Presented at the Annual Conference of the CPSA at Université de Québec à Montréal, 12 June 2024
With Words of Welcome from Elodie Jacquet, Ph.D. Candidate, Simon Fraser University and Comments by Melissa Williams, Professor, University of Toronto
***********
Merci beaucoup Elodie for acknowledging the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation as the custodians of the territories in which we are gathering, and acknowledging that Tiohtià:ke has long been a gathering place for many Indigenous peoples. I’m very grateful to be here; I have made a donation to the Montreal Indigenous Community Network. I know that this donation is symbolic, but I intend it to make my acknowledgement of the Indigenous peoples of these territories somewhat more meaningful. In a similar spirit of acknowledging what I take and my gratitude for that, I have also made a donation to Stella Montreal.
Merci à UQÀM. Thank you for listening to your students, and also thank you for your generous room rental policy. Merci beacoup à André Lecours for taking the initiative for finding this room; merci beacoup à Gustavo Santafé, Anne-Marie D’Aoust, et Justin Massie, our wonderful UQÀM colleagues. Thank you to all CPSA staff, Program Chair, Valérie Vézina, and Local Arrangements Coordinators, Deb Thompson and Amy Janzwood for making all of this possible.
Merci à vous tous/toutes d’etre ici.
In this address, I present an understanding of voice politics within our disciplinary community. I reveal a power dynamic among and between voices that are differently embodied and thus differently positioned. In particular, I reveal a disconnect between the dominant voices of political science and the more marginalized voices of those who experience sexist, racist, ableist, classist, and other forms of oppression.
Over the past 8 months, my understanding of the political concept of voice has been both challenged and deepened. The horrific and tragic attack by Hamas on Israelis on the 7th of October, the unrelenting and excessive violence by the government of Israel, the intensification of both anti-Judaism and Islamophobia world-wide, the turmoil on our campuses, and the teargassing of our students – all of this has weighed, and continues to weigh, heavily on me, as I’m sure it does on you too. While the understanding of voice that I present today is rooted in my own experiences as a political scientist of Japanese-Canadian ancestry, this has been the larger context for my thinking.
For this address, my exploration of voice focuses on two kinds of texts. One set is the published presidential addresses over the 111-year history of the CPSA. These texts are signifiers of what is valued as political science, and who are valued as political scientists. They represent dominant narratives about our discipline, including its concerns, frameworks, and methodologies, as they consolidate and shift, and consolidate and shift, over time. Where there is dominance, there is resistance. Looking closely, we can see a tradition of certain presidents articulating ideas intended to nuance, challenge, and subvert established assumptions and practices. We can see a persistent breaking of silence to give voice to or to amplify the voices of excluded communities. In certain presidential addresses, we see methodologies that are explicitly critical and transformative of existing systems that are oppressive.
The second set of texts come from my family. As an interpretivist, I understand myself to be implicated in my studies. Like others employing interpretive methodology, I design research projects to leverage my embeddedness. Interpretive approaches involve embracing the necessary participation of our selves in our analyses specifically to develop novel insights into social and political phenomena and to generate interesting, trustworthy, and relevant theory. For this paper, I employ elements from autoethnography to examine my experiences as a Yonsei or fourth-generation Japanese-Canadian who was raised by a single mother – an artist and a Sansei (third-generation) – and who grew up with Nisei (second-generation) grandparents – resilient and dignified even as they, their brothers, sisters, kids, and other family members, were incarcerated in the livestock building at Hastings park, internment camps in British Columbia’s Slocan Valley, and in a northern Ontario POW camp, for the “peril” they were considered to pose.
