Oct 28, 2017 | 1:30 PM - 3:00 PM | Loft 2

Desmond Doulatram, BA

Indigenous Decolonization of Academia: Using the Marshall Islands as Precedent for Social Injustice

Abstract Social injustice affecting small-island developing states of indigenous design deserves adequate space within the moral conversations of today. Giving adequate spaces in the academy helps on-going decolonization and prevents further colonization. These particular precedents of social injustice paint in all importance the significance in furthering indigenous decolonization of academia. Marshallese rightfully deserve equal spaces within academia to prevent inaccurate publications and to address ongoing humanitarian commitments of self-determination and equal-dignity. This paper seeks to educate the general public on the negative aspects of an imperial academic system that foregoes indigenous knowledge systems despite legal humanitarian commitments. It demonstrates the benefits of decolonizing academia through successful precedents and it further analyses the dangers of foreign academic design and practices that do not take into context indigenous knowledge systems. This paper elaborates for a general audience to remind ourselves of minorities that have been marginalized and stereotyped yet have persevered at the face of unfair representation. It serves as an additional instrument of decolonization meant to further implement the aforementioned indigenous decolonization herewith. Using the medium of research writing as a form of witnessing to showcase cross-cultural sympathy and understanding at the face of globalization, this paper ultimately displays the purpose of addressing ongoing decolonization efforts through moral example.

Sara Liden, BA

The Limitations of Codified Equality

The fight for social justice and progress is on-going. The achievements made today must be continually built on and criticised as society progresses. Equality gains enshrined into laws require constant scrutiny and criticism. Otherwise, these documents stagnate and fail to achieve the intended goal. Such is the current problem with Ontario’s Human Rights Code.

The Code gives protections on many grounds and provides a means of addressing discrimination and protecting people where they can be most vulnerable: employment, housing, and access to services. However, the grounds are limited by their definitions. The definitions both give and restrict access to the protections. One of the more restrictive grounds is ‘record of offences’, where an individual cannot be discriminated against by an employer for having a record of offence provided they have a pardon that has not been revoked or the offence stems from a provincial regulation. The protection does not cover non-conviction records, such as stays or withdrawals of charges. Nor is it applicable in areas outside of employment, such as housing and access to services.

Drawing on the cultural theory of Antonio Gramsci and Raymond Williams, the critical disability studies of Robert Menzies, and the legal scholarship of Denise Réaume, the presentation will examine how the Code has made mad people who have encountered the criminal justice system a second-tier class. The Code is ‘pigeon-holed’ and fails to address the harmful effects of mental health stigma and discrimination. Mental health is systemically criminalised, and accessible services are disproportionately dependent upon police and judicial intervention. The stigma of criminal records can compound the stigma of mental health and produce an adverse effect on the social determinants of health. There must be systemic and structural changes to the conceptions of mental health, crime, and poverty to create equality for all.

Kelly Minerva, PhD

The narrative erasure of Mumbai's poor

From the southern American slave plantations in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin, to the Belgian Congo in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, to the Indian village in Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World, to the exploitative and dangerous cities in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle and Mulk Raj Anand's Untouchable, literature’s potential to inspire social justice movements has an esteemed history. In the wake of these anti-colonial novels exists a now well-established tradition of postcolonial novels that (re)write and (re)claim indigenous cultures and locales from colonial erasure. Within this tradition, a subset of Anglophone postcolonial novels rewrote the history and identity of Mumbai, India and its residents. Since the 1980s, Mumbai has increasingly been the subject of novels which share enough similarities to define a genre (c.f. Minerva 2017, P. Gopal 2009, R. Shahni 1995). This literary corpus is characterized by its emphasis on the differences between Bombay and Mumbai; its descriptions of the city’s diverse populations and overcrowding; by the struggles to define individual identity in a rapidly and constantly changing city; by clashes between individual, local communal, and national identities; and by the imposition of city, state, and national politics on everyday life. The ever-growing list of Anglophone Bombay novelists contains diasporic and indigenous writers including, but not limited to, Vikram Chandra, Amit Chaudhuri, Dilip Chitre, Anosh Irani, Cyrus Mistry, Rohinton Mistry, R. Raj Rao, Salman Rushdie, Manil Suri, Shashi Tharoor, Jeet Thayil, and Thrity Umrigar. In this presentation, I will examine how the predominantly male, first-person focalizers reveal the imaginative constructions of Bombay created to assuage the modern urban alienation self-proclaimed Bombayites experience in their post colonial city, but simultaneously reproduce the very erasure the novels set out to overcome by reinforcing the relationship between social privilege and economic inequality.