Cultural Politics of Resilience in Kingston, Jamaica

Recently, resilience has become a catchall solution for some of the world’s most pressing ecological, economic and social problems. This dissertation analyzes the cultural politics of resilience in Kingston, Jamaica by examining them through their purported universal principles of adaptation and flexibility. On the one hand, mainstream development regimes conceptualize resilience as a necessary and positive attribute of economies, societies and cultures if we are to survive any number of disasters or disturbances. Therefore, in Jamaican cultural and development policy resilience is championed as both a means and an end of development. On the other hand, critics of resilience see the new rollout of resilience projects as deepening neoliberalism, capitalism and new forms of governmentality because resilience projects provide the terrain for new forms of securitization and surveillance practices. These scholars argue that resilience often forecloses the possibilities to resist that which threatens us. However, rather than dismissing resilience as solely a sign of domination and governmentality, this dissertation argues that resilience must be understood as much more ambiguous and complex, rather than within binaries such as subversion vs. neoliberal and resistance vs. resilience. Overly simplistic dualities of this nature have been the dominant approach in the scholarship thus far. This dissertation provides a close analysis of resilience in both multilateral and Jamaican government policy documents, while exploring the historical and contemporary production of resilience in the lives of marginalized populations. Through three sites within Kingston, Jamaica—namely dancehall and street dances, WMW-Jamaica and the activist platform SO((U))L HQ—this dissertation demonstrates that “resilience” is best understood as an ambiguous site of power negotiations, social reproduction and survival in Jamaica today. It is often precisely this ambiguous power of ordinary resilience that is capitalized on and exploited to the detriment of vulnerable groups. At once demonstrating creative negotiation and reproduction of colonial capitalist social relations within the realms of NGO, activist work and cultural production, this dissertation demonstrates the complexity of resilience. Ultimately, this dissertation draws attention to the importance of studying spaces of cultural production in order to understand the power and limits of contemporary policy discourses and political economy. 

#DressCodePM & Re-Framing The Niqab: News Sources, Hashtag Activism, and Media Representation

This thesis originates from my interest in exploring how minorities are using social media to talk back to mainstream media. This study examines whether hashtags that trend on Twitter may impact how news stories related to minorities are covered in Canadian media. The Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper stated the niqab was “rooted in a culture that is anti-women” on 10 March 2015. The next day #DressCodePM trended in response to the PM’s niqab remarks. Using network gatekeeping theory, this study examines the types of sources quoted in the media stories published on 10 and 11 March 2015. The study’s goal is to explore whether using tweet quotes leads to the representation of a more diverse range of news sources. The study compares the types of sources quoted in stories that covered Harper’s comments without mentioning #DressCodePM versus stories that mention #DressCodePM. This study also uses Tuen A. van Dijk’s methodology of asking “who is speaking, how often and how prominently?” in order to examine whose voices have been privileged and whose voices have been marginalized in covering the niqab in Canadian media from the 1970s and until the days following the PM’s remarks. Network gatekeeping theory is applied in this study to assess whether the gated gained more power after #DressCodePM trended. The case study’s findings indicates that Caucasian male politicians were predominantly used as news sources in covering stories related to the niqab for the past 38 years in the Globe and Mail. The sourcing pattern of favouring politicians continued in Canadian print and online media on 10 March 2015 following Harper’s niqab comments. However, ordinary Canadian women, including Muslim women, were used more often than politicians as news sources in the stories about #DressCodePM that were published on 11 March 2015. The gated media users were able to gain power and attract Canadian Media’s attention by widely spreading #DressCodePM. This study draws attention to the lack of diversity of sources used in Canadian political news stories, yet this study also shows it is possible for the gated media users to amplify their voices through hashtag activism.

Notes on a Symposium: Undisciplined 2015

This publication is a culmination of articles and reviews submitted by Queen's University students in response to the Cultural Studies Graduate Symposium, Undisciplined 2015.

Performing Pedagogies and Exploring Embodied Knowledge

Performing Pedagogies was a week-long performance and exhibition series I organized that took place in Kingston, Ontario between March 15th - March 20th 2016. The motivation for this project came from a desire to explore performative modes of experiencing critical, embodied knowledge. The series featured five performances, a long distance collaboration between thirty-one Queen’s undergraduate students and a Vancouver artist-run free school (The School for Eventual Vacancy), a subsequent exhibition, a panel discussion, and a radical performance pedagogy workshop led by co-artistic director of the international performance art troupe, La Pocha Nostra. Artists featured included Golboo Amani, Basil AlZeri, Caitlin Chaisson, Justin Langlois, Saul Garcia-Lopez, Francisco-Fernando Granados, and Andrew Rabyniuk. By curating examples of performance art that variously incorporated embodied pedagogical interventions, I examined the processes of performance as pedagogy. Performing Pedagogies explored interventions into contemporary contours of neoliberal education paradigms through embodied encounters—fostering conversations about the meanings and limitations of knowledge dissemination and education today and posing questions about possibilities for radical pedagogies, embodied knowledge, and counter curricula.