The exercise of exploring these two sets of texts in parallel reveals a disconnect between overarching narratives of political science and human experiences of suffering, resistance, and resilience. It clarifies to me the work that needs to be done to address what I think should be the central concerns of political science: Humans, their relationships of domination and subordination, and the voices of those who suffer oppression and seek liberation. These concerns are not outside us and do not lie in institutions and structures beyond us. Instead, they are personal, interpersonal, and transgenerational, and they emerge in and from everyday interactions among humans. These interactions are the substance of larger political systems such as patriarchy, racialization, and capitalism. Often this very real terrain of politics, involving people being othered – being shunned, excluded, displaced, incarcerated, and killed – is obscured in and by the dominant approaches and foci of our discipline. Sometimes this obscuring takes the form of overlooking, and sometimes of erasing. Sometimes the obscuring is self-imposed by those who existence necessitates hiding or whose wellbeing involves membership in hidden communities. Understanding politics requires a range of methodological approaches, including those that are more relational, more trust-oriented, and more attentive to voices and realities that are obscured. At times, I believe, we should deploy our skills in solidarity with communities experiencing violence and toward their liberation.
Text
Eighty presidential addresses have been published over the history of the CPSA. At first glance, three themes of dominance are clear: Language, racialization, and gender. Seventy-eight of the 80 addresses were published in English, three were published in French. The first was by Georges-Henri Levesque in 1952, the second by Léon Dion in 1975, and the third by André Lecours in 2023 (Lecours published his in both French and English). Seventy-six addresses were given by those who present as White and whom I presume to be White. Sixty-six addresses were given by individuals presenting as men. This dominance, as Jill Vickers argued in her presidential address, and has argued over her career, has implications for “political science as a ‘cognitive community’ that shares ideas about what ‘counts’ as ‘politics’ and what constitutes ‘science’” (2015, 748). Indeed, a deeper wade into the texts reveals key themes that vary by gender. These are expressed in concept prevalence clouds. Cloud 1 reveals the most prevalent concepts in all presidential addresses. The top 10 concepts include Canadian, governs, states, nations, party, policy, federation, economics, publics, and powers. The cloud also includes rights, women, Quebecers, liberals, constitution, interests, institutions, ministers, and gendering. Derived from all addresses, we can understand this cloud as representing the dominant narrative about the concerns of political science.
Cloud 2 is derived from the presidential addresses by men (n=66). As expected, there is substantial overlap between the first and second clouds. The most prevalent concepts remain Canadians, governs, states, nations, party, as well as federations, policy, economics, publics, and Quebecers. Other prevalent concepts shared between the two clouds are powers, liberals, rights, interests, constitution, culture, ministers, peoples, elections, and individuals. Notably, the second cloud is silent on women and gendering. This cloud represents a concentration of the dominant narrative in Cloud 1.
Cloud 3 contains the most prevalent concepts in presidential addresses by women (n=14). Immediately striking is that Canadians and women are the two most prevalent concepts. These are followed by gendering, states, policy, government, rights, public, legislators, and feminists. Also included are powers and institutions. This cloud reveals that women presidents, like men presidents, are interested in what are taken as the classic topics of our discipline. But women presidents are also keenly interested in what other women and genders are doing and what they are experiencing. Moreover, women presidents articulate concerns for diversity, groups, violence, Indigenous peoples, welfare, colonialism, and immigration. Removing the men, we see a distillation of concerns for the interplay among the personal, systemic, and structural. In this light, Cloud 3 signifies a tradition of women scholars pushing for space for other women and other minoritized peoples, and for research and methodologies that address their concerns.
Taking a dive into the presidential texts reveals a tradition of women presidents challenging the dominant concerns of political science. In this tradition, we can see that women normalize the terms “feminism” and “feminist” (Past-Presidents Andrew, Bashevkin, Colllier, and Vickers, for example). Women engage intersectionality in their analyses (Past-Presidents Jenson and Gidengil, as examples). Women include discussions of LGBTQIA2S communities (Past-Presidents Smith and Everitt, for instance). Women critically examine colonialism (Past-Presidents Abu-Laban and Arneil) and discuss Indigenous peoples as well as other racialized and minoritized communities (Past-Presidents Abu-Laban, Collier, and Timlin). Women expand political science to include interpersonal violence and genocide (Past-Presidents Arneil and Collier). This deeper dive also reveals the contribution of one president who centered racialization and racism in his address, Vincent Wilson, the only Black president – so far – of the CPSA.In naming these communities and experiences, these presidents contribute to legitimating them as concerns of our discipline.
