Interrupting the Legal Person (Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 87A), 2022
This chapter looks at how the concept of biopolitics can be used to understand the settler colo... more This chapter looks at how the concept of biopolitics can be used to understand the settler colonial legal orders. The focus is on the evolution of the definition of ‘Indian status’ in the Indian Act, which is the central piece of legislation in Canada’s Indian administration regime. Historically, the legal concept of Indian status was used as a way to constitute a population in relation to colonial sovereignty, and later was adapted as a mechanism to internally dividing the population through complex forms of legal domination. Scholars have turned to Michel Foucault’s studies of biopolitics and racism to understand how settler colonial sovereignty relates to a population on a territory. This chapter argues that Foucault’s analysis was radically historically embedded in a way that shapes its relevance to understanding settler colonialism. In Foucault’s original analysis, racism emerges as tool of the state in the relation between territory and sovereignty, which was characteristic in feudal Europe. In settler colonial legal orders such as Canada, however, sovereignty’s relation to the population is constituted in the absence of a prior connection to the land.
Uploads
Books by Amy Swiffen
Articles by Amy Swiffen
imaginary of heteronormative kinship, namely, the equivalence of biological and social family origins. We assert that the “secret” of socially intelligible kinship is revealed in the shifting meanings of blood and social desire in ideas of kinship, which has important implications for new kinship studies as well as for adoption scholarship.
Throughout history, different pandemics have given rise to distinct public health measures and governmental techniques. For instance, the response to leprosy ushered in techniques of exclusion and segregation, while the Black Death prompted the birth of quarantine and surveillance practices. Cholera outbreaks led to comprehensive sanitation efforts and the recognition that environmental factors could fall under the purview of government responsibility in disease prevention.
The contemporary responses to COVID-19 are notably shaped by the unique
characteristics of the pandemic and the technological landscape of the twenty-first century. However, the changes initiated by the pandemic response do not only reflect or follow from technical capacities. As in the past, they also manifest shifts in modes of governing the relationship between law and life. The papers featured in the “Pandemics and Paradigms of Governance” special issue seek to critically explore whether the current responses to COVID-19 are giving rise to entirely new governmental techniques. Within the Canadian context, the pandemic has seemingly given rise to what could be perceived as novel expressions of federalism, as exemplified by provincial border closures. Additionally, the starkly unequal impacts of the pandemic on Indigenous, Black, and racialized communities lay bare deeply entrenched issues stemming from systemic racism and colonialism, including limited healthcare access, substandard housing,
and precarious employment. The resilience and resistance demonstrated by these communities during the pandemic has ignited new calls for abolition and decolonization, which emerged as central themes in the protests that gained prominence during the early stages of the pandemic. Concurrently, some governments have cited the economic uncertainties arising from the pandemic as justification for expedited resource development initiatives, encroaching further on Indigenous lands. Furthermore, this prolonged state of emergency raises profound questions about how the legal system and the courts respond to these complex realities, and how justice can be advanced while preserving the crucial distinction between rule by law and the rule of law.
The papers included in this special issue have a clear and ambitious aim: to
navigate these intricate and pressing questions by scrutinizing the emergence of new legal and political trends. This endeavour unfolds through a rigorous inter-disciplinary collaboration, with some contributions centring on the Canadian context while others adopt a more expansive international perspective. It is worth noting that all of these papers trace their origins back to a research workshop funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada, which convened at McGill University in 2022. This workshop served as an intellectual crucible where scholars from diverse disciplines converged to engage in collaborative discussions, cross-pollinating ideas, and integrating feedback from a wide array of perspectives. In this manner, the workshop facilitated a fertile environment for the refinement and enhancement of the contributions that now form this thought-provoking special issue