Cruising,space and surveillance: decolonizing sexuality in Singapore

ABSTRACT

The policing of homosexuality in Singapore through legislation and public policy are imbued with colonial legacies that have enshrined heteronormative values within its public sphere. However, communities within new online spaces in Singapore disrupt the heteronormative surveillance efforts deployed by the state within public, family and political landscapes. Through an analysis of a local online forum dedicated to cruising this article unpacks how local gay men resist, negotiate and deploy surveillance techniques to navigate these heteronormative structures and cruise safely in Singapore. This article demonstrates how online spaces have become part of an everyday resistance that characterize modern-day efforts to decolonize sexuality in Singapore.     

The orang utan is not an indigenous name: knowing and naming the maias as a decolonizing epistemology

ABSTRACT

Much of wildlife conservation literature and practices rely on euro-western nomenclature that are legacies of empire. Although seemingly neutral, the practice of (re)naming nature depends on political, philosophical, and social assumptions that encode top-down behaviour and governance in conservation practices. Indigenous communities’ processes of classifying nature are not recognized as valid and, as such, their conservation strategies are made invisible. If Indigenous knowledge is accounted for by contemporary conservation, it is often from a paradigm that focusses on ecological-scientific knowledge, rather than the complex inter-species relationships that Indigenous communities have with nature. As such, Indigenous communities are often perceived as a barrier or problem towards conservation, due to what is perceived as their lack of care for species of conservation interest. In this article, drawing on a kin study of maias conservation in Sarawak, I explore the power dynamics and tensions emerging within practice and discourses of conservation. In particular, I focus upon the struggles and negotiations in which conservation actors understand the orang utan, as they are commonly known in an international space, that overshadow the Iban ways of naming and knowing the orang utan as maias. Finally, I discuss the Iban classifications/names and relations with nature and how this affects different understandings of conservation.     

Disability Through a Native American Lens: Examining Influences of Culture and Colonization

Disability is a socially constructed identity. What constitutes a disability and what it means to be a person with a disability can vary across cultures. This article explores meanings of disability within Native American cultures, including how ideas about wellness, balance, roles, and responsibilities influence perceptions of disabilities. This is followed by a review of disability prevalence, discussion of services, and explorations of possible reasons for the disproportionate impact of disabilities in Native American populations. The article concludes with an examination of how the colonial context frames both attitudes about and services for Native Americans with disabilities.     

Doing Feminist Peace

The history of the oldest international women's peace organization, the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), presents a practical lesson for individuals and organizations interested in bringing about social change, as well as a theoretical lesson for those concerned with conceptualizing social change. WILPF's positions on decolonization between 1945 and 1975 show how historical circumstances and ideological environment intersected with the organization's ideas about peace to determine different policy choices. An unprecedented resolution in the early 1970s on the inevitability of violent revolutions resulted from a shift in ideological beliefs. While the international environment of the 1960s and 1970s favored this shift, WILPF arrived at its new policies thanks to its reliance on a theoretically-informed feminist critical methodology. This allowed WILPF to increasingly critique entrenched assumptions and reach a better informed understanding of peace, thereby contributing to the redefinition of the context that had created and shaped the organization. An activist-inspired, theoretically-driven feminist critical methodology thus makes social change possible.     

Hemispheric Visions and Border Divisions: Differential Decolonizations at the US National Museum of the American Indian

Abstract

While many populations have suffered unique forms of colonial oppression, what these varying populations seem to share is an understanding of the importance of community support and cultural continuity in the face of struggle. Drawing on notions of differential oppositional consciousness and decolonization, this article examines the US National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC in light of its efforts to represent a hemispheric indigeneity. The Our Lives gallery exhibit co-curated by the Campo Band of Kumeyaay Indians (whose aboriginal lands straddle the border between the US and Mexico) is analyzed alongside the author’s personal reflections of her encounters with the NMAI as a US Chicana/Latina subject. The article urges scholars to recognize how they have been differ entially positioned against power and, furthermore, to acknowledge how and when efforts to decolonize may result in the re-colonization of another already marginalized group. This project asserts that the strength of alliances may not always be built on sameness, but perhaps can be built out of differences.     