While in these addresses, the dominant narrative about political science has expanded to include a broader range of issues and voices, we also see troubling absences. Major events and themes related to gross violations of principles of justice, involving unspeakable violence, and causing tremendous suffering to humans, communities, and their descendants, are not discussed. We must continue to expand our discipline’s concerns, ethics, and methodologies to see, listen to, take seriously, and act in solidarity with those seeking justice, liberation, and peace.
Tradition and Community
My voice comes from a tradition and community that runs parallel to the history of political science. It comes from my family, in particular my Mother, Tsuneko, and Ojiichan and Obaachan, Hideo and Eiko. My great-grandfather came to BC around 1900, likely part of what Mabel Timlin, the first woman president of the CPSA, referred to in her 1960 address as “an unusual entry of Japanese” to Canada. Timlin notes that, Clifford Sifton, at the time Minister of the Interior and responsible for immigration, disapproved of “orientals” (Timlin 1960, 519). Fortunately for my family, and the rest of the Japanese-Canadian community, Sifton failed in his attempt to use educational tests to bar entry of “oriental labour” (Timlin 1960, 519-520). My Japanese ancestors were fishers and farmers; they were not formally educated. They would not have made it into Canada. In this sense, the existence of my Grandfather, Mother, and all of our Canadian-born family members are tied into a failed policy initiative.
Our existence is also tied into a tradition of resilience. But, just as Japanese-Canadian settlers were prosperous in fishing and farming, they were also active in displacing Indigenous families, communities, and nations. My family settled in Musqueam territories at ’qʷeyaʔχʷ stal’ə’w (hoyoa stalo), the mouth of the now called the Fraser River. They had complex relationships with the Musqueam community; they would fish together, and trade salmon and herring roe. Members of my family recount how members of Musqueam families were warm to them; a stark contrast to how White settlers treated them. Despite these bonds, the reality is that my family was not invited into Musqueam territories.
My Ojiichan, Hideo, was born in Steveston, BC in 1913, the same year that the CPSA was established. In the very first presidential address in 1914, Adam Shortt made two assertions that could be understood as both normatively and empirically writing out of political science history Indigenous peoples, nations, and sovereignty, as well as settlers who were racialized as “orientals”. Firstly, he claims that, at essence, the “imperial relationship” between Great Britain and its colonies is “a shared racial basis,” which presumably was a reference to Anglo-Saxon; secondly, he claims that this shared racialization as White therefore brings with it a British type of government (1914, 61). In this inaugural address, Indigenous life histories, ways of living, and standing as sovereign peoples with their own forms of governance were erased. Similarly, non-Anglo-Saxon settlers, and their claims to standing as members of the Canadian polis,were erased. It is only in 2017 that a president, Yasmeen Abu-Laban, critically examines the foundations of the White settler-colonial Canadian state and the role of early political scientists in consolidating them.
Despite the systemic racism, expressed in restrictions on immigration, the denial of the right to vote, limits on the allocation of fishing and logging licences, and bans on taking up certain forms of employment, my family stayed and grew. My Obaachan, Eiko, came to Canada, from Hikone Prefecture, as Hideo’s wife, in about 1936. She was 18 years old. By her 24th birthday, she was living in the Lemon Creek internment camp. With her was my Auntie, Etsuko, who was a toddler. Throughout the BC, there were other women and children internees from Steveston, Japan-towns in Vancouver and Victoria, Clayoquot Island just off Tofino, and many other coastal communities. Men were held separately and forced to do physical labor. More than 700 men were imprisoned in Angler, Ontario, a POW Camp. My Ojiichan was one of them. It is well known that not a single charge was of disloyalty was laid against the more than 22,000 incarcerated Japanese-Canadians. Meanwhile, my Mother, Tsuneko, was in Japan, on an extended visit with Hideo’s parents. When the war with Japan began, Tsuneko, just five years old, was unable to return home to her parents. Decades later, in the late-1980s, she was initially denied “apology money” because the Canadian government claimed it was better for her to remain in Japan during the war than to return to Canada to be interned.
