Defining Intersectional Anti-Oppression within an Insurrectionary Context

In searching the literature, anti-oppression rarely appears as a cohesive framework or lens outside of social movement or social work research, two fields that link scholarly research with socio-political practices (Barnoff and Moffatt, Reference Barnoff and Moffatt2007; Brown, Reference Brown2012; Corneau and Stergiopoulos, Reference Corneau and Stergiopoulos2012; Mullaly and Mullaly, Reference Mullaly and Mullaly2010; N. Razack, Reference Razack1999). Anti-oppression also figures prominently in activist work (Keefer, Reference Keefer2007; Mallory, Reference Mallory2006; Mul, Reference Mul2006; Walia, Reference Walia2013), with anti-oppression being described not as a unified theory, but as a “developing practice” (Luchies, Reference Luchies2014: 102). Luchies traces the emergence of contemporary forms of anti-oppression practice in North America to a convergence of resistances to neoliberal globalization in the 1990s (Reference Luchies2014: 99–100). This convergence of “anti-authoritarian radicals” interweaves anti-capitalist, anti-oppression and anti-imperialist critiques (100, citing Conway et al. Reference Conway2006: 7–11). These linked resistances, ranging from “anti-colonial, anti-racist, radical dis/ability, feminist and queer organizing” have focused on dismantling an oppressive status quo and on conceptualizing “alternative ways of being” (100). These two observations—that anti-oppression figures mostly in social movement and social work research and in activist circles—are significant because they suggest that adopting an anti-oppression lens is intimately tied to grassroots practice. A search for the word “oppression” in CJPS/RCSP abstracts yields only seven articles, all of which were published after 2005. If intersectional anti-oppression scholarship is absent from mainstream CPS, does this suggest a dominant approach where political science itself is characterized as outside of practice?

In his writing on social movement methods and theories, Luchies focuses on “insurrectionary power/knowledge” as “[facilitating] the growth of knowledges that feed and foster collective liberation as it disrupts and progressively dismantles the regime of truth underlying… research” (Reference Luchies2015: 524–25). His contention is that our modes of critique are located within systems of domination and violence, including “imperialism, heterosexism, ableism, capitalism, and cis-/male and white supremacy” (524). Luchies’ focus on insurrectionary power and knowledge raises questions regarding practice for scholars both within and outside of CPS:

These questions are required if scholars wish to “engage with grassroots struggles against oppression and exploitation, and to do research that feeds these struggles” (523). Moreover, these questions signal that political science itself is a practice that produces, sustains and/or disrupts dominance and oppression, meaning that an intersectional anti-oppression lens, as understood as insurrectionary power/knowledge, is both relevant to and important for CPS.

Consequently, in thinking about intersectional anti-oppression scholarship as bodies of insurrectionary knowledges in conversation with each other, this paper draws from social movement research, activist writing, social work research, decolonial scholarship, critical race theory and feminist intersectionality scholarship to reflect on the broad characteristics underlying these conversations. The point here is not to identify a cohesive body of scholarship nor a “comprehensive or unifying theory of multiple and overlapping axis of oppressions” but to examine literatures that are in conversation with each other and that challenge CPS's disciplinary norms (Brown, Reference Brown2012: 35). Are these conversations happening within CJPS/RCSP and CPSR? To be clear, these conversations are fraught and not immune to hierarchy, exploitation and oppression. However, an anti-oppression lens and practice in the context of CPS would, at a minimum, “engage in a knowledge practice that works alongside the people and politics of these struggles and actively takes part in naming and dismantling oppression and exploitation” (Luchies, Reference Luchies2015: 524).

