"It’s Not Like I Could Change Anything, so Why Should I Care?"—Exploring Political Narratives in Depoliticized White Working-Class Environments.

Presenter: Lena A. Hübner

Registration Number: 027
Institution: Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada

Abstract:  In the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, Montrealers took to the streets to fight racism. While hashtags such as #blacklivesmatters and #LaVieDesNoirsCompte went viral, raising awareness about different types of discrimination racialized citizens face in Quebec, the CAQ government refused to acknowledge the existence of systemic racism in the province. Scholars have studied the role online media interactivities play for human rights activists (Pilote & Hübner 2019) and for those who disseminate misinformation about such movements (Gimenez & Voirol 2017). Yet, little attention is paid to the publics these online campaigns are trying to reach, namely those who feel indifferent about the consequences of said political stances. As part of my PhD thesis, this paper explores how white francophone members of Quebec’s working-class who claim to disregard politics come into contact with social and political issues, such as immigration or poverty, in everyday life. I explore if and how the increased fragmentation of public discourse via social media shapes their (a)political stances in order to determine to what extent digital media usage reconfigures their relationship with politics throughout their lives. An intersectional narrative approach (Collins & Bilge 2020, Crenshaw, 1991) to whiteness (McMullan 2005; Du Bois 1922) combining three rounds of in-depth life-story interviews (n=8) (Chadwick 2017) and a one-year ethnographic observation of the interviewees’ social media accounts (Hine 2005) allowed me to analyze class, racial, nation, and gender dynamics via their “mediated everyday political experiences.” The gathered narratives show that participants avoid talking about politics in public settings, including online. Yet, they will discuss issues they care about, such as poverty, in more private settings (Eliasoph 1998). I have found that the way they talk about these issues reveals racist, gendered, classist, and anti-immigrant biases that sometimes draw from particular social media scripts associated with specific media outlets and political perspectives. The sites they access on social media tend to support a white francophone notion of Quebec’s political history, reinforcing key mechanisms of social division. Yet, all informants are aware of these pitfalls and try to prioritize “more reliable” news channels. Apparently, awareness of needing to diversify one’s media sources is not enough to arm white people against adopting discriminatory ideologies. However, analysis of follow-up interviews conducted shortly after the COVID-19 outbreak indicates that increased exposure to polarized messages and misinformation about the pandemic led participants to quit social media—at least temporarily—despite the fact that a majority of social, political, educational, and professional relations were transferred into the virtual realm. The same participants who occasionally interacted with posts that reinforce social division mechanisms now claim they can’t cope with it anymore. The prioritization of less interactive news channels thus becomes a leitmotiv as the feeling of being unable to contribute to social change settles in.

Bio: Lena A. Hübner (Canada) is a PhD candidate at the Université du Québec à Montréal and a scientific coordinator at the CRICIS Research Centre. Her research interests focus on digital inequalities, politics, democracy, and intersectionality. For her thesis, she examines the role informational practices play in the relationship that white members of the Quebec working class maintain with politics throughout their lives, and to what extent digital media usage reconfigures this relationship. She recently co-authored the article “Feminist Mobilizations on Facebook and Twitter: The Case of #StopRapeCulture in Quebec” (2020) published in the French peer-reviewed journal Terminal.

Indigenous and Migrant Embodied Cartographies: Mapping the Inter-relations of the Odeimin Runners Club.

Presenters: Debbie Ebanks Schlums, Adrian Kahgee, and Rebeka Tabobondung
Registration Number: 045
Institution: York University and MUSKRAT Magazine, Toronto, Canada
Abstract: The Odeimin Runners Club is a new Indigenous and Black-Persons-of-Colour (BPOC) media collective creating an online story map using an open-source satellite mapping platform. By tracing activities and connections in our engagements with each other and our communities, our counter-mapping project re-traces trade and ceremonial routes between the north of Turtle Island and the Caribbean archipelago, linking stories, videos and artworks to traditional territories. Our objective in this first project phase is to make short films using Bolex film cameras and process cinema methodologies that incorporate plants and organic materials in film processing. The short films are themed on human survival, land connection, rematriation, and BIPOC counter-mapping as a means to thread our knowledges and stories together as we visit each other’s territories in order to connect and share traditional wisdom that imparts important knowledge and strength to help navigate current political and environmental instabilities facing our communities. As a collective of Ogimaakwe—women warriors, Indigenous and Caribbean—we have rejected a decolonial framework. Beyond the “decolonization is a metaphor” critique outlined by Tuck and Yang (2012), we argue that decolonization inherently embeds failure because it is premised on the one hand, on a defeated peoples, and on the other, on achieving or restoring a way of living, working and being in the world prior to colonization. Instead, we propose an a-colonial approach based on odeimin teachings. Odeimin means heartberry, or strawberry, and it grows and thrives by sending out runners, creating a networked lattice of relations between individual plants. These plants are a metaphor for individuals and communities—one cannot survive disconnected from relations with each other. A framework of Odeimin Teachings converges with what Eades and Zheng (2016) refer to as a “resisting practice,” with the ethos of Marcus Garvey’s self-reliant philosophy and strategy. This a-colonial framework resists oppressive capitalist systems while taking a different path: one outside of colonialism’s hegemonic frameworks. This project shows contemporary relations on a continuum rather than as “new encounters,” outside the language of discovery and within a concept of time immemorial, activating and re-activating the long ties between Indigenous communities, between Black and Indigenous peoples on the mainland and between the islands and the mainlands. This is not to discount the contested position of immigrants as settlers on the territory, but to say that we can build a different relationship outside of a white colonizing paradigm, one that might be less attached to ownership of land. The purpose of this project is to ground our cultural identities in the land of northern and rural Ontario—land that has been dispossessed through colonization by which Indigenous and Black POC’s histories were buried or made invisible as if we did not belong.