While the Japanese-Canadian community, including my family, was dispersed and incarcerated, the dominant narrative of political science in Canada forged ahead. In 1943, C.A. Dawson gave his presidential address to the CPSA, which can be read as rationalizing the treatment of the Japanese-Canadians. According to Dawson, the Japanese “bear a physiological badge that destines them to be… perpetually strange and alien.” Nonetheless, he goes on, the Japanese do “have human characteristics and virtues quite akin” to those of the “White race,” which, had he had more time in his address, he would have demonstrated – so he claims (1943, 296).
When I was growing up, I was frustrated by what I perceived as silence among my Japanese-Canadian family about their experiences of racism, racist policies, and the racist state. In fact, they were using their voices all along in ways that were political.
For example, Eiko used her voice through her physical presence and presentation to articulate her strength and humanity. She, like so many other women carried their sewing machines as they boarded trains and buses to the internment camps. She, like so many of them, made a point of dressing elegantly throughout the interment. Style transcends fashion; and what I see in this photo is that it expresses the self, the self’s autonomy and dignity. In this photo, I hear my Obaachan saying: “You can take away our property, our homes, and our livelihoods, and you can split up our families. But you will not take away who we are.”
After being released from the POW camp in Angler, Ojiichan chose Japan over “east-of-the-Rockies” – the two options given by the Canadian government to the Japanese-Canadians. There, he found work for the US Occupation forces. Members of my family felt an enormous sense of shame for having been incarcerated by the Canadian state. In Japan, members of Japanese-Canadian and Japanese-American communities experienced even more shame for not being “Japanese-Japanese.” Instead of letting the shame consume him, Ojiichan leaned into his work as a driver, housekeeper, and cook for several US military officers. Quite akin to the “White race,” he cleaned the house, prepared meals, and cared for kids. This is of a letter of recommendation from McGlachlin Hatch, in which he writes of my Ojiichan’s loyalty, honesty, and good nature. Who my Ojiichan was, was a challenge to dominant stereotypes. Who he was, was his voice. His work for the Hatch family enabled him to support his now reunited family in Hikone and, when the Canadian government finally permitted, to return to Steveston and rebuild. Years later, we would all enjoy his blend of American cooking – roast chicken, mash potatoes, and lemon merengue pie – with Japanese home cooking – miso shiro soup, sukiyaki hotpots, and baked salmon. For me, this too was Ojiichan exercising his voice, politically, bringing us together to heal from the trauma of war and to continue moving forward as a family.
In 1957, just three years after my family’s return to Canada, my Mother went to art school to study painting with Jack Shadbolt. She was one of a handful of “Asians” in the entire school. The presence of these students created an opening to the normalizing of Japanese and Chinese within the Vancouver arts community. They represented a challenge to existing power structures within this community, and they pushed the boundaries around who artists are and what art is.
Just after graduating, she married my biological father, Murray. This too was political, pushing established norms concerning racialization and marriage. It was not as political as interracial procreation. My Father once told me a story about his dining out with my Mother, who was pregnant with me, and my Brother Aaron, who was five. This was in the late-1960s. Sitting at an adjacent table was another White man and his family. Murray recalls overhearing this man ask his family, rhetorically: “It’s ok to marry one, but to have kids with one?” I know how that comment felt in my Mother’s body because I felt it too. I still feel it when I’m being “othered,” and when I witness others being “othered”. Tsuneko would become a single mother, working multiple jobs to support us; eventually, she would return to full-time art. Themes prominent in her work relate to the horrors of war and the possibilities for healing in beauty – enjoying the cool sweetness of watermelon during an air raid. Commenting on her 2022 retrospective show, curator Maggie Tchir writes that my Mother “chose a path ‘to explore and offer a way out of strife, and into beauty, if only for an instant’” (2022). My Mother’s various works speak to the trauma she experienced but also to “the great generative beauty of lives lived, and places that speak of healing and truth – of gardens and plants, of forests and the ocean” (Tchir 2022). My Mother’s voice – expressed through her decisions to pursue art, to marry my father, and to have kids with him – has always been deeply personal and political.
