(Un)Settling the Colonizer Within: Settler Life-Writing as Discursive Truth-Telling

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session Seventeen
  In Roundtable Session: UnSettling Social Studies: Difficult Knowledge and (Post)Colonial Legacies (Table 6)

Abstract

Pursuing truth in social studies education includes acknowledging how colonial discourse is reproduced both inside and outside of the classroom. This paper reports on how settler colonialism is discursively reproduced by the author’s practice of life-writing personal memories of growing up near one of Canada’s national parks. Analyzing discourse surfacing from memory and recollection can be an anti-colonial tool for settlers (as teachers or students) to confront uncomfortable truths in history and present and ongoing colonial violence. Writing in relation to land that is both beloved and contested, the author demonstrates, through a poststructuralist framing, how colonial subject positions are constituted through settler life-writing and how discourse analysis may reveal complicities and resistances to colonial subjectivities.

Author

• Kim Edmondson, University of Alberta
  Presenting Author