Reimagining Cooperative Research Futures

1
Re-imagining Co-operative Research Futures

• Dr. Isobel M. Findlay
• Mapping Co-operative Studies in the New
  Millennium
• University of Victoria, May 2003

2
Situating Knowledge

• Theory is always a (necessary) detour on the way
  to something more important.--Hall, 1991
• Communication is a symbolic process whereby
  reality is produced, maintained, repaired, and
  transformed. . . . Communication . . . Produces
  the social bonds . . . That tie men sic
  together and make associated life
  possible.Carey, 1992
• The fundamental issue is the identity of the
  decision-maker. . . . the courts of the
  colonizer have assumed the authority to define
  the nature and meaning of Aboriginal cultures.
• R Barsh and J Henderson, 1997 1102

3
Re-imagining Co-operative Research Futures

• Researching back (Smith, 1999)
• Enriching discursive practice
• Investing in revisionary theory and history
• Including diverse voices
• Adding values

4
Key Operating Assumptions

• Research is neither natural nor neutral.
• Meanings and identities are not out there waiting
  to be discovered but are actively produced and
  reproduced.
• Constructions of cultural gaps between
  academics and activists, between theory and
  practice, between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal
  peoples are products of dominant institutions and
  discourses.
• Common sense views operate as barriers to
  productive relations and change.

5
Revisiting Co-operation

• Co-operation as theme and theory
• Co-operation as a practice with a history
• Co-operation as agent and object of decolonizing
• Co-operative intellectual as change agent
• Co-operation as decolonizing a colonial legacy
  that has taught us how to value difference, how
  to fragment, how to reproduce hierarchy

6
Globalization

• justificatory myth acting as the main weapon
  in the battles against the gains of the welfare
  state and neo-liberalisms very smart and very
  modern repackaging of the oldest ideas of the
  oldest capitalists while dismissing progressive
  thought and action as archaicBourdieu, 1998
• Dangers of becoming another name for aggravated
  inequality--Paul Martin
• Growing disparity in social health indicators
  between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal populations
  in Canada.

7
Neo-liberalism and neo-colonialism

• Obliterating the public in the public good
• new individualism Bill Turner, 2002
• Corporate appropriations of discourses of
  cooperation and diversity
• Recuperation of empire in mainstream
  historiographyCannadine, Ornamentalism, 2001
  Niall Ferguson, Empire, 2003 Linda Colley,
  Captives, 2002
• First Nations Governance Act and government
  policy of wilful forgetting of foundational
  irrationalities of colonial dispossession

8
On Postmodern Impossibility

• Our current ideologies . . . use expert argument
  to turn almost any form of injustice into an
  inevitability.J. R. Saul, 1994
• The Cult of Impotence Selling the Myth of
  Powerlessness in the Global Economy.McQuaig,1998
• The cult of transgression without risk leading
  to cynicism as one of the Fine Arts.Bourdieu,
  1998

9
Postcolonialism

• expands contexts/histories
• unpacks oppressive universals
• commits to agency, accountability,
  social/political action
• recenters marginalized knowledge
• revalues postcolonial subject (not as object of
  expert or imperial gaze)

10
On Re-imagining Possibilities

• Current era as a site of rupture of old
  discursive regimes and hence a site of
  possibilitiesMartin Nakata, 2000
• Fences and virtual fences Have always been part
  of capitalism windows of dissent mean activists
  take down the first fenceson the streets and in
  their mindsKlein, 2002

11
Ovide Mercredi, May 2003

• Respond to the challenge to make universities
  relevant to his community.
• Reconsider what parliamentary democracy has meant
  for Aboriginal peoples in Canada.
• Move from knowledge products and self-centred
  champions of knowledge to ways of knowing.
• The world of interdependency is here to stay.

12
Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, May 2003

• Value the difference that difference makes.
• Remove the barriers to credibility and capacity.
• Listen to the traumatized peoples and their
  stories.
• Disrupt the neat categories of justice.

