Paper short abstract:

This paper draws on an instance of a group of Indian international students who sat on an 18 day protest in Toronto to refute their deportation orders, to reflect on how the migrant student movement in Canada is characterised by- in the context of ongoing collective action— a seeming nothingness.

Paper long abstract:

In the popular cultural imaginary, the term movement indicates an ontological orientation toward motion, a future horizon, and a goal imagined to be ahead of us. Instead, and in practice, what precisely constitutes a social movement and transformative political action is often borne out of vacillations and backsliding. This paper draws on an instance of a group of Indian international students who sat on an 18 day protest outside Pearson International Airport, Toronto to refute their deportation orders to reflect how the migrant student movement in Canada is characterised by- in the context of ongoing collective action— a seeming nothingness. Canada's higher education system is devised by a quicksand like policyscape that at once imagines international students as immigrants who will ease the country's ageing labour force and also casts them as "cheating actors" in the immigration regime. This paper will use ethnographic instances from the 18 day protest to locate how political outcomes don't always come from signature events associated with movements and struggles. Rather, in a policy regime that imagines international migrant students in constant flux between categories and migrant timelines, an exploration of possibilities is afforded by untimely adjacency through "unmovement". As a methodological intervention in the study of resistance, analytic attention where there is quiet, calm, and ostensibly little movement, pose a series of questions about how "unmovement" may in fact reveal the complexities of the political ecologies of activism and transformative social action.

Paper short abstract:

Using a case-study of a collaborative museum display co-created by a London-based Brazilian supplementary school and myself (as an artist/anthropologist), this paper considers what lessons public museums in the UK can learn from migrant communities about preserving intangible heritage in migration.

Paper long abstract:

Given some of the challenges public museums have in helping to safe-guard intangible heritage, this paper turns to supplementary schools in the UK to consider how they preserve heritage in migration.

In the UK, public museums have developed sophisticated techniques to preserve and protect the material culture of vulnerable communities across the world. Yet a great deal of the cultural heritage that the communities themselves regard as valuable and seek to protect falls under the category of 'intangible heritage'- that is, heritage which is immaterial, based on practice, tacit and embodied knowledge. Despite having little space to display and store their material artefacts, supplementary schools in the UK make spaces and use embodied means by which to teach children their cultural heritage in diaspora.

As part of a larger museum-and-migrations PhD study, I facilitated the making of a collaborative museum display entitled ‘The Whispering Forest’, together with Brazilian supplementary school children, their parents and teachers, in which Portuguese-speaking trees tell folk stories of landscapes disturbed by humans and protected by mythical child-heroes. In this Brazilian supplementary school, set up to help children retrieve their cultural roots in diaspora, tree symbolism is used to recall Brazil and describe children’s connection to it. Children are seen as seeds with potential for their latent Brazilian heritage to grow, given the right circumstances. In 2019 the school turned to the Museum of London in an effort to help them celebrate their Brazilian identity.

Recalling the making process of a museum installation and other performances by parent-teachers, and reflecting on the longer, troubled history of community performances in museum spaces, I use the case-study to address deeper issues around ‘the politics of temporality’ (Feldberg), and ask what lessons public museums in the UK can learn from migrant communities in preserving intangible heritage in migration.

Paper short abstract:

Algorithmic policing is the latest frontier of colonial aggression in Canada, and the Canadian state is invested. An analysis of Canada’s AI policy funding police departments in their technological integration is necessary to analyze the data economy as the new modality of Canadian imperialism.

Paper long abstract:

Algorithmic policing is one of the latest frontiers of colonial aggression in Canada, and the Canadian state is invested. My analysis engages both the literature on critical data studies with abolitionist epistemologies. I also want to advance a discussion on the next frontier of abolitionist concern in Canada as it concerns the carceral technologies of settler colonial states. The primary research questions animating my work are as follows: How do data and algorithmic technologies act as the carceral modality through which white supremacy is advanced, with policing as the apparatus affirming consolidating Canadian settler colonialism? How are the developments in predictive analytics in Canadian police departments extending the coloniality of the nation state through data surveillance into private life? My investigation aims to first evaluate the development of predictive policing in Canada in various Canadian cities. Second, interpret and theorize the legal conditions that facilitate a data market climate favorable for private firms to privatize, and profit from public data for private profit, something theorized as a new “data enclosures” by authors such as Mark Andrejovic. Third, to theorize how these data enclosures that presume data to be a free resource for monetization might reconstitute subjectivity of users by extracted from their labour and content of their intimate life. Lastly, to provide theoretical generalizations on how these case studies my points to a new extended form of coloniality by the Canadian nation state through algorithmic policing in the goal of securing national sovereignty.

Paper short abstract:

Universities are important centres for international student-migration and "success". They have also been accused of taking advantage of students; becoming "bad actors" in Canada's higher education system. This paper looks at the overdetermined narrative of "success" and accompanying stereotypes.

Paper long abstract:

With a global reputation the University of Toronto (UofT) is an important centre for international student-migration, student life, and discourses of diversity and educational “success”. Being known as an “immigrant-friendly” country, Canada, and UofT specifically, promise international students a pathway to "success" in a welcoming environment. More recently, however, international students have been "scapegoated" or blamed for contributing to the country's worsening "housing crisis." Some private colleges and public universities have also been accused of taking advantage of rising international student fees, while providing under-resourced infrastructures and "fake" degrees, to exploit students - becoming "bad actors" in Canada's higher education system. With a stated goal of targeting these "bad actors" — and amid concern about the impact growing numbers of international students are having on the housing market so close to federal elections — Immigration Minister Marc Miller announced that the federal government will cap the number of international student permits over the next two years. This paper will take a closer look at the overdetermined narratives of "success/failure" and "good actors/bad actors," how they limit the experiences of international students, as well as ignore the university as a place of refusing single narratives and stereotypes.