Liberal "Othering" and the Settler Colonial Imagination

• In Event: Theoretical Criminology Panel: Psychosocial and Cultural Criminology

Abstract

One of the features supposedly unique to the neoliberal governance of crime is the construction of crime as a set of problems not just to be responded to, but to be prevented through the management of "at-risk" individuals. This mirrors explanations for state intervention in the lives of Indigenous people throughout the course of Canadian history: that the failure to properly integrate Indigenous children results in a threat to the safety and stability of non-Indigenous society. In present-day crime prevention programming this is expressed in language that constructs Indigenous youth as imminent threats or failures in need of management and training. This lines up with what Jock Young (2007) has called "liberal othering" where the potential criminal is constructed by well-meaning outsiders as lacking the skills and behaviors necessary to make it in a society they take for granted to be good. Often this liberal construction is deployed in deliberate attempts to resist the conservative casting-out of the villainized "other". Using a cultural criminological lens, this analyses case studies in community-based crime prevention programming directed at Indigenous youth in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada to explore how racist tropes can be reproduced or resisted in the search for alternatives to tough-on-crime policy.

Author

• Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land, CUNY Graduate Center