Unsettling Histories: Representation and Indigenous Creative Art Praxis in Official Indian Residential School Redress

This dissertation offers an investigation of the role of visual strategies, art, and representation in reconciling Indian Residential School history in Canada. This research builds upon theories of biopolitics, settler colonialism, and race to examine the project of redress and reconciliation as nation and identity building strategies engaged in the ongoing structural invasion of settler colonialism. It considers the key policy moments and expressions of the federal government—from RCAP to the IRSSA and subsequent apology—as well as the visual discourse of reconciliation as it works through archival photography, institutional branding, and commissioned works. These articulations are read alongside the creative and critical work of Indigenous artists and knowledge producers working within and outside of hegemonic structures on the topics of Indian Residential School history and redress. In particular the works of Jeff Thomas, Adrian Stimson, Krista Belle Stewart, Christi Belcourt, Luke Marston, Peter Morin, and Carey Newman are discussed in this dissertation. These works must be understood in relationship to the normative discourse of reconciliation as a legitimizing mechanism of settler colonial hegemony. Beyond the binary of cooptation and autonomous resistance, these works demonstrate the complexity of representing Indigeneity: as an ongoing site of settler colonial encounter and simultaneously the forum for the willful refusal of contingency or containment.

Calling for resistance: The political economy of Indian and Canadian call centre industries

Call centres have in the last three decades come to define the interaction between corporations, governments, and other institutions and their respective customers, citizens, and members. From telemarketing to tele-health services, to credit card assistance, and even emergency response systems, call centres function as a nexus mediating technologically enabled labour practices with the commodification of services. Because of the ubiquitous nature of the call centre in post-industrial capitalism, the banality of these interactions often overshadows the nature of work and labour in this now-global sector. Advances in telecommunication technologies and the globalization of management practices designed to oversee and maintain standardized labour processes have made call centre work an international phenomenon. Simultaneously, these developments have dislocated assumptions about the geographic and spatial seat of work in what is defined here as the new international division of knowledge labour. The offshoring and outsourcing of call centre employment, part of the larger information technology and information technology enabled services sectors, has become a growing practice amongst governments and corporations in their attempts at controlling costs. Leading offshore destinations for call centre work, such as Canada and India, emerged as prominent locations for call centre work for these reasons. While incredible advances in technology have permitted the use of distant and “offshore” labour forces, the grander reshaping of an international political economy of communications has allowed for the acceleration of these processes. New and established labour unions have responded to these changes in the global regimes of work by seeking to organize call centre workers. These efforts have been assisted by a range of forces, not least of which is the condition of work itself, but also attempts by global union federations to build a bridge between international unionism and local organizing campaigns in the Global South and Global North. Through an examination of trade union interventions in the call centre industries located in Canada and India, this dissertation contributes to research on post-industrial employment by using political economy as a juncture between development studies, critical communications, and labour studies.