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Canadian Political Science Association2025 Annual Conference Programme
The Politics of Belonging: Conflict,
Community, Curriculum
Hosted at George Brown College, Toronto, CANADA
June 3 to June 5, 20252025 Annual Conference Programme
The Politics of Belonging: Conflict,
Community, Curriculum
Hosted at George Brown College
June 3 to June 5, 2025
Political Theory
H11(a) - Author Meets Critics Session: Danielle Taschereau Mamers’ Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing
Date: Jun 4 | Time: 10:15am to 11:45am | Location:
Chair/Président/Présidente : Marta Bashovski (Campion College at the University of Regina)
Danielle Taschereau Mamers (University of Toronto)Gerald McMaster (OCAD)
Mark Rifkin (University at Bufallo)
Gabrielle Moser (York University)
Laurence Butet-Roch (McGill University)
Robert Jackson (University of Alberta)
Abstract: Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing asks how do bureaucratic documents create and reproduce a state’s capacity to see? What kinds of worlds do documents help create? Further, how might such documentary practices and settler colonial ways of seeing be refused? In this book, Danielle Taschereau Mamers investigates how the Canadian state has used documents, lists, and databases to generate, make visible—and invisible—Indigenous identity. With an archive of legislative documents, registration forms, identity cards, and reports, Taschereau Mamers traces the political and media history of Indian status in Canada, demonstrating how paperwork has been used by the state to materialize identity categories in the service of colonial governance. The book’s analysis of bureaucratic artifacts is led by the interventions of Indigenous artists, including Robert Houle, Nadia Myre, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, and Rebecca Belmore. Bringing together media theories of documentation and the strategies of these artists, Settler Colonial Ways of Seeing develops a method for identifying how bureaucratic documents mediate power relations as well as how those relations may be disobeyed and re-imagined. By integrating art-led inquiry with media theory and settler colonial studies approaches, Taschereau Mamers offers a political and media history of the documents that have reproduced Indian status. Most importantly, she provides an innovative guide for using art as a method of theorizing decolonial political relations.