We identify four sites of reflection that illustrate what intersectional anti-oppression conversations could look like in the context of CPS. While this list is not exhaustive, it does represent some of the dominant preoccupations of what we are describing as insurrectionary knowledges. First, these insurrectionary knowledges take oppression seriously in their analyses and are rooted in a contextual theory of oppression. Despite critiques of intersectionality as being a static “identitarian framework” (Joseph, Reference Joseph2015: 20) or critiques that implicitly “neutralize the political potential of intersectionality” (Bilge, Reference Bilge2013: 405) by submerging the anti-racist social justice lineage of feminist intersectionality (Erel et al., Reference Erel, Haritaworn, Gutiérrez Rodríguez and Klesse2010; Thobani, Reference Thobani2012), anti-oppression insurrectionist knowledges share many of feminist intersectionality's commitments as articulated by women of colour and do so in a way that attention to oppression is inescapable. In this way, the link between intersectionality and the approach to addressing oppression in other insurrectionist knowledges attends to some of the critiques of totalizing grand narratives. This is important as Hill Collins and Bilge note that while the “word ‘oppression’ may be out of favour…the social conditions that it describes are not” (Reference Hill Collins and Bilge2016: 161). Consequently, although the precise theory and vocabulary of oppression may vary, deep consideration of oppression involves destabilizing the idea that there are essential social groups, focusing instead on “intersecting inequities of class, race, ethnicity, age, religion and citizenship” (161). Moreover, the attention to oppression explicitly moves beyond naming it and identifying its impacts, to disrupting the legitimacy of those structures and practices. At a minimum, intersectional anti-oppression scholarship in a Canadian context situates itself within settler-colonialism, and also seriously considers other forms of systemic domination, including, but not limited to, heteropatriarchy, capitalism and racism.

Second, anti-oppression scholarship names complicity and privilege in terms of both the subject being studied and the role of the scholar. This critical and epistemological reflexivity goes beyond an acknowledgement of standpoint to naming particular narratives as dominant, and explicitly positioning oneself as contributing to or unsettling those narratives (Brown, Reference Brown2012: 37). These critiques are not transcendent but are imminent; here, the producer of scholarship includes themselves as the object (Bilge, Reference Bilge2017). Drawing from Leonardo, accounting for complicity and privilege is tethered to domination; recognition of privilege without recognition of the agents of domination “obfuscates the historical process of domination in exchange for a state of dominance in medias res” (Reference Leonardo2004: 139). Consequently, attention to complicity and privilege requires the disruptive work of thinking of CPS as a historical process through which domination is secured. While still foregrounding an analysis of resistance, this contextual recognition of privilege and complicity moves beyond narrative to identify the disciplinary and institutional context of knowledge production as “exploitative, oppressive and hierarchical” (Luchies, Reference Luchies2015: 254). In the Canadian context, this involves positioning oneself within the structure of settler-colonialism, raising foundational questions regarding the “Canadian” in CPS. That such an exercise is so profoundly disruptive to CPS signals why in Thompson's Reference Thompson2008 review of CJPS/RCSP, Canadian Public Policy and Canadian Public Administration, “political science ranks last among its sister disciplines of history and sociology in terms of the inclusion of race” (531). Similar work remains to be done in terms of identifying the depth and breadth of CPS work situated in an analysis of settler colonialism, but Ladner provides a crucial intervention by highlighting that “because of the roots of the discipline, political scientists have largely ignored Indigenous political traditions and have largely studied contemporary Indigenous politics from the vantage point of the Western-eurocentric tradition” (Reference Ladner2017: 164). Consequently, intersectional anti-oppression scholarship encourages reflection on what an accountable research programme looks like and to whom must one be accountable. This enables consideration of how settlers are implicated, how accountability is intersectional and how privilege is underscored by whiteness, heteropatriarchy, capitalist and ableist structures of domination.

Third, just as Hill Collins and Bilge write that “intersectionality must be wary of annexing other perspectives, such as decolonial and transnational approaches, under its wide tent umbrella,” we similarly do not want to “erase local resistant knowledges and praxis and silence local knowledge producers” (Reference Hill Collins and Bilge2016: 196). Intersectional anti-oppression conversations are situated in a recognition that all theories and research are political and that the purpose of this scholarship is to not simply understand but to transform. This has several implications and leads to different theoretical formulations within different insurrectionary knowledges. For example, intersectional anti-oppression conversations could take seriously the long-term impact of what Tuck has termed “damage-centred” research, which she describes in the context of research with and involving Indigenous peoples (Reference Tuck2009: 409). Here, research cannot begin and end with an analysis of oppression, because “the danger in damage-centred research is that it is a pathologizing approach in which the oppression singularly defines a community” (413). Put differently, damage-centred research “operates…from a theory of change that establishes harm or injury in order to achieve reparation” (413). This balance between serious attention to oppression and a simultaneous focus on alternate futures is certainly not resolved. However, as a characteristic site of reflection, we consider this to be of note when thinking about the qualities of intersectional anti-oppression conversations.

