Leslie G. Roman

States of Insecurity: Cold War memory, “global citizenship” and its discontents

This article situates the dominant discourses of “global citizenship” employed in North American universities to internationalize the curricula, drawing in part on evidence from one Pacific northwestern Canadian university in the post-September-11 context of recent restrictive immigration policies, anti-terrorist measures and evocative Cold War memories. Far from weakening the Canadian nation-state or jettisoning neoliberalism, it argues that authoritarian post-Fordism constitutes a supra-juridical state that offers fewer social services but governs with more entrepreneurship through its globalization, immigration and “national security” policies. The article shows how the post-September-11 changes to Canadas immigration and refugee legislation from 1978 to 2001, write evocative fears about “terrorists” and “invading immigrants” on the national body politic. These changes provide literal and metaphorical transnational, economic and socio-legal mobility with substantive and specific human rights to those prospective immigrants deemed “highly skilled global citizens”. Yet, such policy efforts and legislation also reproduce the exclusions and differential hierarchies of gendered, classed, ableist and racialized notions of skill, flexible work and vulnerable or unobtuinuble citizenship for those it deems “non-immigrants”, migrants or non-citizens. The conclusion asks: Is “global citizenship” an oxymoronic slogan; a well-meaning but naïve equation of transnational mobility or “belonging” with formal legal substantive citizenship and human rights; or an opportunity to claim democratic praxis through a decolonized curricular, pedagogical and educational policy?

No time for nostalgia!: asylum‐making, medicalized colonialism in British Columbia (1859–97) and artistic praxis for social transformation

This article asks: How have disability, indigenous arts and cultural praxis transformed and challenged the historical sociological archival research into relationships among asylum‐making, medicalized colonialism and eugenics in the Woodlands School, formerly the Victoria Lunatic Asylum, the Provincial Asylum for the Insane in Victoria, BC 1859–72 and the Public Hospital for the Insane, (herein, PHI) and most recently, the Woodlands School in New Westminster, British Columbia (1878–1996)? How can the experiences of ‘patients’ often silenced or suppressed in archival historical sociology and in official institutional records be re‐claimed through the textual analysis of official documents, the arts, oral history, and community engagement? The article unearths the unexplored dimensions of medicalized colonialism in the first critical shift – from 1859–97 – from a minimal juridical state in which magistrates and judges determined the processes of commitment to one in which medical authorities as colonial administrators had greater control over PHI than in previous years. Through a textual analysis of clinical case records, patient files, legislation, colonial medical administrators’ correspondence, and the records of the first Royal Commission Public Inquiry in 1894 into the abuses and deaths of patients at PHI, the research reveals the fissures within the discourses of colonial medical administrators and staff within the emerging medical‐juridical apparatus. Gaps, silences, or truths untold in the official records are then counter‐posed with insights gleaned from the art of First Nations, Secwepemc Tania Willard, oral historical work with Qayayt First Nations, Rhonda Larabee, on whose grandfather’s land the Woodlands School was built, key reports from the independent community living, de‐institutionalization, self‐advocacy movements, confirming the systemic physical, emotional, and sexual abuses that went on at Woodlands, as well as with the testimonial narratives of the self‐advocate survivors of Woodlands in their documentary film, From the Inside/Out! Analyzed relationally, these sources provide a richer understanding of the links between the disturbing past of PHI and the present legal struggles pertaining to Woodlands. Disability and indigenous studies are shown to challenge and transform ableist normalizing medicalized colonialism and its pastoral educational sociology. The article concludes that no time is a time for nostalgia about Woodlands or such related total institutions.

This Earthly World: Edward Said, the praxis of secular humanisms and situated cosmopolitanisms

This essay unearths the educational and socio-political implications of Edward W. Saids work for our understanding of what a secular humanism might mean in the highly charged atmosphere of the post-Cold War and September 11 discourses that have pervaded the USA and, to varying degrees, other parts of the world. It asks what it means to move beyond both corporate and neo-liberal notions of “global citizenship” into more robust communities of affiliation, dialogue, and democratic participation? How does Edward Saids work inform the praxis of democratic and critical secular humanism? Learning to move contrapuntally out of place, beyond narrowing categorical identity politics that divide humanity into the “us” and the “them,” the paper shows both what is promising and worth challenging as educators, scholars, and intellectuals of this “earthly world.”

The Unruly Salon: Unfasten Your Seatbelts, Take No Prisoners, Make No Apologies!.

This article examines the multi‐faceted contributions of disability studies including the work of artists and scholars inspired by The Unruly Salon, a disability arts, culture and scholarship series held at Green College, the University of British Columbia January–March 2008 to substantive citizenship and cultural politics. The article examines various tropes of normalcy through the new epistemological and methodological lenses and resources posed by disability studies projects. It shows how social, structural, cultural and material barriers construct some as ‘disabled’ and others as non‐disabled and puts forward ways to connect social models and human rights’ frameworks with a cultural politics of situated disability narratives that have the power to perform back to such normalizing regimes through disability arts, culture and scholarship. In so doing, the article demonstrates how disability cultural politics and scholarship lay claim to specific transformative counter‐publics. Scholars in disability studies from the Unruly Salon marshal new and transformative forms of social citizenship by, with, and for disabled people to create generative and innovative public discourses about disability as difference. Qualitative research is challenged to think anew its methodologies and epistemologies in light of the powerful difference that disability variously makes.

