Andrew Woolford

Community Positions, Neoliberal Dispositions: Managing Nonprofit Social Services Within the Bureaucratic Field

In this article, we demonstrate the critical value of Loïc Wacquant’s reworking of Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the bureaucratic field for the study of nonprofit social services. In particular, we suggest that this approach offers a richer understanding of the neoliberalization of nonprofit social service agencies. To illustrate this point, we draw upon interviews with nonprofit social service providers in Winnipeg, Manitoba, examining the field competition between welfare and neoliberal orientations to social service practice, as nonprofit agency managers seek to adapt to the shifting conditions of the bureaucratic field. Building upon Wacquant’s analysis, we argue that the welfare dispositions presented in our interviews are inadequate to protect the social services from neoliberal restructuring. Instead, we present the reflexive practices articulated by Indigenous social service agencies as a model for a counter-transposition that could offer a more powerful challenge to the neoliberalization of the bureaucratic field.

Neoliberal restructuring, limited autonomy, and relational distance in Manitoba’s nonprofit field

This article draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu to describe the nonprofit field. We highlight the ways in which the neoliberal restructuring of the nonprofit field has introduced new market conditions and valuational standards that have compelled social service providers within this field to adapt to or resist its structural transformation. Our study is focused on social service providing nonprofit agencies in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where the limited autonomy of the nonprofit field has facilitated neoliberal domination in the form of new technologies of management and accountability that threaten to create relational distance between social service providers and service users.

The limits of justice: Certainty, affirmative repair, and aboriginality

In recent years, the world has witnessed a surge in reparations claims made by victim groups seeking recompense for their suffering.1 Inspired by the success of Jewish groups, who won reparations from Germany for crimes committed during World War Two (see Grossman 1954; Zweig 1987; Balabkins 1993), these new collective actors are defining the modern ‘reparations field’ (Torpey 2003) through their demands for truth, retribution, reconciliation, restitution, and monetary compensation. These reparative demands would seem an appropriate response to an ‘age of genocide’ (Smith 1987; Alvarez 2001; Power 2002) that roughly coincides with the last century; however, reparations have their uses and misuses. Reparations, in and of themselves, have no moral content; they are inscribed with this content through the actions of those who participate in these ameliorative rituals. In their ideal expression, reparations promote tolerance, sharing, harmony, and communication, and direct former antagonists toward the goals of hope, justice and peace. But after an extended period of mass violence, these goals are, surely, to borrow from Derrida (1992, 2001), an ‘experience of the impossible.’ There is no absolute closure to the trauma and suffering, and there is no definite point from which a society can move forward into a collective future. Thus, the infinite and indeterminate nature of these goals often leads governments to seek a political means by which they attempt to foster a more immediate ‘certainty’ through the process of repair. This ‘certainty’ is viewed as a matter of pragmatic necessity since ‘uncertainty’ in many cases could spell the re-emergence of violence. In this sense, certainty is a valid reparative objective since transitional societies will only hold tenuously together without a modicum of stability and solidarity.2 However, this quest for certainty can take on a sinister character when the reparative mechanism is misused as a means to effect the neoliberal self-regulation of the victim population in an attempt to shape them to better fit the contours of the dominant social order. In this paper, I construct an ideal-typical distinction between what I term ‘reparations as certainty-making’ and ‘reparations as justice-making.’ Briefly, the former refers to political negotiations designed to bring an expedient and practical harmony to a history of conflict and brutality, while the latter describes an ongoing reconciliatory process through which tolerance, trust, and reconciliation are gradually developed. Balancing the two forms of reparation is a difficult, but often necessary task. Without certainty-making, continuing struggles are likely to impede the needed reconciliatory work. But without justice-making, the certainty achieved risks becoming nothing more than a temporary respite from conflict. The difficulty of balancing these two forms of repair can result in a privileging of either certainty-making or justice-making. In this regard, I highlight a disingenuous form of certainty-making, ‘affirmative repair’ (adapted from Fraser 1997) that threatens to overdetermine the process of justice-making. With affirmative repair the reparative process is used

Policing (by) the urban brand: defining order in Winnipeg's Exchange District

In this paper, we examine the ways in which the urban brand is policed in an attempt to ensure that the Exchange District business improvement zone in Winnipeg, Manitoba maintains a stable and safe image. In doing so, we pay particular attention to the use of security and beautification services as well as environmental design in the production of perceptions of safety. In addition, we suggest that the brand itself is a source of policing, since it evokes a regulatory ideal or ‘definition of order’ that facilitates coordination of the institutions, auspices and agents engaged in the co-production of the brand and its boundaries.