As one alternative, Tuck proposes a desire-based framework (Reference Tuck2009: 416) and rematriation; here “Indigenous communities and other over-researched but invisibilized communities can reject narratives and theories that have been used against us, and re-story knowledge and research to forward our own sovereignty and wellbeing” (Tuck and Gazatambide-Fernández, Reference Tuck and Gazatambide-Fernández2013: 80). Capturing this attention to the contestation over futures, Luchies develops an ethics of prefiguration (Reference Luchies2015: 531). Focusing on intersections of systems of hostility and depreciation (McWhorter, Reference McWhorter2004: 55), Hill Collins and Bilge discuss a “praxis perspective,” which “does not merely apply scholarly knowledge to a social problem or set of experiences but rather uses the knowledge learned within everyday life to reflect on those experiences as well as on scholarly knowledge” (Reference Hill Collins and Bilge2016: 42). In her writing on techniques of knowing, settler colonialism and Indigenous peoples, Audra Simpson speaks of “refusal” as a commitment to “think very seriously about needs and… involves a calculous ethnography of what you need to know and what I refuse to write in” (Reference Simpson2007: 72). Consequently, intersectional anti-oppression scholarship is transparent in how it contributes to popular struggle, particularly in its targeting of dominant groups and institutions as sites for change. Practice and process are integral to an anti-oppression framework, while resilience, resistance, resurgence and justice are acknowledged as politically relevant starting points.

Finally, intersectional anti-oppression scholarship redraws the boundaries of “the political” and understandings of power, implying that the state cannot be neutral. Moreover, political expertise is not simply the domain of elites. Insurrectionist knowledges focus on local knowledge producers (Hill Collins and Bilge, Reference Hill Collins and Bilge2016: 196) and in doing so centre marginalized knowledge. While there is a modernist tension at play in terms of authenticity and truth, our focus is on the ways in which “the material conditions of lived experiences” are treated as “real,” but also as socially located and socially organized (Brown, Reference Brown2012: 43). These experiences are uttered through subjugated and suppressed voices that “[deconstruct] thin descriptions which reinforce dominant social stories and taken for granted everyday discourses” (45). The orientation towards the political expertise of marginalized actors is not premised on corroboration, but is rather seen as constitutive (Luchies, Reference Luchies2015: 528). As Ladner writes, CPS has not done this with respect to Indigenous peoples, rarely studying “traditional Indigenous political systems, traditional Indigenous political thought or why so many Indigenous nations created themselves as polities without power” (Reference Ladner2017: 166).

If scholars use the “right words,” does their writing automatically fall within the scope of insurrectionary knowledges? For example, in her discussion of decolonizing anti-racism, Dhamoon (Reference Dhamoon2015) addresses debates concerning identifying people of colour as settlers, critiquing Sharma and Wright's position (Reference Sharma and Wright2008–Reference Sharma and Wright2009) that migrants are not settler colonists and that Indigenous nationalisms “reproduce colonial logics” (Dhamoon, Reference Dhamoon2015: 22). Sharma and Wright engage with notions of colonialism, imperialism, and racialization. They criticize the global system of capitalism, and their analysis cautions against conflating different migration processes. However, as Dhamoon notes, their analysis adopts an “Oppression Olympics framework, whereby groups are positioned as if they are competing for the mantle of the most oppressed, without disrupting hegemonies of power” (Reference Dhamoon2015: 22). Further, they “deny historical Indigenous continuity of title,” ultimately adopting a perspective that feeds into Indigenous peoples’ dispossession (22–23). And, their dismissal of Indigenous nationalisms is located in “Western colonizing ontologies,” precluding nationalism of its “liberatory potential” (23). Critics of our approach might query whether Sharma and Wright's analysis “counts” as insurrectionary. How many of the four characteristics does scholarship need to embody? In many ways, Sharma and Wright's analysis does fall outside of the four aforementioned sites of reflection, particularly with respect to paying attention to local knowledge producers. However, we also signal that it is significant that this entire conversation occurs outside of our mainstream journals in CPS. It is tempting to suggest that there is a “right” way to employ foundational concepts, and in that gesture it is tempting to suggest one must define these concepts substantively in order to effectively chart what we are interested in examining. This approach is contrary to how we are deploying this language of intersectional anti-oppression scholarship, given our interest in charting conversations that are in process and contested. These conversations disrupt dominant narratives within our discipline, and they offer a site for methodological, conceptual and theoretical innovation; there is not a singular and definitive path for disruption. Consequently, we adopt these four broad commitments to assess the differences between gender and diversity research and research that uses an anti-oppression lens to interrogate the extent to which scholars within CPS use this lens and to understand why such approaches have remained marginal in CJPS/RCSP and CPSR.