Disability arts and culture as public pedagogy

This article considers the implications of a disability arts, culture and scholarship series ‘The Unruly Salon’, undertaken at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver in Canada, which ran from January to March 2008. It asks how and whether the encounter of this Series with its diverse audiences makes a lasting contribution to the reshaping of education at the University of British Columbia in terms of curriculum, pedagogy, place, space and culture. It argues that The Unruly Salon Series is but a cornerstone in the groundwork for the ‘global citizenship’ to which the University’s Trek 2010 policy and mission statement aspire. The question is not only: what have the disabled and non‐disabled participants of this timely and creative series learned from about working within the ‘fragile spaces between impairment and disability’?, but also the article asks: how will Canada’s third largest public university learn so as to transform its intellectual, social culture and built environment for prospective and existing students, faculty and staff with disabilities? The article concludes that such social change advantages the impaired and non‐disabled alike.

Conditions, contexts, and controversies of truth-making: Rigoberta Menchú and the perils of everyday witnessing and testimonial work

Knowledge is not the product of solitary Cartesian consciousness, nor is it contained within a discursive field. Sense – meaning – truth – and falsehood – are always local achievements of people whose coordinated and coordinating activities bring about the connectedness of statements about the world that they index at that time, in that place, and among those who participate in the social act, whether present to one another or not. (Smith, 1999, p. 126–127)

Making and Moving Publics: Stuart Hall's Projects, Maximal Selves and Education.

An extraordinary educator and public intellectual, Stuart Halls career as a scholar, activist, teacher and mentor has touched almost every field in the social sciences and humanities. Paradoxically, education rarely claims him as an educator. Stuart Halls refusal to see publics as given, fixed or settled matters with clear or final demarcations and boundaries allowed him to move pedagogically and politically between and among different constituencies and sites of formal and non-formal education, policy and praxis, arts’ groups and social theorizing in larger national and transnational spaces as places for public thinking, teaching publics and, thus, for making what I will call ‘maximal selves’. Indeed, his praxis articulated Michael Warners queering of our theoretical understandings of publics and counter-publics, addressing and registering affectively and effectively with variously hyphenated communities. I will show how his formation as an intellectual worked with uncomfortable diasporic differences of his own ‘minimal selves’ to suture together alliances with specific marginalized groups as part of his extraordinary commitment to education as public thinking and teaching publicly. It is only until we understand him as an extraordinary educator that our tasks and inheritance from Halls varied projects become appreciable.

Go figure! Public pedagogies, invisible impairments and the performative paradoxes of visibility as veracity

This article asks how public pedagogical texts mobilise particular meanings about whose bodies/minds matter or figure? How do they articulate particular affective investments, desires, and values related to our everyday understanding of invisible and visible impairments, and the ways in which discourses of ‘normalcy’ are taught? The author examines three examples of public pedagogy or media campaigns to educate the public about particular invisible impairments experienced predominantly by women. It theorises how women with invisible impairments are seen to lack veracity in Western visual cultures that both equate and privilege the visible with truthfulness and authenticity. The paper considers, after Agamben, the ‘zones of exception’ created by the in/visible hierarchy for disability rights claims and human rights struggles for women with invisible impairments.

Prelude and temptation: Arresting a vitriolic and defamatory controversy

Knowledge is not the product of solitary Cartesian consciousness, nor is it contained within a discursive field. Sense – meaning – truth – and falsehood – are always local achievements of people whose coordinated and coordinating activities bring about the connectedness of statements about the world that they index at that time, in that place, and among those who participate in the social act, whether present to one another or not. (Smith, 1999, p. 127)

Diasporic reasoning, affect, memory and cultural politics: An interview with Avtar Brah

This interview explores the intellectual contours of Stuart Halls work through the insights of Professor Avtar Brah, Emerita, Birkbeck College, whose feminist post-colonial voice has shaped generations of scholarship on diaspora thinking, achieving public intellectual status. Her Cartographies of Diaspora (1996) received international acclaim, challenging nationalist feminisms to engage diasporic cultural politics. The longest standing member of the Feminist Review editorial collective, Brahs intertwining of feminist theorisation with transformative pedagogies is well known. It is rare that feminists of colour or diasporic feminists are celebrated as ‘public intellectuals’, even when they are exceptionally accomplished in multiple spheres of intellectual life. Thus, we have chosen to interview Professor Avtar Brah, whose transnationally recognised work both owes a debt to and extends Halls work in some surprising directions. Our interview explores some questions together as a ‘we’ and others individually to respect and highlight our own respective theoretical, socio-political and transnational experiences. This approach to interviewing acknowledges our different voices, as well as our affinities through this collaboration.