutional designs that found the relationship between a nation, people or ethno-national group and geography/territory. The dissertation features a qualitative structured and focused comparison of the conflicts in South Africa, and Palestine. Method of difference is applied for a case-oriented interpretive inquiry that focuses on the complexity of each of the two cases and aims at capturing the historical diversity of these similar cases.

A Critical Review and New Directions for Queering Computing and Computing Education

Technological imaginaries underpinning computing and technoscientific practices and pedagogies are predominantly entrenched in cisheteropatriarchal, imperialist, and militaristic ideologies. A critical, intersectional queer and trans phenomenological analysis of computing education offers an epistemological and axiological reimagining by centering the analysis of gender and sexuality through the lens of marginalized people’s experiences (queer, trans, and intersecting marginalities). It analyzes how systems of domination and liberation occur through relationships between objects, people, and their environments and how these systems of power multiply in effect when people are situated at multiple axes of oppression (such as gender, sexuality, race, and disability). Complexity, heterogeneity, and fluidity are at the core of queer and trans imaginaries and challenge the assumed naturalness of biological categories that underpin much of the cisheteronormative harm and violence in K-16 education, STEM (science, technological, engineering and medical) disciplinary practices, and technological innovations. Foregrounding complexity, heterogeneity, and fluidity supports the critique, construction, and transformation of computational objects, worlds, and learning environments so that queer and trans perspectives, narratives, and experiences are centered and valued. In doing so, ambiguity, fluidity, and body becoming are centered in virtual spaces, thereby offering emancipatory possibilities for supporting critical literacies of gender and sexuality. Methodologically, approaches rooted in active solidarity with queer and trans people and a commitment to listening to intersectional experiences of gender and sexuality-based marginalization and resilience reorient computing learning environments towards liberatory, justice-oriented practices. Computing scholars and educators have identified data science (more broadly) and algorithmic bias (in particular) as an essential domain for furthering education research and practice. Histories of erasure, exclusion, and violence on queer and trans people, both by carceral technologies and algorithmic bias, and as part of the computing profession, are enacted on individual people and reflected in societal biases that inform and shape public experiences of computing and technologies. Overall, queering computing education and computing education research directs attention towards a multifaceted problem: the historical and ongoing hegemonic, cisheteropatriarchal control over programming; the limitations to representation by code that a computer can recognize; the possibilities to queer code and computer architectures; the technological regulation of identity and bodies; and the limits and affordances of technological representation of gender and sexual identity. A queer, trans, intersectional, justice-oriented approach to computing education attends to the structural, socio-historical context in teaching and learning computer science and coding, including the dominant cultures of the technology workforce and the everyday disciplining interactions with technology that shape who we can become.

The racial environmental state and abolition geography in California’s Central Valley

This article introduces the “racial environmental state” as an analytical framework for examining race and environment as mutually constituting modes of state power. Under racial capitalism, the state relies on the constant articulation of racial and environmental difference and domination to sustain the uneven geographies necessary for capitalism. The racial environmental state offers a way to examine hegemonic state power operating through the convergences of race and environment, as a site for resistance, and the proliferation of abolition geographies. Using this framework, the author analyzes the abolitionist struggle to transform the carceral geographies of California’s Central Valley through a campaign to stop the construction of a prison in Delano, California. This case study shows the importance of recognizing race and environment as interconnected systems of domination and resistance. It also highlights the possibilities and limitations of engaging the state in the abolitionist fight for freedom.

Corporeal Crisis and the Contested Female Terrain: An Ecofeminist Reading of ‘The Birth-Mark’

This paper originally and substantially studies Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ‘The Birth-Mark’ from an ecofemninsit perspective, while exploring the interconnections and interdependency between the systematic and institutional ways in which woman and nature were dominated by male-centred society in 19th century America. By building on significant contributions to ecofeminist theory, this paper argues that the oppression of women and exploitation of nature by patriarchal culture and male-run institutions are represented in ‘The Birth-Mark’ as a product of masculinist, colonialist and capitalist assumptions and practices. This paper demonstrates that patriarchal culture’s unjust hierarchies and systems of domination are connected conceptually, and the promise of Aylmer to relieve Georgina from the corporeal crisis is an instance of difference-and-hierarchy-based domination; it aims at perpetuating the accepted authority and power of man who can contest God’s female terrain, and to claim his ability to recreate and reintegrate it in ways that show absolute control over nature and God.