CPS, Gender and Diversity

In this section, we map trends in CPS with respect to the discipline's treatment of gender and diversity. We read all abstracts published in CJPS/RCSP from its founding in 1968 until the first half of 2017 and CPSR from its founding in 2007 until the first half of 2016. After reading the abstracts and categorizing them as broadly addressing “diversity” issues depending on whether they talked about “women,” “gender,” “race,” “ethnicity,” “disability,” “sexuality” and other “diverse” social locations, we proceeded with a targeted search of specific keywords (addressed below) to ensure we could identify articles that not only addressed “diversity” writ large but also used an intersectional, anti-oppression lens. Reading abstracts allowed us to see whether and how scholars focused on similar questions during particular time periods, whereas using precise keywords helped us unearth articles that specifically engaged in intersectional, anti-oppression sites of reflection. While our examination of abstracts is not exhaustive, our goal is to provide readers with an understanding of broader trends. By providing a general assessment of how CPS scholars engage with gender and diversity research over time, we highlight what types of gender and diversity research are represented in CJPS/RCSP and CPSR at specific junctures. Our goal is to illustrate shifts in the way CPS scholars take up gender and diversity research; while an in-depth analysis of all of these articles is important in noting specific conceptual shifts, we hope that our analysis compels CPS scholars to understand general longitudinal trends in gender and diversity research.

We focused on abstracts because, first, abstracts provide a convenient summary of the article's primary preoccupations. Moreover, abstracts are significant given that they are intended to capture how authors themselves see their works’ central contributions. Second, the presence or absence of specific keywords in abstracts offers quantifiable insight into the volume of articles published on issues of gender, diversity and anti-oppression. It is possible for articles to take up questions of diversity and anti-oppression, but include none of our search terms in the abstract. Moreover, we recognize that certain sites of reflection outlined above, specifically the naming of complicity and privilege, might be more difficult to locate in the abstracts than others. We attempt to address these methodological issues by applying an extensive search term list and evaluating these abstracts not on their ability to include all four sites of reflection; rather, we read these abstracts to identify articles that aim to deconstruct longstanding structures of power complicit in the (re)production of inequality (Fairclough, 2013). By undertaking a critical discourse analysis of abstracts, we approached the discourses present in these abstracts not only as representing individual “texts” to be studied but as being in a dialectical relationship with other “objects, elements, and moments”; thus, discourses are imbued in “meaning-making” that reflects larger social and political norms (4). Furthermore, we integrated into our analysis “normative elements” that allowed us to identify ways to “mitigate” power imbalances (11). In doing so, we focus on the intersectional anti-oppression scholarship that exists and its analytical contribution to the discipline as a whole rather than address omissions. While absolutely crucial to this conversation, addressing why certain critical narratives are noticeably absent from these journals is beyond the scope of this paper. Abstracts remain a useful indicator for exploring what comprises mainstream CPS and for mapping scholarship that adopts an intersectional anti-oppression lens.

Our starting point was to assess “gender,” as gender scholars were the first to argue that differences—specifically, the differences between men and women—led to different political outcomes. We classified articles that featured women in politics, gender and politics, and feminist analysis as representing “gender” research. We considered research that centres different marginalized groups as constituting diversity research in adherence to Young's theory on the “politics of difference” (Reference Young1990), which drew attention to the way concepts such as morality and justice excluded historically oppressed groups. Specifically, we categorized articles that discussed disability, race, sexuality and other marginal identities and/or social locations as representing research on “diversity.” We decided to separate the two after noticing that gender scholars in CPS focus on sex and gender at the expense of analyzing diversity, with “gender” oftentimes used as a proxy for diversity. It was important to see what types of diversity research exist beyond a singular focus on gender.

