In 2022, we invited junior and senior scholars to share a 3-minute microlecture on the question:

“What are your lineages of insurgent and resurgent knowledges?”

Inspired by a set of microlectures organized by Rita Dhamoon and Glen Coulthard in 2010 at the Canadian Political Science Association annual conference that invited reflections on what decolonizing political theory could mean, we wanted to offer an intentionally expansive prompt that invited presenters to reflect on their intellectual, political, and community lineages, and to also invite and make space for embodied orientations to the political. This was an intentional intervention into a conventional political science space that elevates so-called objective knowledge and diminishes experiential and ancestral knowledge.

Rather than defining what we mean by the term’s “insurgent” and “resurgent” and our lineages, we asked participants to reflect on how insurgent and resurgent knowledges shape their methods, politics, and pedagogies, drawing from the communities in which they locate themselves, from their lineages of political practice, and/or their relationships to more-than-human life. 

To generate further conversation, we invited Dr. Ethel Tungohan and Dr. Debra Thompson to offer reflections on the threads of insurgent and resurgenmji8t knowledge that the microlecture participants brought into the room.

Below you will find the links, with suggested readings/links, to each microlecture and the analytical comments from the discussants.

Mariam Georgis

Mariam Georgis

Mariam Georgis is a scholar of global Indigenous politics. Her teaching and research is based on a global approach to colonialism, Indigeneities, and southwest Asia (Middle East). Globalizing colonialism to think about multiple frontiers of empire – Western and non-Western – and the complexity of race, borders and Indigeneities, she is engaged in research that builds a transnational understanding of Indigeneities, self-determination, sovereignty, and decolonization. Grounded in her positioning as an Assyrian, Indigenous to present-day Iraq, dis/replaced to stolen Indigenous lands in present-day Canada, she uses decolonial and Indigenous feminist approaches to disrupt and challenge contemporary understandings of southwest Asian politics and societies.

Christine Sy

Christine Sy

Please see my University faculty page at waaseyaa’sin Christine Sy . My most recent op-ed on Indigenous-Canadian politics and gender, co-authored with Joyce Green, is circulating in Windspeaker, Rabble, APTN, and East Kootenay News. Also forthcoming, Indigenous Womxn Write More Land (draft title), ed. (Wolsak & Wynn) and Introduction to Indigenous Feminism with Hokulani Aikau, Isabelle Altamirano-Jiménez, and Sarah Nickel (Routledge).

Note: The James Baldwin quote I refer to in this micro-lecture runs within the chapter called “Witness” (19:15-46:17) of I Am Not Your Negro (2016). While the opening discussion of trust and mistrust is relevant, the precise timestamp for the inspirational source is 20:53-23:21. Originally viewed through free streaming on CinemAfrica (July 1, 2020), at the time of writing, it can be viewed on TVO Today Docs on YouTube.

Lynn Ng Yu Ling

Lynn Ng

Lynn Ng Yu Ling Ling is a Banting postdoctoral fellow at York University, Canada. Her doctoral project compared and contrasted the eldercare regimes of Singapore and Taiwan, with a focus on the lived experiences of foreign domestic workers who migrate to East Asia as live-in caregivers. Her current project, “Care for All is Care that Pulls Us Through,” constructs a transnational and relational framework for care ethics and practice that prioritizes migrant care workers’ stories and voices. Her research analyzes the devaluation of care work(ers) from feminist political economy and racial capitalism perspectives that situate the broader structural injustices of gendered and racialized labor immigration policies.

She has written across a wide variety of scholar activist collectives, such as the Carework Network, Taiwan Insight, and Hong Kong-based Lausan, among others. She has undergraduate teaching experience in FPE, comparative politics, international relations, and global development courses. In her view, insurgent resurgent knowledge is dynamic, diversifying, and vibrant across place, space, and time. They feel like a chaotic jumble of experiments in thought and action which can look very different but are all oriented to imagining alternative worlds of caring.

Tari Ajadi

Tari Ajadi

Tari Ajadi is an Assistant Professor in Black Politics at McGill University. His research analyses how Black activists in mid-sized cities in Canada strategize to prompt change in policing and in health policy. He is a Board Member with the East Coast Prison Justice Society, and a co-author of the Defunding the Police: Defining the Way Forward for HRM report released January 2022.

Rebecca Major

Rebecca Major

Rebecca Major is a Métis and Mi’kmaq scholar that also has settler ancestries, holding the NVD Research Chair of Northern Governance and serving as an Associate Professor in Indigenous Governance at Yukon University. Additionally, she is an adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Windsor. Her areas of expertise include Canadian Indigenous public policy, Indigenous governance and politics, Indigenous land and governance claims, policy learning, Indigenous feminism, intersectionality, and knowledge systems.

Rebecca also brings valuable hands-on experience in Indigenous governance, having previously worked in Métis administration as a policy advisor in Environment and Inter-governmental Affairs. She has also held leadership roles as a Métis local president in Saskatoon and Area Representative for the Métis Nation-Saskatchewan; Western Region 2A. In addition to her teaching and research responsibilities, Rebecca dedicates much of her time to community service and advancing equity and Indigenization initiatives within the university.

