Dispossessing bare life: Towards a theoretical framework for examining power relations through economic development at the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa

In the past twenty years an increasing number of Global South nations have vied for the rights to host prestigious and expensive sport mega events. This trend requires significant reflection given the enormous economic costs of these events, which often produce little capital gain for the host nation (Whitson & Horne, 2006). Furthermore, sport mega events are often utilized for their symbolic capital (Belanger, 2009), which sometimes manifests through forcing people from their land for the sake of “beautification” (Davis, 2006). In this project, then, I asked how technologies of power were utilized by FIFA, corporate stakeholders, and the South African government to control people who were marginal to, or impeded the success of, the World Cup in Nelspruit, South Africa. This project consisted of two parts: the first involved constructing a theoretical framework for better understanding power as it operates through sport mega events in general. To this end I employed Marxian notions of the ordering of physical space, Foucauldian conceptions of sovereignty and governmentality, and Agamben’s (1998) state of exception to determine how particular bodies are constituted and controlled through sport mega events. In the second part, I applied this theoretical framework to the events in South Africa to better elucidate how people became displaced and killed because of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. I used South African popular news and documentaries as empirical evidence and conducted a discursive analysis of said news media. Through this coverage it became apparent that the mega event created the conditions in which new forms of rogue sovereign partnerships could arise through a historically and spatially contingent process of capitalism. The rogue sovereigns’ para-juridico-political orders, the discourses and practices of accumulation by dispossession as a tactic and effect of govermentality, and other historical non-capital subjectivities such as racial identity, all contributed to constituting Agamben’s state of exception in which people could be displaced, killed or left to die in the events surrounding the World Cup.

Finding Common Ground: A Critical Review of Land Use and Resource Management Policies in Ontario, Canada and their Intersection with First Nations

This article provides an in-depth analysis of selective land use and resource management policies in the Province of Ontario, Canada. It examines their relative capacity to recognize the rights of First Nations and Aboriginal peoples and their treaty rights, as well as their embodiment of past Crown–First Nations relationships. An analytical framework was developed to evaluate the manifest and latent content of 337 provincial texts, including 32 provincial acts, 269 regulatory documents, 16 policy statements, and 5 provincial plans. This comprehensive document analysis classified and assessed how current provincial policies address First Nation issues and identified common trends and areas of improvement. The authors conclude that there is an immediate need for guidance on how provincial authorities can improve policy to make relationship-building a priority to enhance and sustain relationships between First Nations and other jurisdictions.

Need To Be Adored

Faced with a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, I began with the objective of discovering methods for creating art that were still accessible to me. Along the way, I encountered others who had travelled this road before me. Their experiences led me to examine, not only my art, but also my political orientations, my love obligations and my transitioning self. In my varied art pieces, I conjure something from diverse sources and different worldviews, including contemporary feminist performance art and disability cultural theory. My thesis is a project. I make things: puppets, videos and performances, which included the exhibition, Need to be Adored (2014), staged in the digital media lab of the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. The exhibition introduced thirteen of my puppets and a thirty-two-minute looped video. Following the exhibition, I put the puppets away and spent two years reading. Finally, taking my inspiration from Carolyn Ellis’s The Autoethnographic I (Ellis 2004), I turned my processes into words. I wrote out my experiences. I created an alternative text of my identity from an able-bodied cis-identified woman into a disabled trans-feminist artist academic. The writing required an uncomfortably intimate examination of my life. Nothing less than complete honesty would allow me to understand my new location. The resulting text is a lyrical and sometimes whimsical flow of consciousness that invites the reader to imagine what it might be like to engage in such a candid review of everything one holds close to one’s heart. Contained within are all my identities. In this text I let some out. This is a story of unsettling. I am working on my art practices, creating a cast of characters from cloth. Puppets. El becomes the exulted main character of a fictional accounting. She uncovers her queer roots and begins to see that she is at the centre of a very strange geography. Her desire to make film is revealed as she re-remembers her childhood through a disability lens.

Evaluation of a ToF Camera for Remote Surveying of Underground Cavities Excavated by Jet Boring

Cigar Lake is a high-grade uranium deposit, located in northern Saskatchewan, Canada. In order to extract the uranium ore remotely, thus ensuring minimal radiation dose to workers and also to access the ore from stable ground, the Jet Boring System (JBS) was developed by Cameco Corporation. This system uses a high-powered water jet to remotely excavate cavities. Survey data is required to determine the final shape, volume, and location of the cavity for mine planning purposes and construction. This paper provides an overview of the challenges involved in remotely surveying a JBS-mined cavity and studies the potential use of a time-of-flight (ToF) camera for remote cavity surveying. It reports on data collected and analyzed from inside an experimental environment as well as on real data acquired on site from the Cigar Lake and Rabbit Lake mines.