Figure 1 illustrates an upward trend in the number of gender and diversity articles in CJPS/RCSP. In total, CJPS/RCSP has 109 gender and diversity articles. CPSR, in contrast, has consistently featured gender and diversity research since its founding, publishing 15 such articles. While there were only three gender and diversity articles in the 1970s and nine in the 1980s, there were 20 such articles in the 1990s and 44 from 2000 to 2009. From 2010 to the first half of 2017, there were 33 gender and diversity articles, most of which were part of CJPS/RCSP's special issue on “Finding Feminisms.” In fact, had it not been for “Finding Feminisms,” there would have been fewer gender and diversity articles than there were the previous decade. We cannot explain the decline; however, this suggests the possibility that gender and diversity researchers are taking their articles to specialized gender and politics journals. In any case, the determination of the special issue's guest editors to redress the “systemic biases around gender” in CPS by featuring “affirmative, activist-inspired academic research” (Dobrowolsky, et al., Reference Dobrowolsky, MacDonald, Raney, Collier and Dufour2017: 405), coupled with former CJPS/RCSP president Jill Vickers’ and then CJPS/RCSP editor-in-chief Graham White's active encouragement of the publication of this issue allowed it to come into fruition (406). This highlights, first, the importance of having a critical mass of scholars prompting attention to gender and diversity issues and, second, the intrinsic value in senior scholars fostering a supportive institutional environment for the dissemination of such research.

Figure 1 Number of ‘women’, ‘gender’, and ‘diversity’ articles in CJPS/RCSP and in CPSR

The rise in gender and diversity research in the 1990s and in the 2000s in CJPS/RCSP affirmed Vickers’ observation that scholars’ focus on “women and sex” in the 1970s and the 1980s later gave way to gender research (Reference Vickers2015: 760), which Vickers argued went beyond analysis of sex differences to consider how “politics and political science is gendered” and “operates ‘along many interrelated dimensions … sex and sexuality, family, race and nation, work and institutionalized relations of power and violence’” (752, citing Celis et al. Reference Celis, Kantola, Way and Weldon2013:17). From the 1990s onwards, we found articles on gender and social movements (Bashevkin, Reference Bashevkin1995, Reference Bashevkin1996; Perrault and Cardinal, Reference Perrault and Cardinal1996; Philips, Reference Philips1991; Smith, Reference Smith1998) and on gender, the constitution, and the courts (Dobrowolsky, Reference Dobrowolsky1998; Morton and Allen, Reference Morton and Allen2001).

Despite the inclusion of research in these areas, the overwhelming majority of articles on gender in CJPS/RCSP and in CPSR remained focused on electoral behaviour and on political participation. Table 1 shows that these articles make up 39 per cent in CJPS/RCSP and constitute 60 per cent in CPSR, amounting to 41 per cent overall. The dominance of articles on political behaviour compared to articles on public policy (15%), on social movements (13%), and on feminist political theory (11%) shows that gender researchers prioritized research on conventional modes of political participation, echoing CPS's traditional emphasis on these areas. This was the case even in the 1990s and in the 2000s.

Table 1 Number of Articles by Category

Yet the 1990s onwards saw an expansion in diversity research beyond gender. Rayside's piece (Reference Rayside1992) on the institutionalization of homophobia in England and Smith's paper (Reference Smith1998) on how the Canadian Charter affected the “gay liberation” movement in Canada were the first articles in CJPS/RCSP that recognized diversity as constituting more than simply gender. In the 2000s, CJPS/RCSP had articles on race (Besco, Reference Besco2015; Bilodeau et al., Reference Bilodeau, Turgeon and Karakoç2012; Hurwitz and Peffley, Reference Hurwitz and Peffley2010; Nath, Reference Nath2011; Thompson Reference Thompson2008) Thompson and Wallner, Reference Thompson and Wallner2011; and on disability (Prince, Reference Prince2001). “Finding Feminisms” included articles that for the first time in the journal's history substantively addressed transgender issues, gender fluidity and queer theory (F. MacDonald, Reference MacDonald2017; Manning, Reference Manning2017; Page, Reference Page2017), perhaps signalling the emergence of scholarship that “queers” CPS.

Also in the 2000s, CJPS/RCSP featured articles that recognized overlapping experiences of marginalization, as seen in Green's research (Reference Green2001, Reference Green2006) and Dick's (Reference Dick2006) on Aboriginal women, Abu-Laban and Couture's work on “multiple minorities” in the Alberta public school system (Reference Abu-Laban and Couture2010), Hankivsky's advocacy of diversity mainstreaming (Reference Hankivsky2005) and Hankivsky and Dhamoon's discussion of intersectionality (Reference Hankivsky and Dhamoon2013). In contrast, since its inception, CPSR has featured diversity articles, with articles on the experiences of intersectionally disadvantaged groups such as the LGBTQ population (Everitt, Reference Everitt2015; Everitt and Camp, Reference Everitt and Camp2009) and immigrant and visible minority women (O'Neill et al., Reference O'Neill, Gidendil and Young2012); however, as with the aforementioned gender articles, most of these diversity articles focus on political behaviour.

