Decolonizing Refugee Studies, Standing up for Indigenous Justice: Challenges and Possibilities of a Politics of Place

This paper interrogates the challenges and potentials for solidarity between refugees and Indigenous peoples by bringing decolonial, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist critiques in different parts of the world, including in white settler colonies and in the Third World, into conversation with each other and with Refugee Studies. The first section of the paper offers two analytical steps towards decolonizing mainstream Refugee Studies. The first step involves identifying, analyzing and problematizing what we may call “an elephant in the room,” a parallax gap between Refugee Studies and studies of International Politics. The second analytical step is problematizing and challenging the popular discourses of charity and gratitude that dominate refugee discourses and narratives in the Global North. The second section of the paper engages in a more direct and detailed discussion about challenges to and possibilities for solidarity between refugees and Indigenous peoples. Articulating historical and contemporary parallels between refugee displacement from land and Indigenous dispossession of land, this section demonstrates that there are nevertheless no guarantees for political solidarity. It argues that potentials for solidarity are contingent on a politics of place, as articulated by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars; and also possibly on a reconceptualization and reorientation of refugee identity different from the ways it has been constituted in colonial discourses

Stripers, bailarinas exóticas, eróticas: identidad e inmigración en la construcción del Estado canadiense Stripers, erotic and exotic dancers: immigration and identity in the construction of the canadian nation-State

Este artículo presenta una discusión sobre la migración de mujeres Latinoamericanas para trabajar en la industria del sexo en Canadá, como bailarinas exóticas, a través de visas temporales de trabajo. El objetivo es demostrar que esa migración se encuentra determinada en un contexto de relaciones desiguales de poder enmarcadas por las políticas migratorias canadienses, relaciones de explotación económica de Norte América hacia Latinoamérica, construcciones raciales y racistas, y relaciones patriarcales de género, en el que el trabajo sexual es una de las pocas opciones laborales que tienen las mujeres.<br>This article discusses how the migration of Latin American women to work in the sex trade, specifically as exotic dancers, as temporary workers is framed within a specific context of Canadian immigration policies, uneven economic relationships between North America and Latin America, racial and racist constructions and sexist gender relations where sex work is one of the few working possibilities that women have