The specter of Fanon: the student movements and the rationality of revolt in South Africa*

The largest student revolt since Soweto 1976, the student movements of 2015, were historic, challenging the lack of serious reform in the university systems and bringing to the fore the question of decolonization. Named ‘the Fanonian moment,’ it was the latest expression of the disillusion of rainbow politics. Marked by the Marikana massacre and the death of Nelson Mandela, Fanon’s name is almost as popular as Steve Biko’s and his name is often referenced in newspaper articles. While Fanon’s critique of post-apartheid has been well rehearsed in South Africa, this paper considers ‘the Fanonian Moment’ and the current popularity of Fanon as well as Steve Biko’s idea of Black consciousness as critical elements of decolonial liberation. With a focus on the student movements, the paper suggests that Fanon’s thought, and his notion of the rationality of revolt, is especially alive in intentional spaces where decolonization and liberation are linked with everyday questions of movement democracy and organization.     

Toward a Decolonial Alternative to Development? The Emergence and Shortcomings of Vivir Bien as State Policy in Bolivia in the Era of Globalization

There is an urgent demand for the examination of the critical perceptions of new kinds of ‘development’ which are emerging in the Global South in response to—and often opposed to—the global capitalist political economy. This article discusses the case of contemporary Bolivia in which indigenous political alternatives have emerged as the resistance to economic globalization and the powers of capital accumulation, as well as to the cultural and epistemological commitments of the Western order. Through an ethnographic approach, it examines the emergence and shortcomings of the notion of vivir bien—a local, decolonial, indigenous concept of good life—as state policy. It argues that despite its transformative potential, the translation of vivir bien discourses into state practices has not been, to a large degree, achieved.     

Decolonizing Vision on Borderlands: The Mexican Southern Borderlands in Critical Review

This article critically examines the Mexican southern borderlands, understood both as a concrete borderline region and as a concept constructed by scholars. Building on recent borderlands debates, the article constructs a decolonizing vision, which provokes us to ask: To what extent is the borderlands perspective colonialist? By dividing the world into centers and peripheries, do we automatically repeat the centrist interpretations? Are the habitants of the borderlands thinking they are living in a periphery? By exploring academic literature on Mexican southern borderlands and decolonizing criticisms set forward by the Zapatista movement, the article brings forth epistemological challenges related to colonialist imagery and vocabulary on borderlands, suggesting a decolonizing vision from which to shed a new light to the world political centers and peripheries. This way, the article attempts at bridging critical borderlands studies with the field of international relations.     

Under the cloak of professionalism: covert racism in teacher education

This study focuses on manifestations of racism and colonialism in teacher education. I build on the theoretical framing of Critical Race Theory and decolonization in order to expose racist and colonial assumptions at the core of teacher education. I highlight in particular the work of covert racism under the cloak of teachers’ professionalism. I focus on what I call ‘professional microaggressions’: subtle forms of racism and colonialism hidden beneath professional definitions. By interviewing graduates of a well-established Indigenous teacher education program in British Columbia, Canada, I examine the mechanisms that still hinder the success of Indigenous teacher candidates in teacher education and in the school system. The study highlights the resilience, resistance, and strategic planning that Indigenous teachers use to challenge the system while advancing their position within it. Lastly, I suggest ways to support Indigenous teacher candidates in teacher education.     

Crossing borders in initial teacher education: mapping dispositions to diversity and inequity

In this article, we share a study focused on engaging teacher candidates with multiple forms of diversity and inequity to study emerging patterns of dispositions. Our primary concern is in understanding the processes through which societal inequity becomes reconstituted through teacher education. Our study attempts to deepen discourses of ‘equality’ and ‘equity’ in education, to consider the ways teacher candidates relate to broader systems of power and global and local inequities through their role as educators. Inspired by both decolonial and Western critical theories, we frame this as research that seeks ‘otherwise’ as we invite teacher candidates to ‘cross borders’ to what is ‘other’ to themselves. In this article, we share our study’s priorities, methods, methodological/theoretical framework, data analysis and findings. Our findings identify a significant gap between the priorities of social equity to which teacher candidates state they commit and the educational practices that would affirm those commitments.