Our analysis shows that gender and diversity articles in CJPS/RCSP and CPSR remain rooted in political behaviour and political institutions, highlighting the continued relevance of Vickers’ observations (Reference Vickers1997) that because CPS is structured to study formal politics, research that deviates from top-down analyses of the state is less likely to be recognized as being part of the discipline.

The Need to Integrate an Anti-Oppression Lens in CPS

Our original sample of articles on gender and diversity is significantly reduced if we focus on articles that adopt an intersectional anti-oppression lens, suggesting that what counts as “diversity” scholarship is defined within disciplinary parameters. In total, 21 of the 109 gender and diversity articles in CJPS/RCSP and 1 of the 15 articles in CPSR reflect one, some or all of the four characteristics of an intersectional anti-oppression approach outlined above. Returning to these abstracts but using the terms (and their derivatives): oppression, dominance, settler colonialism, colonization, exploitation, marginalization, sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, heteronormativity, homonormativity, racism, poverty, settler, privilege, whiteness, white supremacy, intersectional, resistance, justice, liberation, Indigenous, citizenship, anti-oppression, and Aboriginality, yielded 22 more articles in CJPS/RCSP.

Articles in CJPS/RCSP and CPSR that adopt an intersectional anti-oppression approach disrupt specific concepts that have defined CPS including, but not limited to, identity (Hakivinsky and Dhamoon, Reference Hankivsky and Dhamoon2013; Nath, Reference Nath2011; Page, Reference Page2017; Thompson, Reference Thompson2008), Aboriginality (Ladner, Reference Ladner2017; Lugosi, Reference Lugosi2011, D. MacDonald, Reference MacDonald2007; Murray, Reference Murray2017; Panagos, Reference Panagos2007), sovereignty (Bruyneel, Reference Bruyneel2010; Green Reference Green2001, Reference Green2006; Hudon, Reference Hudon2017; Voth, Reference Voth2016), mobilization (Tungohan, Reference Tungohan2017) and equality (Abu-Laban and Couture, Reference Abu-Laban and Couture2010; Hakivinsky, Reference Hankivsky2005, Reference Hankivsky2012). While these concepts are an intrinsic part of CPS and are discussed extensively in CJPS/RCSP and CPSR, analysis typically reproduces structural forms of power inside and outside the discipline. For example, scholars have had a longstanding preoccupation with the relationship between equality and cultural accommodation, as indicated by the wealth of articles that evaluate the objectives of cultural accommodation in Canada (Kymlicka, Reference Kymlicka2010; Uberoi, Reference Uberoi2016; Wilson, Reference Wilson2009), the limits of tolerance (Banting, Reference Banting2010; Harell, Reference Harell2013; L. White, Reference White2003), and the impact of multicultural accommodation on national identity and unity (Johnston, Reference Johnston, Banting, Kymlicka and Soroka2010; Stolle et al., Reference Stolle, Harell and Soroka2016). Linking these articles together is their theorization of equality within liberal-democratic values of inclusion and individual autonomy, assessing state successes and shortcomings of Canadian multicultural policies according to their accommodation of minority cultural groups.

Critical of this lens's fixed understanding of culture, anti-oppression scholarship questions not only the state's reliance on a specific definition of culture to accommodate minorities but also highlights relationships of privilege that allow the state to define “reasonable accommodation” (Dhamoon, Reference Dhamoon2009; Green, Reference Green2001), further signalling that discourses like reasonable accommodation are governmentalities that strategically deploy culture as a red herring. Who decides what is reasonable? What if culture is not the most salient characteristic of one's identity? What are the implications for mainstream narratives of Canadian multiculturalism if we challenge the state's championing of culture? Adopting an anti-oppression approach raises questions that are not simply academic, but also present tangible theoretical implications.

