kayl bourgault

University of California, Santa Cruz, Community Studies, Undergraduate

University of California, Santa Cruz, Feminist Studies, Undergraduate

Followers

Following

Public Views

Activist scholar interested in repatriation of land back to indigenous peoples, radical redistribution of resources, and hence the abolition of police, prisons, and nation-states.

less

Federico Faloppa

University of Reading

Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar

University of Nevada, Reno

Naor Ben-Yehoyada

Columbia University

Antonio Sorge

University of Toronto

Leandros Fischer

Aalborg University

Leila Whitley

University of California, San Diego

Sébastien Chauvin

University of Lausanne

Marlou Schrover

Universiteit Leiden

S Marek Muller

Texas State University

José Ángel Maldonado

University of South Florida

InterestsView All (12)

Uploads

Papers by kayl bourgault

We Own It - LGST SOC Final

This paper explores the possibilities of a non-hierarchical, anarchist university while mapping o... more

Download

Human Rights and Alternative Paradigms: Limits and Possibilities

In order to conceptualize human rights, one must conceptualize a universalizing understanding of ... more In order to conceptualize human rights, one must conceptualize a universalizing understanding of the human category. This is where the paradox of human rights emerges-whereas conceptualizations of human rights are applied through top-down definitions outlined by the United Nations, the implementation of human rights necessitates on-the-ground community organizing. Due to its nature derived from predispositions of situated precarity, community organizing renders communities targets of human rights violations in the form of retaliation--in turn rendering subaltern communities outside of the human category altogether. This occurs because these communities are already existing within a system that fails to render them visible as humans defined within their contexts. These circumstances become exacerbated as survival necessitates challenging the system which has rendered communities invisible in the first place in order to live with the kind of dignity that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights seeks to institute. This process occurs through mechanisms which operate as "arms" of the institution of human rights. These "arms" include but are not limited to institutions such as nation-state(s), law(s), Western medicine, race, and gender. In this sense, human rights as applied within a universalizing paradigm furthers the project of globalization which has historically codified some of the most atrocious human rights violations, as Julietta Hua writes--"The conceptual conditions tied to universality, which define it through and against difference, are important to understand because they ultimately constrict how human rights can be used as a political tool even as these conditions also provide the reason why human rights offers almost limitless possibilities for imagining alternatives". 1

Download

Challenging the Production of Illegality

The music video Borders by M.I.A. is relevant to conceptions of contraband in understanding the i... more The music video Borders by M.I.A. is relevant to conceptions of contraband in understanding the intersection between Michel Foucault's illegality and Naor Ben-Yehoyada's hospitality. These frameworks for analysis articulate the objectification of people who are experiencing statelessness as a result of the production of illegitimate categories, and provide alternatives to frameworks which are commonly applied to refugee crises such as morality, religion and law. The video suggests that the category of "contraband" becomes problematized when it is people who are being categorized as such, and that the (il)legalization of migration renders human beings as objects of the state, meanwhile, their lives and well being are truly precious from the perspective of liberation movements. The video also suggests that there are various levels on which resistance to a globalized white supremacist, capitalist cisheteropatriarchy become possible; that is, it is possible to subvert hierarchical systems on personal, interpersonal, and macroscopic scales. In an interview on her video Borders, M.I.A. makes a careful distinction between multiculturalism and assimilation when considering the international refugee crisis which has touched her life in a deeply personal way (Al Jazeera).

Download