Disrupting the informal–formal justice complex: on the transformative potential of civil mediation, restorative justice and reparations politics

Among the many ‘informal’ conflict resolution practices currently available within the vast justice market, three stand out: civil mediation, restorative justice and reparations politics. These, in our estimation, are among the most widely discussed and broadly practiced new justice forms within the juridical field. In our recent work, we have sought to identify commonalities among these three ideal types of ‘informal reckoning’, as well as to evaluate their potential to achieve a transformative justice, partly through the medium of change‐oriented informal justice counterpublics that move beyond the contemporary confluence of social and legal domination and aspire to create new possibilities for justice that uproot class, race and gender‐based inequities.

Nodal repair and networks of destruction: residential schools, colonial genocide, and redress in Canada

This article asserts that a deeper understanding of colonial genocide is a necessary basis for recent attempts to redress the harms caused by Canadian residential schools through the processes prescribed by the Indian Residential School Settlement Act. To advance such an understanding, I conceptualize residential schools as a crucial node in a genocidal ‘network of destruction’. Moreover, I explore examples drawn from oral statements about and memoir-based depictions of residential schooling in the province of Manitoba to highlight localized ways in which residential schools were experienced by Indigenous persons in a manner that can be described as genocidal. In conclusion, I draw attention to how Canadian redress mechanisms must do more than itemize and individualize colonial harms – these mechanisms must tackle the entrenched and still operative ‘outcome generating system’ that produced residential schooling harms in the first place.

Canada and colonial genocide

This introductory article offers an overview of debates about genocide and settler colonialism in Canada. The argument is presented that Canada, although a marginal case to genocide studies, provides important insights and challenging questions, particularly with respect to the need to decolonize the field of genocide studies.

Digitized Suffering, Actual Healing: Empathy, Reconciliation, and Redress Through a Virtual Indian Residential School

Our chapter provides an overview and comparison of the collective experience of the many different kinds of suffering experienced in both Canadian and American Indigenous boarding schools. We are especially concerned with explaining how this suffering diminished important forms of social and cultural capital within Indigenous communities in a way we argue is consistent with Raphael Lemkin’s conceptualization of genocide. We specify and critically assess the ways in which Canadians have been working to acknowledge IRS harms, most especially through a public apology and the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA), the terms of which specified the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). With reference to testimony given by residential school Survivors before the TRC on the topic of reconciliation, we will detail some of the difficulties inherent in attempts to alleviate suffering in the aftermath of the IRS system. This testimony expresses concerns about the limited potential of established reconciliatory mechanisms to redress the losses of social and cultural capital resulting from Indigenous peoples’ experiences of these schools. We conclude by reflecting on the possibilities for advancing reconciliation afforded by Embodying Empathy, a critical and creative collaboration linking scholars, IRS Survivors, and technologists in an attempt to construct a virtually immersive IRS “storyworld.”

Genocidal carcerality and Indian residential schools in Canada

This paper contributes to the criminology of genocide through examination of settler colonial destruction within the broader context of what we term ‘genocidal carcerality’. We employ this term to examine the ways in which space is implicated in the physical, biological, and cultural destruction of group life. In this paper, our purpose is not to create a typology of genocidal carcerality, but rather to demonstrate the multiplicity of spatial strategies at work within any genocidal context, with specific focus on Indian Residential Schools. In so doing, we critique attempts to reduce genocidal carcerality to a single spatial form, such as the camp. We illustrate our main points through a case study of the Fort Alexander Indian Residential School in Manitoba, Canada.

Obstacles and momentum on the path to post-genocide and mass atrocity reparations: A comparative analysis, 1945–2010:

In contemporary human rights politics, much international effort is invested in securing reparative settlements in the aftermath of genocide and mass atrocities. This article details a broad comparative research project in which we seek to map the respective paths of 47 post-genocide and mass atrocity reparations claims. Based on the findings of this study, using a mixed-methods approach, we highlight some potential obstacles within claims processes and demonstrate the importance of resource mobilization for reparative success. In particular, this article advances sociological understanding of the importance of momentum in resource mobilization as a means of carrying a reparations movement toward successful transitional justice outcomes.