Certain scholars (Alcantara and Davidson, Reference Alcantara and Davidson2015; Ladner, Reference Ladner2005; Voth, Reference Voth2016) assessing the state's treatment of Indigenous peoples have abandoned this traditional focus on institutional factors. For example, Alcantara and Davidson (Reference Alcantara and Davidson2015) compare the institutional and non-institutional factors influencing successful self-government negotiations between the federal government and specific Aboriginal groups. In doing so, they contend that a combination of these factors—policy evolution, territorial devolution, competition for land claims and internal cohesion among groups themselves—account for varying outcomes between self-government and land claim negotiation processes. While the incorporation of non-institutional factors enriches previous analyses of self-government negotiations in Canada (Ladner, Reference Ladner2017), these factors are assessed within a liberal democratic framework defined by the fundamental tension between the Government of Canada favouring “arrangements that respect the existing constitutional and legal orders of Canada,” and many Aboriginal groups seeking “their ability to exercise their right to self-determination” (Alcantara and Davidson Reference Alcantara and Davidson2015: 554). Despite naming this tension, the language of an intersectional anti-oppression framework is absent, submerging how racism and colonialism have shaped the self-government negotiation process. In focusing primarily on the “interplay between Indigenous people and the settler-state,” the authors’ conclusions reproduce the longstanding assumption that Indigenous resurgence in and of itself is a reactionary logic to settler-colonialism (Ladner, Reference Ladner2017: 167). As such, post-colonial narratives of self-government remain intact and form the basis for subsequent analyses of the Canadian state's “progress,” hindering any type of robust engagement with Aboriginal dissent regarding the negotiation process itself.

An intersectional anti-oppression lens therefore encourages examining how the language of diversity either frames the relationship between the Canadian state and Indigenous people within a liberal politics of recognition or ignores this relationship altogether. Prominent Indigenous politics scholars have adopted versions of this lens to reconfigure understandings of recognition (Coulthard, Reference Coulthard2014a, Reference Coulthard, Smith and Simpson2014b; Coulthard et al., 2014), citizenship (James, Reference James2014; A. Simpson, Reference Simpson2014), and sovereignty (Bruyneel, Reference Bruyneel2007; Ladner, Reference Ladner, Rocher and Smith2003). Not limited to Indigenous politics, this disruption of the liberal narrative of recognition also rethinks inclusion (Dhamoon, Reference Dhamoon2009, Reference Dhamoon and Gaon2010, Reference Dhamoon2013), nationalism (Bannerji, Reference Bannerji2000; Thobani, Reference Thobani2007; Walia, Reference Walia2013), and white privilege (S. Razack, Reference Razack1999). This list of examples is not exhaustive, nor does it imply a homogenous approach; this merely provides a snapshot of the utility of an anti-oppression lens in disrupting the concepts that reinforce uneven power dynamics between the state and oppressed populations, and the potential this lens holds for future work on identity.

In their reflection of these four characteristics of an intersectional anti-oppression framework, this body of scholarship contextualizes oppression. Analysis commences from a point of recognition that systems of power including, but not limited to colonialism, heteropatriarchy, racism and capitalism do not exist in isolation (Dhamoon, Reference Dhamoon2009; Hankivsky and Dhamoon, Reference Hankivsky and Dhamoon2013; Tungohan, Reference Tungohan2016). Rather, these systems overlap, positioning individuals within a more complex system of power that challenge binary approaches to theorizing identity (e.g. white/non-white, minority/majority, etc.) inherent in CPS (Abu-Laban and Couture, Reference Abu-Laban and Couture2010; Tungohan, Reference Tungohan2017). Relatedly, these scholars account for the unequal power dynamics that exist between themselves and the subjects being studied. The language of oppression/anti-oppression used in academia implicates this particular institution in the very systems of power that these scholars aim to disrupt. An analysis reliant on self-reflexivity highlights that while individual scholars have and continue to adopt an anti-oppression approach, it is not without complications.

Additionally, this scholarship challenges the assumed apolitical nature of oppression, questioning the argument that identity-based systems of privilege occur naturally. Highlighting how systems of power and privilege are socially constructed to further a state's agenda, the literature addresses the consequences these systems present for marginalized populations, providing a “critique of the work and vehicles of power” (Hankivsky and Dhamoon, Reference Hankivsky and Dhamoon2013: 901). By expanding our understanding of the “political,” analysis of oppression goes beyond formal legal and political institutions to include “informal” political realms. In doing so, prescriptions made by these scholars are transformative as they blur the boundaries of the state outlined in CPS.