13
Pierre Bourdieu, 1998

• Collective, critical, and committed intellectuals
  winning back democracy from technocracy by
  unpacking economic and other necessities and
  hence neutralizing the effects of forbidding
  fatalism.
• a new and critical internationalism and an
  economics of happiness to counter cruder
  cost-benefit analyses.
• Cooperatives as institutions capable of
  obstructing the logic of the pure market.

14
Hardt and Negri, 2000

• Cooperation as a means of organizing political
  space against Empire in its currently globalizing
  character.
• Militants resist imperial command in a creative
  way. In other words, resistance is linked
  immediately with a constitutive investment in a
  biopolitical realm and to the formation of
  cooperative apparatuses of production and
  community.

15
Indigenous Humanities

• a strategic labelling of actively produced and
  respectfully disseminated knowledges
• unapologetically hybrid, collaborative, and
  interdisciplinary
• catachresis, category mistake, or misnaming such
  as Gayatri Spivak welcomes as the limit of
  authority and the place of progressive change

16
Indigenous Humanities

• unpacks the complicity of the traditional
  humanities in history of colonialism
• rereads treaties, cultural, legal, and historical
  texts
• revalues Aboriginal knowledge and heritage
• makes inquiry more relational, sociable, modest

17
Indigenous Humanities

• Resists the individualizing, personalizing, and
  feminizing of cultural sensitivity training
• Refuses to reproduce colonial categories of
  identity
• Retells the histories of colonialism and roles of
  law, religion, and education in producing and
  reproducing inequities
• uses multiple strategies in multiple sites

18
David Newhouse, 2002

• Deconstruct the view that everything modern -
  capitalism, markets, individuals as free and
  equal consumers - will always and everywhere
  bring progress while everything traditional
  brings backwardness.
• Build on Aboriginal understandings of progress,
  society, the economy, and the relationship of the
  individual to the collective.

19
Wanda Wuttunee, 2002

• We can all be economic warriors.
• Think about the costs of relying on mainstream
  business only.
• Think of the children when making economic
  decisions.
• Understand our history, embrace all of our
  strengths, move to stronger relationships with
  our neighbours.
• Give the gifts of hope, strength and love.

20
James (Sakej) Youngblood Henderson, 2002

• Understand split-head society
• Aboriginal soul and Eurocentric head
• Restructure and rethink Canada and reinvent the
  constitution
• Rediscover and unleash economic potential of
  treaty economy
• Build Aboriginal think tanks

21
Marie Battiste, 2002

• We are all marinated in Eurocentrism
• Education is foundation of transforming agenda
• RCAP is a postcolonial agenda
• The postcolonial is an act of hope
• rethink boundaries and retell stories
• Aboriginal regulatory frameworks and respectful
  dialogue are critical
• Imagine, dream, create, celebrate together

22
From Many Peoples, Strength

• To neglect the past is to postpone the future
  (Ndebele, 1994).
• Disinterested expertise repeats colonialisms
  perverse logic that distorts, disfigures, and
  destroys the past of oppressed peoples (Fanon,
  1968)

23
Power of Education/Communication

• RCAP (1996) stressed the central role of
  communications in building community cohesiveness
  within Aboriginal nations and fostering
  relationships between cultures. . . .
  Communication is much more than a cultural glue .
  . . . We actually construct who we are ( Vol. 3
  620-21)

24
Transforming/Sharing Tools

• Recovering Canada with John Borrows and his
  Declaration of Interdependence
• Reframing the terms of intercultural relations
• Renewing with Georges Erasmus relationship
  between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in
  Canada
• From aboriginal rights to relationship between
  peoples
• From crying needs to vigorous capacity
• From individual citizenship to nations within the
  nation state

25
From Many Peoples, Strength

• Rebuilding community means sharing the
  definitional power (Monture-Angus, 1995).
• Rewriting discourses and curricula remakes
  meanings and relationships.
• Re-imagining co-operative research futures takes
  critical engagement, commitment, and coalition.