I have come to realize that the experiences of my family – experiences with wide-spread anti-Asian racism and racist state policies, and with healing and regeneration – motivated me to pursue an education in political science. This was not always clear to me. In my initial studies and early-career, I was interested in the dominant threads of Anglo-American political theory. What appealed to me was the ideal of fundamental moral equality, which ran through the writings of John Rawls and other liberal theorists. Academic discussions of multiculturalism, also popular at the time, extended this principle to a range of communities. Feminists within political theory’s mainstream of the 1990s further expanded the application of this principle. I appreciated these discussions about theories of justice, democracy, and representation, but I knew they were fundamentally disconnected from my lived experiences.
In the 2010s, a deep shift in my thinking and scholarship resulted from my volunteering with women-serving organizations in the Downtown Eastside (DTES) of Vancouver, and specifically with organizations serving sex workers. Relationships that I developed – including with my now long-time collaborator, sex worker rights activist, Kerry Porth – made me critically interrogate dominant narratives about communities of sex workers – narratives that I had internalized from mainstream feminism of the 1980s and 1990s. Collaborating with Kerry made me understand the necessity of using my privilege as a researcher to contribute to ending the oppression of sex workers – oppression that takes the form of stigma, specifically, “whorephobia,” criminal laws focused on sex work, and law enforcement campaigns that conflate trafficking with sex work. To develop meaningful scholarship, I have learned that I have to build relationships of trust with community members. This involves making commitments to them, and keeping them, to not further stigmatize them by advancing false narratives about, for example, abolishing sex work by criminalizing either the sale of sexual services, the purchase of these services, or both (in fact, criminal laws specific to sex work only increase the risk of violence against sex workers) and, for example, the relationship between sex work and sex trafficking (in fact, sex work is work, and trafficking is a form of violence that occurs in many industries). It also involves working with community members not as research subjects or participants but as partners, and it means remaining accountable to them. It also means ensuring that research outputs are not locked behind paywalls or buried in academic jargon, and that they include accessible community reports, presentations, and other forms of communication. For our current project entitled Sex and Solidarity! we have developed a series of informative (and engaging) comic strips centering three university students – Selina, Jaz, and Julie – as they learn about what sex work is, the diversity of sex workers, the harms of criminalizing sex work, and the need to normalize sex work as work.
The methodology that Kerry and I have developed is explicitly solidaristic. Through our work, we seek to advance the human and labor rights of sex workers, and the destigmatization and decriminalization of the industry. Our broader argument is that, where evidence is clear that practices, policies, and institutions cause grave harms, researchers focusing on these areas have responsibilities to ensure that their projects contribute to the justice and liberation struggles of communities experiencing those harms.
In recent months, my understanding of solidaristic research approaches has been challenged as I have read works of Abu-Laban, who was the first Palestinian president of the CPSA, and Abigail B. Bakan, who is Jewish, as I have interacted with members of the CPSA’s Reconciliation Committee, and as I have witnessed the acts of courage by so many students. Here again, these texts run alongside those of family members, two of whom recently graduated with MDs and are now moving on to placements as interns – one in family medicine; the other in surgery. My nieces Anisah and Nasreen navigate their lives in the United States as doctors, as young Muslim women, and as third-generation Palestinians living in the west. Their experiences encourage me to ensure that my narrative includes them.
This afternoon, I have explored stories in the texts of presidential addresses and in those of my family. The disconnect between them enables me to see, very clearly, what should be the central concerns of our discipline. As political scientists, we have responsibilities to call attention to violence, to study it, to theorize it, and sometimes to do something about it. We have the tools and expertise to engage in this scholarship in ways that are conceptually nuanced, critically reflexive, methodologically rigorous, and evidence-based, and that is thoughtful, compassionate, and anti-oppressive. We need to combat oppression, including Islamophobia, anti-Judaism, anti-Palestinian racism, and anti-Jewish racism. We need to condemn organizations, institutions, and states that commit violence against innocent humans. Ultimately, we need to deploy our knowledge, methodologies, and other resources toward peace. To do so, we must tend to and amplify the voices of those who experience oppression. Human suffering, human relations of domination and subordination, and pathways toward liberation for all are the rightful and, in my mind, central concerns of political science.
Merci beaucoup tout le monde/thank you so much everyone. It’s been the deepest honor of my professional life to have served you as President of the CPSA.
************
