Teachers' constructions of racism and anti-racism

Race and racism inform our subjective realities and structure unequal material relations in contemporary society. While researchers have developed substantive theories to explain racism as systemically pervading institutions within society and permeating our consciousness, studies must also examine how people with privilege deny or admit the existence of racism within their institutions in different environments. Studies of how educators understand racism have been emerging; however, there remains a paucity of scholarship addressing this topic in the Canadian Prairies. In this thesis I use discourse analysis to investigate how prairie teachers negotiated the troubling topic of racism in their schools. The data was collected through open-ended surveys and focus-groups exploring teachers’ understanding of racism and anti-racism within two mid-sized prairie city high schools. First, exploring survey responses, I use text-based discursive analysis techniques to analyze how participants minimize the unsettling presence of racism in the school. In their responses, teachers used techniques of individualization, blaming the victim, displacement, and situating racism as a student problem to avoid implicating themselves or their school within racism. Teachers preserved the colour-blind image of education, maintaining the benevolence of the educational institution and its employees. However, different images of education emerged from focus-group discussions with educators interested in exploring anti-racism in the school. Focus group participants shifted from minimizing racism to problematizing privilege and power within the building. Multicultural, psychological, and institutional approaches to anti-racism emerged, emphasizing the need to engage individuals, cultures, and institutional structures. Exploring how teachers articulated different versions of the school environment, the identities of students, and their own identities within and between these different anti-racist discourses exposed how versions of each approach could be constructed to situate racism as external to education, and how critical conceptualizations of the school opened opportunities for individual, cultural, and institutional change within education. This research develops the understanding of race in the Canadian Prairies, discourse analysis within geography, anti-racist education, the geography of how teachers situate racism, and how teachers construct the relationship between school, teacher identity, and racism

Modeling the seasonal autochthonous sources of dissolved organic carbon and nitrogen in the upper Chesapeake Bay

In this paper we investigate the seasonal autochthonous sources of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and nitrogen (DON) in the euphotic zone at a station in the upper Chesapeake Bay using a new mass-based ecosystem model. Important features of the model are: (1) carbon and nitrogen are incorporated by means of a set of fixed and varying C:N ratios; (2) dissolved organic matter (DOM) is separated into labile, semi-labile, and refractory pools for both C and N; (3) the production and consumption of DOM is treated in detail; and (4) seasonal observations of light, temperature, nutrients, and surface layer circulation are used to physically force the model. The model reasonably reproduces the mean observed seasonal concentrations of nutrients, DOM, plankton biomass, and chlorophyll a. The results suggest that estuarine DOM production is intricately tied to the biomass concentration, ratio, and productivity of phytoplankton, zooplankton, viruses, and bacteria. During peak spring productivity phytoplankton exudation and zooplankton sloppy feeding are the most important autochthonous sources of DOM. In the summer when productivity peaks again, autochthonous sources of DOM are more diverse and, in addition to phytoplankton exudation, important ones include viral lysis and the decay of detritus. The potential importance of viral decay as a source of bioavailable DOM from within the bulk DOM pool is also discussed. The results also highlight the importance of some poorly constrained processes and parameters. Some potential improvements and remedies are suggested. Sensitivity studies on selected parameters are also reported and discussed

La Grange Comprehensive Plan 2018 - 2038

In the Fall of 2017, the City of La Grange and Texas Target Communities partnered to create a task force to represent the community. The task force was integral to the planning process, contributing the thoughts, desires, and opinions of community members—as well as their enthusiasm about La Grange’s future. This fifteen-month planning process ended in August 2018. The result of this collaboration is the La Grange Comprehensive Plan, which is the official policy guide for the community’s growth over the next twenty years.La Grange Comprehensive Plan 2018 - 2038 provides a guide for the future growth of the City. This document was developed by Texas Target Communities in partnership with the City of La Grange.Texas Target Communitie

HISTORICIZING THE ENCOUNTER BETWEEN STATE, CORPORATE, AND INDIGENOUS AUTHORITIES ON GITXSAN LANDS

This essay charts the shifting assemblage of the conduct of state, corporate, and Indigenous authority through four historical moments: mercantilism, settler colonialism, Indigenous resurgence, and corporate reconciliation. With reference to Gitxsan territories, it makes a series of interrelated arguments. The development of colonial territorial claims and regimes of governance overlapped pre-existent and ongoing Indigenous territorial relationships. The historical division between the political and economic domain reshaped the relationship between state and corporate authorities, the state deferring to corporate actors to manage relations in the economic domain. The conduct of state and corporate authorities has constrained and modified the exercise of Indigenous jurisdiction. Nevertheless, Indigenous resurgence has opened space for renegotiating the colonial legal order, including relations between extractive resource companies and Indigenous authorities. Emergent corporate practices of contracting with Indigenous authorities over development, however, reflect a reconfiguration rather than rupture of the settler colonial legal order. Corporate-Indigenous agreements rely upon colonial modes of organizing lawful political and economic conduct, and continue to block more radical and anti-colonial expressions of Indigenous jurisdiction. To expand possibilities for articulating forms of Indigenous jurisdiction that refuse the categories of colonial political economy, it is necessary to problematize the relationship between colonial state and corporate authority. L’auteur de cet essai décrit l’évolution imbriquée de la conduite des instances de l’État, du monde des affaires et des peuples autochtones à travers quatre périodes de référence : le mercantilisme, le colonialisme de peuplement, la résurgence autochtone et la réconciliation avec le monde des affaires. En évoquant les territoires des Gitxsan, l’auteur présente plusieurs thèses liées entre elles. La constitution de revendications territoriales et de régimes de gouvernement coloniaux a empiété sur les relations préexistantes de longue date des peuples autochtones avec leur territoire. La division historique entre les domaines politique et économique a transformé les relations entre les instances de l’État et celles du monde des affaires, l’État s’en remettant aux acteurs du monde des affaires pour gérer les relations dans le domaine de l’économie. La conduite des instances de l’État et du monde des affaires a créé des contraintes pour l’exercice du pouvoir autochtone, qui s’en est trouvé modifié. Toutefois, la résurgence autochtone a ouvert une possibilité de renégocier l’ordre juridique colonial établi, notamment de changer les relations entre les entreprises extractives et les responsables autochtones. Par contre, les pratiques toutes récentes du monde des affaires, qui consistent à conclure des marchés avec les responsables autochtones concernant le développement, témoignent d’une reconfiguration plutôt que d’une rupture de l’ordre juridique colonial établi. Les ententes conclues entre les entreprises et les Autochtones reposent sur des modes coloniaux d’organisation de la conduite économique et politique légitime et continuent de faire obstacle aux modes d’expression plus radicaux et anticoloniaux du pouvoir autochtone. Pour élargir les possibilités d’expression des formes de pouvoir autochtones qui ne se prêtent pas aux catégories de l’économie politique coloniale, il est nécessaire de poser le problème des relations entre les instances de l’État colonial et celles du monde des affaires

