Criminal Justice Policy and Victim-Survivor Empowerment: A Case Study of Domestic Violence Disclosure Schemes in England and Wales

Empowering victim-survivors has long been recognised as one key strategy in reducing domestic abuse. This article explores whether Domestic Violence Disclosure Schemes as a criminal justice response to preventing domestic abuse in the United Kingdom are experienced as empowering in practice. Centralising victim-survivor voices, this article argues that variability in experiences of feeling empowered or disempowered pivoted upon whether those who deliver the scheme adopted an incident or process focussed approach. It concludes that while such schemes can be empowering when concomitant support is forthcoming, ultimately the victim-survivors in this study were left feeling disillusioned because of the disparities between what was expected and the limits of what was delivered in practice

Beyond Nostalgia: Networks of Indigenous World-Making with Paul Seesequasis

Paul Seesequasis, a Plains Cree writer and journalist, discusses the significance of the Indigenous Archival Photo Project with Tanja Grubnic. He addresses how the social media–based archive restores visibility to historical photographs of Indigenous people whose identities have been marginalized through photography as an extractive art form under colonialism. The project initiates a collective process of memory reconstruction and world-making as community members identify friends, family members, and places in the images shared on the internet. Their conversation concludes by discussing the profound link between land and digital space. In consultation with Seesequasis, Grubnic has selected several images from the online project that honour the rich narratives of Indigenous communities across generations past, present, and future

ᒫᒥᑐᓀᔨᐦᒋᑲᓂᐦᑳᐣ ᓂᒦᑭᓯᐢᑕᐦᐃᑫᐏᐣ ᐁᑿ ᓂᒥᑐᓀᔨᐦᒋᑲᐣ / mâmitoneyihcikanihkân nimîkisistahikêwin ekwa nimitonêyihcikan: my reflections of beading with a computer

Four Generations is a digital media installation I coded that computationally generates portraits of my Indigenous lineage using 3D generated beads. Initially exhibited in my Master of Fine Art exhibition at the University of British Columbia in the summer of 2015, this work was then curated for the Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound exhibition at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York City from November 2017 through January 2019. The work now resides in the collection of the Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC) Indigenous Art Centre. My original intent for Four Generations was to create a dialogue between my nehiyaw (Cree) Métis ancestry, my Indigenous art practice (beadwork), and computational media. However, it has since become a work reviewed by others to explore deeper understandings of digital representations of Indigenous culture, heritage, and identity, and peripherally as an example for critical discussions about language revitalization, Indigenous data sovereignty and computer code studies. This paper reflects on my artwork Four Generations (2015), examining its contributions to Indigenous artistic production and digital translations of Indigenous cultural praxis, including language, medicine, and ceremony, and its impacts on computer programming and computing philosophies. I explore how this work has shaped Indigenous media art through contemplations of public discussions and critiques and express how these discussions have (re)shaped my identity as an Indigenous artist and computer programmer

Introduction: Storywork in Indigenous Digital Environments

This is the Introduction to the Transmotion special issue on Indigenous social media and digital environments

#HonouringIndigenousWriters: Visiting with and through Indigenous Literatures in the “Digital Turn”

In 2017, in partnership with the UBC Longhouse and UBC Libraries,the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies and the University of British Columbia Library began the annual “Honouring Indigenous Writers Edit-athon.” Each year, building out of events such as the Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-athon, our team of organizers work with Indigenous authors to improve the representation of Indigenous literatures online. We build consensual relationship with authors to revise Wikipedia pages, distribute organizer kits to interested collaborators, maintain an event dashboard, and host live readings from new and established Indigenous authors in Vancouver, Kelowna, and Alberta. The event itself is inspired by Daniel Heath Justice’s hashtag #HonouringIndigneousWriters, which he began on Twitter in 2015 to draw attention to the wide range of literatures available by Indigenous authors. With Justice’s consent, we build on his good work by furthering the reach of Indigenous literatures in digital and physical spaces.  In this article, I suggest that #HonouringIndigenousWriters illustrates that any attempt to squarely demarcate boundaries between offline and online communities risks eliding the nuanced facets of relationality that are core to Indigenous literary studies. Bronwyn Carlson argues that in Indigenous engagements with the digital, there is often “no distinction between online and offline worlds; they are seamlessly enmeshed”. Productively blurring the boundary between online and offline worlds informs what critical and ethical and relational engagement in the digital must look like. Via a history of #HonouringIndigenousWriters, written from my perspective as one if its co-founders, I hope to illustrate how, as scholars of Indigenous literary studies, we can draw online and offline worlds into closer proximity and, as Warren Cariou urges us, find places to visit with stories