Guntas Kaur

Guntas Kaur

Guntas Kaur is a Punjabi Sikh community-based researcher, policy analyst and PhD student in Sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her academic research broadly explores the possibilities of Indigenous-Sikh solidarity through historical anti-colonial linkages and contemporary intercultural connections. Her doctoral work in particular, is centred in exploring the future of Punjabi language in the Canadian diaspora and the interconnectedness between the preservation of Punjabi language outside of Punjab, and the revitalization and reclamation of Indigenous languages in settler Canada.

Through her work, Guntas hopes to engage the academy in two seemingly divergent perspectives (Punjabi-Sikh and Indigenous) and envision a future where oppression is no longer a prerequisite to solidarity building between communities.

Dani Magsumbol

Dani Mugsumbol

Dani Mugsumbol is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Politics at York University, Toronto, Canada. As a child of the Filipina labour diaspora who was also one of the waves of Filipino nursing graduates in the 2010s, this project is close to Dani’s heart; the relationships she has with her families, both kin and found, are at the heart of her scholarly endeavours. Her focus is informed by her own relations of care and kinship with the Filipino Canadian community. Her current research is firmly situated at the juncture where labour & migration studies, Canadian studies, and Filipino-Canadian studies intersect.

Tka Pinnock

Tka Pinnock

Tka Pinnock is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at York University, and a graduate affiliate of the Centre for Feminist Research and the Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean.Her research interests lie at the intersection of feminist political economy, political ecology, and critical development studies where she explores the everyday politics of ‘life-work.’ Her doctoral project explores the ways in which the ‘life-work’ of craft workers in Jamaica is re/shaped by contemporary economic development processes and their constructions of indigeneity as a political-economic response.

An avid community volunteer, Tka contributes to both her local and diaspora communities and engages in community-based research. Her doctoral research, leadership and volunteerism have received several awards and scholarships and awards, including the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, The Grace and David Taylor Graduate Scholarship in Caribbean Studies, and the Kappa Kappa Gamma Foundation of Canada Scholarship.

Anita Girvan

Anita Girvan

Anita Girvan is part of an extended family of Afro-Caribbean (Jamaica) diasporic settlers and was raised on Lheidli T’enneh land. She currently lives on Syilx Okanagan Nation land and is mother of 2 humans and co-nurturer with plant life. She is enchanted by metaphor, poetry and music and how larger-than-human relations are captured by, but also escape or challenge human representational systems. She is a player with words and voice in the tradition of call-and-response. In attempting to listen differently for liberatory futures, she is inspired by Black feminist, Indigenous & people-of-colour coalitional thought and creative practice.

She is currently assistant professor of cultural studies and environmental justice at UBC, Okanagan. She is grateful to be in community with the IRK folx there and with extended communities who share political and creative commitments in shaping coalitional time in planetary space.

Rita Kaur Dhamoon

Rita Kaur Dhamoon

Rita Kaur Dhamoon is an auntie, sister, daughter, anti-racist feminist, scholar, educator and learner, and aspiring artist and drummer. Her ancestors hail from Amritsar Punjab, where her great grandparents and grandfathers fought against British colonialism. She currently lives on the lands of the Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ Nations where they work to restore the camas and clam beds, honor the salmon and eagle, and expand their language speakers.

Her insurgent/resurgent knowledge is rooted in the teachings of her mother and the other women in her family. It is also grounded in anti-racist feminism, anti-colonial and decolonial politics, and anti-capitalism. She loves to play with paint, pastels, and charcoal. By tapping into the creative arts, I hope to honour the power and history of my ancestors and the communities who disrupt rule/control and advance liberatory beingness.

Ethel Tungohan

Ethel Tungohan

Ethel Tungohan is a Canada Research Chair in Canadian Migration Policy at York University. She has also been appointed as a Broadbent Institute Fellow. Her research looks at precarious migrants, migrant labor, migrant activism, migrant motherhood and global care chains, Filipino-Canadian studies, diaspora studies, and critical race studies. She specializes in socially engaged research and is actively involved in grassroots migrant organizations such as Gabriela-Ontario and Migrante-Canada. Her book, Care Activism (University of Illinois Press) won the National Women’s Studies Association First Book Prize! See https://www.tungohan.com/research/.

Debra Thompson

Debra Thompson

Debra Thompson is the Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University. A member of the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists, she is internationally recognized as a leading scholar of the comparative politics of race. Her teaching and research interests focus on the relationships between race, the state, and inequality in democratic societies.

Dr. Thompson’s book, The Schematic State: Race, Transnationalism, and the Politics of the Census (Cambridge University Press, 2016) is a study of the political development of racial classifications on the national censuses of the United States, Canada, and Great Britain.  Her best-selling second book, The Long Road Home: On Blackness and Belonging (Scribner Canada, 2022) is equal parts a personal meditation, penetrating analysis, and pointed social critique of the dynamics of race and belonging over time and across the Canadian-U.S. border.