New Relationships on the Northwest Frontier: Episodes in the Gitxsan and Witsuwit'en Encounter with Colonial Power

This dissertation examines relationships between colonialism and Indigenous peoples that shape the development of extractive resources in Gitxsan and Witsuwit’en territories in Northwest British Columbia, Canada. I argue colonialism and Indigeneity are co-constituted. Theoretically, this dissertation brings an analysis of colonialism into conversation with Foucauldian understandings of sovereign, disciplinary, and governmental power. I begin by situating the relationship between colonialism and the Gitxsan and Witsuwit’en people historically, then transition to examine in greater detail the contemporary relations unfolding through the courts, traditional knowledge studies, resource governance, and education. I argue the Gitxsan and Witsuwit’en assertions of territory and jurisdiction in the Delgamuukw litigation exposed Indigenous traditions to new forms of colonial discipline and debasement but also induced new regimes of recognition and doctrines of reconciliation. Subsequently, Aboriginal traditional knowledge studies integrated recognition of Indigeneity within the governmental regulation of resource development. However, such recognition has been constrained. Witsuwit’en resistance to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project highlights the ongoing emergence of Indigenous politics in excess of regulatory integration as traditional. This excess is continually reincorporated into colonial governance processes to resecure development, through not only techniques aimed at protecting Indigenous traditions but also training regimes designed to incorporate Indigenous labour within the industrial economy. Through the dissertation, I demonstrate the entanglement of resource development with a continuous cycle moving through moments of Indigenous contestation, colonial response, and subsequent Indigenous challenges. This cycle has relied on the exercise of sovereignty, disciplinarity, and governmentality as distinct yet interpenetrated modalities of colonial power. Colonial sovereignty operates to suspend the political excess of Indigenous political claims, discipline works to enframe Indigeneity, and government minimally regulates to protect and foster Indigenous being. However, on the basis that Indigenous forms of territory and subjectivity remain unreconciled with colonial regimes of discipline and governmentality, Indigenous authorities perpetually advance new jurisdictional claims that problematize those of the colonial sovereign, and reopen spaces of negotiation. I suggest the movement between moments of resistance and reconciliation remains necessarily open and indeterminate. These multiple trajectories of the encounter between Indigenous peoples and colonialism, I argue, continually unfold to constitute the colonial present

Gown Goes to Town: Negotiating Mutually Beneficial Relationships between College Students, City Planners, and a Historically Marginalized African-American Neighborhood

University–community partnerships have long sought to develop interventions to empower historically marginalized community members. However, there is limited critical attention to tensions faced when community engaged courses support urban planning initiatives in communities of color. This article explores how three Florida State University planning classes sought to engage the predominantly African-American Griffin Heights community in Tallahassee, Florida. Historically, African-American communities have been marginalized from the planning process, undermining community trust and constraining city planning capacity to effectively engage and plan with African-American community members. In this context, there are opportunities for planning departments with relationships in the African-American community to facilitate more extensive community engagement and urban design processes that interface with broader city planning programs. However, mediating relationships between the community and the city within the context of applied planning classes presents unique challenges. Although city planners have increasingly adopted the language of community engagement, many processes remain inflexible, bureaucratic, and under resourced. Reliance on inexperienced students to step in as community bridges may also limit the effectiveness of community engagement. Thus, while community engaged courses create opportunities to facilitate community empowerment, they also at times risk perpetuating the disenfranchisement of African-American community members in city planning processes

Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law: Introduction

Environmental harm is of increasing concern to peoples and states all over the world, whether in relation to ensuring access to healthy air, water, food, and sustainable livelihoods, or coping with the diversity of challenges posed by changing climates and ecologies. While international lawyers have focused on crafting solutions to environmental problems, less attention is paid to the disciplinary role in fostering harmful and unsustainable behavioural patterns. Environmental issues are usually relegated to the specialized field of international environmental law. This project explores instead the role of nature in the general discipline, arguing that the natural environment is a determinative factor in shaping international law, and that assumptions about nature lie at the heart of disciplinary concepts such as sovereignty, development, economy, property, and human rights