Tools of Conviviality: Art in the Postcolonial Imagination

Key arguments regarding the relationship between postcolonial art and aesthetics and the emancipatory imagination have implications for pedagogical and curriculum reform in the era of globalization. Postcolonial art, aesthetics, and postcolonial imagination are, and invoke paths through and exceeding, dominant traditions of thought in critical thinking on the status of art. These dominant critical traditions have led us to what Cameron McCarthy calls the “forked road” of cultural Marxism and neo-Marxism: the antipopulism of the Frankfurt School and Habermas and their contemporary affiliates versus the populism of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies and those insisting on the nearly virtuous engagement of the First World working classes with contemporary consumer culture. These approaches have tended, McCarthy maintains, to generate critical apparati that silence the historically specific work of the colonized inhabitants of the Third World and the periphery of the First. In beckoning curriculum and pedagogical actors in a different direction, toward postcolonial art and aesthetics, McCarthy argues that the work of the postcolonial imagination dynamically engages with systems of domination, authority over knowledge, and representation, destabilizing received traditions of identity, association, and feeling, and offering, in turn, new starting points for affiliation and community that draw on the wellspring of humanity, indigenous and commodified. Key motifs of postcolonial art (literature, performance art, sculpture, and painting) illuminate organizing categories or new aesthetic genres: counter-hegemonic representation, double or triple coding, and utopic and emancipatory visions. These ethically informed dimensions of postcolonial art and aesthetics constitute critical starting points, or tools of conviviality, for a conversation over curriculum change in the tumult of globalization and the reassertion in some quarters of a feral nationalism.

Critical Race Theory for Speech-Language Pathology

Race has yet to be discussed as a significant factor in the field of speech-language pathology. Race is often conflated with nonmainstream dialects and discussed in purely linguistic terms. However, the terms we use to describe dialects are highly racialized, centering white mainstream norms and treating nonmainstream varieties of English as “different” and, therefore, inferior. Hierarchical thinking about language contributes to the misdiagnosis in Black and other communities of color because racialized language ideologies have been left unstated. This chapter demonstrates through a critical race theory approach how structural racism shapes the field's conceptualization of language and competence. Using an intersectional lens in particular, this chapter discusses race, disability, and language ideology as systems of domination that compound the effects of racism for communities of color. CRT is then used to reveal, critique, and intervene on the historically embedded racist structures that continue to manifest in speech-language pathology research, teaching, and practice today.

Students With Disabilities' Learning in South African Higher Education

This chapter discusses how the normative practices and structures ‘disables' students with disabilities in their learning in the context of the South African higher education. Empirically, examples from the students' lived experienced have been drawn from the previous study that has been conducted in one institution of higher education, which is a privileged space, by virtue of being formerly advantaged. Data combines available literature on normativity and disablement of students with disabilities and empirical data, which were collected through interviews with students with disabilities studying specific professional degrees. Decolonial theory informed deeper understanding of the cause of normative assumptions and consequently disablement of students with disabilities. Literature and lived experiences of students with disabilities reveal that despite efforts of disruption normativity and disablement have continued to be reproduced at different levels because systems of domination are so durable and inventive.

“Habits of the Flesh” and the Call to Conversion

In this essay, the author “scrutiniz[es] the ‘signs of the times’ and seek[s] to detect the meaning of emerging history” to explore the call to conversion issued by the 1971 Synod of Bishops in Justice in the World (JW). In that document, they condemn oppressive systems of domination that hinder authentic human development and urge people toward conversion of the Spirit, which “frees [them] from personal sin and from its consequences in social life.” To determine what it is that people are to convert from, this essay builds on an evolutionary framework—developed through Augustine’s ecology and contemporary scientific theory—and explores how this framework can help limit the pursuit of domination in favor of promoting a more integrated and just world. Doing so contributes to the dialogue concerning how Christians can “work out their salvation by deeds of justice,” in light of the prescient framework delivered in JW.

Colonial creep

This commentary engages with the book’s chapters on colonial linguistics by highlighting that in their struggles to maintain their ancestral sovereignty, Indigenous peoples remind all of us that, for most of our histories as human beings on the Earth, we have exercised and cultivated our individual and collective powers to set in motion dynamic relationships of well-being and mutual benefit. The commentary argues that Indigenous peoples also remind us that it has only been in the last few millennia and in a few aberrant cultures that systems of domination such as patriarchy, ethnocentrism, and accumulation of wealth have sought to assure that our deployment of what Foucault refers to as the ‘awesome materiality’ of these powers no longer serves the life-seeking interests of ourselves, our communities, and humanity, but instead serves the death-seeking interests of processes of domination, such as colonization.

Antidemocratic and Exclusionary Practices: COVID-19 and the Continuum of Violence

The global coronavirus pandemic has reified divisions, inequity, and injustices rooted in systems of domination such as racism, sexism, neoliberal capitalism, and ableism. Feminist scholars have theorized these interlocking systems of domination as the “continuum of violence.” Building on this scholarship, we conceptualize the U.S. response to and the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic as reflective of the continuum of violence. We argue that crises like pandemics expose the antidemocratic and exclusionary practices inherent in this continuum, which is especially racialized and gendered. To support our argument, we provide empirical evidence of the continuum of violence in relation to COVID-19 vis-à-vis the interrelated issues of militarization and what feminists call “everyday security,” such as public health and gender-based violence. The continuum of violence contributes theoretically and practically to our understanding of how violence that the pandemic illuminates is embedded in broader systems of domination and exclusion.