Bio: Debbie Ebanks Schlums
Debbie Ebanks Schlums is an art-researcher, PhD student and Vanier Scholar in Cinema and Media Studies at York University. Her research explores methodologies of Caribbean diasporic archiving in the Jamaican Diaspora through storytelling and media installation. Debbie is a recipient of the Susan Crocker and John Hunkin Scholarship in the Fine Arts, and Canada Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council grants. She was a founding member of the Out of a War Zone and To Lemon Hill Collectives, both addressing the Syrian refugee crisis. She is a former Co-Director of the Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film and Co-Producer of Saugeen Takes on Film.

Bio: Adrian Kahgee
Adrian Kahgee, (Saugeen First Nation), founding member of Odeimin Runner’s Club, is an artist and Community Arts Educator, currently teaching Visual Arts and Indigenous Studies, with the Bluewater District School Board. She is former Co-Artistic Director and Community Co-ordinator for the Fabulous Festival of Fringe Film. Adrian is Co-Producer of Saugeen Takes on Film, a community-based film program working with artisans, youth and knowledge keepers from her community. Her current artistic practices, of painting, performance activated installations and film, are centered around continuous research, exploration, and sharing of familial and communal knowledge, on our existence upon Turtle Island since time immemorial. Her work has been featured at Creemore Festival of the Arts, Reel World Film Festival, imagineNATIVE, FADO, ANDPVA and CBC Radio.

Bio: Rebeka Tabobondung
Media and story creator Rebeka Tabobondung is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of MUSKRAT Magazine.com, a leading digital Indigenous arts and culture magazine established in 2010. Rebeka is also a filmmaker, writer, poet, and Indigenous knowledge researcher with a strong body of work focused on Indigenous birth knowledge. Since 2017, Rebeka has been working as a creator, researcher, and writer with award winning Montreal based Rezolution Pictures, who along with APTN are partners in the Spirit of Birth web series and interactive Spirit of Birth mobile App and digital platform. In 2011, Rebeka produced and directed the short doc, Spirit of Birth in partnership with the National Screen Institute, which screened across Canada and internationally. Rebeka’s written works are published in numerous books, journals, and anthologies.

Restor(y)ing Indigenous Ways of Being on Screen: Fourth Cinema Documentary.

Presenter: April Lindala
Registration Number: 053
Institution: Northern Michigan University, Marquette, USA
Abstract: Documentary filmmakers and Indigenous communities have a stormy historical relationship with some early films posing as authentic representations, where non-Native filmmakers often set a cinematic stage of how they thought an Indigenous community should look on screen. Fourth Cinema films, specifically documentaries, have the opportunity to represent tribal nations and Indigenous communities in cinematically sovereign ways and in doing so, such films may operate as both expressions of "survivance" (as explained by Vizenor) and critiques of "cognitive imperialism" (Battiste). Films examined in this study will range in representation of tribal nation / Indigenous community, subject matter, production date, filmmaker, and mode (the specific style of documentary). Frameworks employed to articulate the representation of cinematic sovereignty (a blending of cultural sovereignty from Singer and visual sovereignty from Raheja) will include contributions from multiple Native scholars' voices: Native/Indigenous feminist theory (Tuck, et al), relational accountability and relationality (Wilson), and tribal critical race theory (Brayboy).

Bio: April Lindala has been a full-time employee at Northern Michigan University located on Anishinaabe territory since February 1993. She has worked at WNMU-TV13, the Center for Native American Studies, and Diversity Student Services. She obtained a MFA from NMU in 2006. From January 2005-June 2019, she served as the Director of the Center for Native American Studies. In Fall of 2019, she earned rank of Full Professor in Native American Studies. Professor Lindala has had several poems published in various anthologies and publications. She was the project director for the anthology, Voice on the Water: Great Lakes Native America Now published by NMU Press. She was a top-five nominee for 2021 UP Poet Laureate. She is completing a PhD in Rhetoric, Theory and Culture from Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan.