Program Highlights
Decoloniality took center stage at NWSA's 2016 National Conference in Montréal, Québec. Not only did the conference take place for the first time outside of U.S. territory, then-NWSA President Vivian May included what may have been the first land acknowledgement in the program's presidential welcome letter, citing the territory as Tiotià:ke, unceded Mohawk/Kahnawake territory. Noted scholar of Indigenous descent and Indigenous Studies Leanne Betasamosake Simpson gave the Keynote Address. Indigenous Studies and Indigenous scholars also made up the Plenary Sessions and President Session:
Plenary: "Decolonizing Institutions"
Speakers: Karen Leong (mod.), Amanda Lock Swarr (mod.), Julia Chinyere Oparah, Audra Simpson, and Kim TallBear
Tapping into legacies of critical resistance and self- determination, this plenary examines what it means to decolonize institutions. In addition to considering strategies for disrupting settler colonial logics and founding violences embedded in a range of institutions, presenters discuss how to reconceive institutional formations and relations in ways that do not reinforce legacies of trauma and conquest. Rejecting environmental degradation, territorial dispossession, sexual violence, carceral/militarized state practices, coloniality’s divisive dichotomies, and the systematic destruction of languages and cultures, the plenary speakers draw from their experiences with community organizing, radical politics, and social justice work to reimagine the contours of education, law, and science.
Plenary: "Performing Resistance"
Speakers: Karma Chávez (mod.), Laura Gutiérrez (mod.), Natalie Diaz, Favianna Rodriguez, and Tali Taliwah
Highlighting how creative world-making practices have long been crucial to anti-colonial, queer, and coalitional resistances and radical revisionings, this plenary explores the dynamic relationship between performance and social change and engages a decolonial imaginary as vital to producing transformative consciousness. Drawing on experiential knowledges, powerful storytelling, and rhythmic resonances, the presenters address how creative praxis is pivotal to dismantling oppression, contesting empire, and producing new mythologies and ways of living/loving/being/moving/ speaking/creating. Collectively, these artist-activists/activist- artists offer fierce poetics, powerful visions/visuals, and deep insights into the role of the creative in radical transformation, organizing for collective action, and relational (re)imaginings.
Presidential Session: "Decoloniality, Intersectionality, and Critical Resistance"
Speakers: Vivian M. May (mod.), Sirma Bilge, Anna Carastathis, and Ange-Marie Hancock
This session focuses on three new books about intersectionality that highlight its activist roots, complex history, and radical possibilities: Intersectionality, by Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge (Wiley, 2016); Intersectionality: An Intellectual History, by Ange-Marie Hancock (Oxford, 2016); and Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons, by Anna Carastathis (Nebraska, 2016). Drawing on their work across borders and disciplines, the authors will discuss:
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- How to disrupt U.S.-centric, ahistorical, and/or depoliticized approaches to intersectionality;
- How intersectionality “travels” and is applied (or misapplied) as a critical tool, political lens, and school of thought;
- How intersectionality remains relevant for social justice work and radical politics;
- The need to take up decolonial and intersectional feminist projects together—to delegitimize settler logics, challenge state power, generate effective coalitions, contest endemic violence, or focus on sovereignty politics in new ways, for example.
The conference subthemes – "Unsettling Settler Logics," "Movements and Migrations," "Bodies and Biopolitics," "Borders and Be/Longings,” “World-Making and Resistant Imaginaries" – gave space for presenters to contextualize their work and their positions within the narrative, power, realities, and legacies of colonialism. Below are examples of sessions from the 2016 conference that centered decoloniality and Indigenous Studies.
"Decolonizing Reproductive Justice in Theory and Practice: Toward Indigenous Self Determination"
- Papers: "Colonial Intrusions, the “Sixties Scoop,” and Coercive Sterilization: One Indigenous Woman’s Story;" "Decolonizing Feminism: Reproductive Justice in Support of Indigenous Self Determination;" and "Cogenerating Knowledge with Urban Indigenous Women and Allies to Foster Reproductive Justice: Reflecting on Collaborative Action-based Project Processes"
"Embodiments of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Indigeneity in the Criminal Punishment System"
- Papers: "Perverted Justice: Female Juvenile Delinquency and Sexual and Racial Category Formation in U.S. Interwar Popular Culture;" "Postcolonial Colonialism on a Prison Island: Intimate Interactions between Political Prisoners and Indigenous Women on Buru Island as a Site of Colonization, 1969–79;" "Repurposing Zalba et al.: Prison Sociology and Securing Prisoners’ Parental Rights;" "The Indigenous Woman: Canada’s Necropolitical Prisoner;" and "Uniform Feelings: U.S. Police Psychology and Emotional Labor"
"Reframing the Narratives of the Settler State"
- Papers: "Beyond “Decolonized Skies”: Unsettling Civilians and their Anti-Drone Artwork;" "Positioning Academic Success among Refugee- background Students within the Logics of Resistance;" and "Unsettling Colonial Logic in France: From Charlie Hebdo to Génération Bataclan"
"Violent, Self-Destructive, and Resilient? Disablement at the 'Horizon of Death'"
- Papers: "Understanding Psychiatric Violence in Immigration Detention in Ontario;" "Rehabilitation as Benevolence: Canadian Disaster Intervention in the Philippines;" and "Governing Indigenous and Racialized Bodies through Public Health and Safety Measures"
"Unsettling Settler Discourses with Disability, Native, and Third World Ontologies"
- Papers: "Decolonized Disablement, Cripped Coloniality: Toward Decolonial Disability Justice" and "We Never Named It “Decolonial” It’s Just Us..."
"Trans* Lives, Cis Privilege and Decolonial Interventions"
- Papers: “'Everyday (De)colonialism' and Trans* Health Activism;" "A People’s Investigation Against the Militarization of Care: the In-Custody Death of Kayla Xavier Moore;" "Destabilizing the Cisgender Body;" and "Insisting on Life: Popular Epidemiology and Trans* Life Expecte\ancy [sic] in Argentina"
"Reconceptualizing Sport: From International Solidarity to Multicultural Imperialism"
- Papers: "Marathoning and Menstruation: The Myth of Frailty;" "Muslim American Women in Sports: Constraints, Challenges, and Empowerment;" "The Right Kind of Other: Multicultural Imperialism and Flexible Citizenship in Women’s Olympic Beach Volleyball;" and “'Olympics Without Apartheid' in Rio: Brazilian- Palestine Solidarity Against Israeli Securitization"
"Violence, Prisons, and the Settler State"
- Papers: "A Recipe to Resist Colonialism: Strategies of First Nations Incarcerated Women and Artistic Inquiry;" "Feminist Politics of Prison and Police Reform: Prioritize Pro Se Prisoner Empowerment;" "La Prison Raciale: Interroger le Système Pénal Québécois;" "Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Canada and Grassroots Strategies for Change;" and "Unsettling Settler Logics in the Courts of Women"