Race, Ethnicity, Indigenous Peoples and Politics

L12 - Equity and Reconciliation in Institutions

Date: Jun 13 | Time: 12:00pm to 01:30pm | Location: 680 Sherbrooke St. West 495

Chair/Président/Présidente : Seon Yuzyck (University of Alberta)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Tobin Leblanc Haley (University of New Brunswick)

Discussant/Commentateur/Commentatrice : Leah Levac (University of Guelph)

Dependency Work as Witnessing: Able-Nationalism and the Limits of Labour Justice in Canadian Healthcare: Sarah Munawar (University of Houston)
Abstract: Hospitals, ICUs, long-term care homes, are not just transitory places, or death-worlds, within colonial systems; for families like mine, in the netherworld of dependency care, and for care-workers, they are a critical setting for our most intimate struggles for labour, gender, racial and disability justice. Through critical auto-ethnography, I outline three anecdotal interactions between my family and healthcare workers, during my father’s hospitalization, in which discourses on labour rights are weaponized by healthcare administration to shut down the complaints, and demands of, racialized, disabled, and elderly patients. Families like mine situated within the netherworld of dependency care, challenge the notion that caring labor in carceral healthcare settings, and the harm and neglect justified in care’s name to racialized and disabled elders, cannot be accounted for. The impact of medical violence done in care’s name is written off as a constitutive feature, or natural consequence, of the racialized, disabled, and elderly patient’s body—as a body that is chronically risk-prone, unpredictable, damaged, frail and in decay. Healthcare workers have names, faces and institutional and legal roles and responsibilities. Healthcare systems are regulated; there are policies, laws and codes of accountability; yet, medicalized violence remains highly invisible, impersonal and untraceable to a name and face, to specific healthcare workers who perform caring labour in a harmful way. In this paper, I emphasize that a constitutive labour of dependency work is naming, and documenting, policies, practices, actors, systems, and discourses that are used to enact and justify medical violence and carceral practices of care in Canada to create what Sara Ahmed calls, a phenomenology of an institution. Dependency work is knowledge keeping. I explore how institutional hierarchies of labor within settler-colonial healthcare settings are white-orientated and serve as, what Sara Ahmed calls, the postal system by which the complaints of racialized, disabled elders are dismissed, buried and delegitimized. There is power in naming practices of medical violence, mapping institutional hierarchies, using policy levers, and evoking rights-based legislation in the claims-making process. Black, Indigenous, racialized, disabled and queer scholars, however, have taught us that settler-colonial healthcare systems not only endanger the health and safety of Black, Indigenous and racialized patients and healthcare workers but are also built on theft and appropriation of their caring labour; in this paper, I argue that when Black, Indigenous and racialized patients, and healthcare workers, often work together and mobilize caring labour to create phenomenologies of healthcare institutions for the sake of harm reduction, health equity, and labour justice, they are often punished and disciplined. Such punishment , for example, could mean more medical violence and neglect for patients and, termination of employment and a toxic working environment for healthcare workers. Conversations on accessibility complaints, especially between patients and healthcare workers, are interpreted as hostile and burdensome demands for more labour and resources to make healthcare service delivery and spaces more accessible. In the context of a pandemic, then, where Canada’s healthcare system is collapsing, understaffed and underfunded, what is first to be cut are the demands of disabled, racialized and elderly patients. I argue that demanding just ecologies of labour within settler-colonial healthcare systems requires Black, Indigenous and racialized healthworkers and patients to forge, build and deepen relational affinities, homeplaces, and dissident friendships by resisting anti-relational and white-orientated practices of settler governance within healthcare settings.

Accessible Canada Act(ing):: Aaron J. Service (Carleton University)
Abstract: Passing into law the Accessible Canada Act (ACA) in 2019, the Canadian federal government committed to eradicating ableism within the public service by 2040. Addressing hiring biases and representational asymmetries related to peoples with disabilities in governance, the ACA was to erase barriers for those traditionally excluded from the public service based on their “disability.” Roughly five years after the ACA was put into law, it is worth asking how does the Canadian federal government understand the problem of ableism in the federal public service? Traditionally this question was difficult to answer in anything but the abstract. However, with the first “Accessibility Plans” following the ACA now being published, it has become possible to assess this understanding empirically. This paper mobilizes Carol Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to be?” (WPR) method of qualitative post-structural policy analysis, to establish discursive trends in the classification of “ableism,” interpretation of “disability,” and remedy of ableism through “accessibility” across federal departments’ “Accessibility Plans.” This paper argues two things based on the evidence: 1) despite de-centralization in addressing the ACA, there are a great deal of similarities among departments’ representations of problems related to “disability” and “accessibility”; and 2) despite rhetoric to the contrary, these discursive trends indicate continuity in ableist presumptions traditionally associated with the ableist “biomedical model” of disability. Little has been written about the ACA by political scientists, thus the proposed paper contributes to this literature, while also adding to existing discourses regarding ableism in Canada, and studies of Canadian public policy.