Climate Justice Symposium 2023

The 2021-2022 City of Vancouver Climate Equity Working Group (CEWG) collaboratively put forward this Climate Justice Charter to City of Vancouver staff to guide their actions in response to the climate crisis.

Lists characteristics of white supremacy culture that commonly show up in organizations. The characteristics include perfectionism, concentration of power, right to comfort, individualism, and progress is bigger/more.

"This chapter describes the potlatch as a methodology to engage culturally diverse classrooms in liberation curriculum. The Potlach is a high-context, community-based, participatory method offering three intra/interpersonal reflexive waypoints teachers can use when designing and delivering transformative learning."--chapter summary

Though there is no standard model or practice for what decolonizing research methodology looks like, there are ongoing scholarly conversations about theoretical foundations, principal components, and practical applications. However, as qualitative researchers, we think it is important to provide tangible ways to incorporate decolonial learning into our research methodology and overall practice. In this paper, we draw on theories of decolonization and exemplars from the literature to propose four practices that can be used by qualitative researchers: (1) exercising critical reflexivity, (2) reciprocity and respect for self-determination, (3) embracing “Other(ed)” ways of knowing, and (4) embodying a transformative praxis. At this moment of our historical trajectory, it is a moral imperative to embrace decolonizing approaches when working with populations oppressed by colonial legacies.

The way that we as researchers view and interpret our social worlds is impacted by where, when, and how we are socially located and in what society. The position from which we see the world around us impacts our research interests, how we approach the research and participants, the questions we ask, and how we interpret the data. In this article, we argue that it is not a straightforward or easy task to conceptualize and practice positionality. We have developed a Social Identity Map that researchers can use to explicitly identify and reflect on their social identity to address the difficulty that many novice critical qualitative researchers experience when trying to conceptualize their social identities and positionality. The Social Identity Map is not meant to be used as a rigid tool but rather as a flexible starting point to guide researchers to reflect and be reflexive about their social location. The map involves three tiers: the identification of social identities (Tier 1), how these positions impact our life (Tier 2), and details that may be tied to the particularities of our social identity (Tier 3). With the use of this map as a guide, we aim for researchers to be able to better identify and understand their social locations and how they may pose challenges and aspects of ease within the qualitative research process. Being explicit about our social identities allows us (as researchers) to produce reflexive research and give our readers the tools to recognize how we produced the data. Being reflexive about our social identities, particularly in comparison to the social position of our participants, helps us better understand the power relations imbued in our research, further providing an opportunity to be reflexive about how to address this in a responsible and respectful way.

This paper reports on the findings from a series of twenty in-depth, semi-structured interviews that explored how a group of leading Canadian health researchers who are recognized for their excellence in community-engaged Indigenous health research envision enacting an anti-colonial research agenda and the inherent tensions of doing so in institutional settings. Interview transcripts were thematically analyzed in order to explore how the different places that shape communityengaged scholarship (Community spaces, Offices of Research Ethics, and Office of Finance and Administration) 1) produce different, often conflicting understandings of responsibility; 2) how different spaces constrain and shape agency in terms of enacting forms of responsibility in research, and; 3) the role that settler subjectivities have in shaping acts of interpretation that are productive of institutionally mediated forms of responsibility. We organize themes of responsibility, relational ethics, and acts of refusal around the locales through which they are produced and mediated in order to display narratives relating to each site. Specifically, we highlight how relationally negotiated formulations of ethical responsibility, which occur between Indigenous community partners and researchers, can be circumscribed or marginalized by existing institutional structures. By making visible the ways in which conflicting responsibilities emerge and must be negotiated in working toward anti-colonial research relationships, our findings contribute to ongoing conversations regarding Indigenous-settler alliances in health research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the Five Indigenous Design Paradigms, a decolonial and unsettling design framework that guides both students and instructors to work through an Indigenous lens. Topics covered include Indigenous societies' relationships to land and place, engaging with one's inner creativity, and intuition in design practices.

Whiteness as a is a socio-political identity characterized by expectations, conscious and/or unconscious, of power and privileges that are granted to individuals or groups conferred into a White racial classification. This identity was born out of historic conditions (e.g. laws, policies, and practices) that gave rise to a racial hierarchy in the U.S., granting social, political, and economic privileges to people considered “White” and created the expectation that these advantages should continue. This hierarchy and related structural advantages persist today. To subvert Whiteness, activists, educators, and scholars created White privilege (and other related) interventions seeking to illuminate the power inherent in Whiteness. However, these psychologically focused (implicit bias) interventions frequently fail to alter the systemic conditions that perpetuate and reinforce White privilege and BIPOC oppression. To address this issue, we provide a framework that takes a systems approach to subverting White dominance. Bringing together critical Whiteness and systems change theories, we provide readers with a framework designed to alter systems’ and settings’ relationship to Whiteness. Specifically, we detail how interventions may be successful in altering White dominated spaces by (1) defining local patterns of racial privilege/oppression and the system conditions reinforcing them; (2) designing interventions to disrupt and realign these system conditions to promote equity; (3) implementing interventions in ways that uphold justice; and (4) redefining patterns of privilege/oppression and system conditions to learn if efforts are starting to make a difference. We conclude by providing recommendations to change agents, stakeholders, and researchers.