Introduction to the Special Section

This paper introduces the Special Section Can Criminal Justice Responses Empower Women? A Case Study of Domestic Abuse Disclosure Schemes. It locates the case study of Domestic Abuse Disclosure Schemes in a wider trend of expanded criminal justice responses to domestic abuse. It then outlines the introduction and format of the Domestic Abuse Disclosure Scheme in England and Wales in 2014, followed by schemes introduced in other jurisdictions. It goes on to discuss the development, uptake and wider contextualisation of the schemes, as well as the emerging body of academic research. Finally, the contributions of the four substantive papers in this Special Section are detailed

Refiguring Digital Landscapes: Online Pedagogical Hubs of Indigenous Latinx Youth

Educational literature has long invisibilized Indigenous Latinx youth in favor of a monolithic discourse of Latinidad. For example, being grouped by nationalities (i.e. Mexican or Guatemalan) or as pan-ethnic identities (i.e. Hispanic or Latinx ) does not fully express Indigenous peoples’ cultural breadth, experiences, and languages throughout Latin America. As such, many Indigenous Latinx migrants bring with them traditions, epistemologies, and family histories that they embrace and sustain through multiple avenues. In this paper, we focus on educational spaces created on Instagram, where Indigenous Latinx youth actively engage in discourses and cultural production of indigeneity, borderlands, and colonialism. We situate the emergence of Instagram as a site of pedagogical depth that Indigenous Latinx youth deploy as co-curricular building projects. Finally, we deploy Critical Latinx Indigeneities to make sense of a post shared by a Quechua-Aymara account titled “Detribalized, Reconnecting, Indigenous: Further Debunking Attacks to ‘Latinx’ Reindigenization” and the various user responses to the post who actively participated in refiguring the conversation by nuancing, situating, and contemplating the overall premise of the post, which was mestizo/Latinx “reindigenization” through reclamation of an Indigenous identity. Users crafted responses to specifically address components of the post creating a “hub” whereby others could engage in this type of public pedagogy. Our purpose is not to center any particular narrative but more so create an opportunity to witness how Instagram has and is a generative site of pedagogical co-creation, by, in this case, the various user responses to the post who actively participated in refiguring the conversation by nuancing, situating, and contemplating the overall premise of the post, which was mestizo/Latinx “reindigenization” through reclamation of an Indigenous identity. Instagram is therefore a generative site of pedagogical co-creation, a move we call refiguring digital landscapes. ​​We define refiguring digital landscapes as spaces of dialogue, where Indigeneity is in motion and actively being articulated and re-articulated and contested. This paper suggests three key components: 1) how youth from differing Indigenous territories can provide nuances on Latinidad and indigeneity based on their own experiences 2) complicate the way in which settler colonialism (as an ongoing process) is interpreted within multiple geographic contexts 3) map the way that CLI is enacted via online interfaces. Through refiguring digital landscapes, Indigenous youth are actively establishing robust digital worlds that, although they can be in contestation, do foster a depth of epistemological and ontological importance

The potential refugee status of the Rohingya in Bangladesh under International Refugee Law

Finding a solution to the Rohingya refugee crisis has been frequently brought to attention by the international community, humanitarian organisations and academic scholars. As they are affected by the world’s fastest growing humanitarian crisis, the Rohingya are one of the most marginalised and persecuted groups, marking one of the most significant events in contemporary world history. The framework within International Refugee Law could potentially offer protection for the Rohingya refugees, under the 1951 Geneva Convention, the main regulation to locate the assistance of refugees. The current refugee crisis will be assessed through a theoretical approach from postcolonialism to understand the complexity of the social and political roots of the persecution in Myanmar. The tensions that arise from the violence and suffering endured by the Rohingya has been relevant since the colonial period. Accordingly, this essay explores how the Rohingya refugee crisis illustrates the inadequate protection of laws under International Refugee Law, resulting in the construction of postcolonial statehood. At face value, the framework of international law should provide an appropriate solution, but the legal enforcement seems to have opposite effect. To pinpoint the source of the problem would intensify an incremental step closer to providing a long-lasting suitable solution to provide international support to the Rohingya