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In the colonial Caribbean, European fathers of children born to African (enslaved or freed) island mothers might choose to acknowledge 'their' children through processes of recognition 'by repute' - evidenced through being named in baptismal records, the use of the paternal family name and, in particular, recognition in wills. Being accepted as 'a reputed child' carried crucial socio-economic benefits, and not infrequently resulted in children being taken to Britain for education and/or re-settlement. This paper focuses on the use of a father's last testament to provide for and control a legacy for his 'reputed children'. It draws attention to the use of children to provide heirs for fathers lacking legitimate ones, exemplifying processes of assimilation which not only asserted the primacy of paternal lineage but also required the erasure of maternal heritage. This paper reflects on the implications of the supressed/forgotten metropolitan legacy of paternal recognition 'by repute', and argues the importance of recovering a maternal (and island) inheritance.

This thesis examines the student subject in institutional policies directed at undergraduate students at the University of Lethbridge. The central research questions are: Who is the student subject imagined and produced by such policies? What norms circulating within these policies fashion a particular kind of student subject? Universities are stratified workplaces, and policies directed towards students regulate and govern student behaviour, as well as their student experiences. Using a feminist post-structural discourse analytic, I examined the student subject in 17 University of Lethbridge policies that apply to undergraduate students. While the student subject is expected to follow a trajectory of success that includes specific modes of behaviour and performance, the student subject exercises agency. To illustrate student agency, a description of some activism initiatives led by students demonstrates how students challenge the ideal student narrative and forge a path towards more equity and accessibility for all university community members.

Seven collaborators in this project used PhotoVoice, a visual participatory action methodology, to explore the complexity of violence as it is lived, represented, and (re)defined in the context of queer non/monogamous communities in Lethbridge, Alberta. Critically engaging with the themes of neoliberalism, oversimplified positivity discourse, and the intersections of power and identity that often shape spaces of non/monogamies, collaborators considered prevailing narratives of violence within their communities, and how these narratives challenge or sustain conventional gender-based heteronormative models of relationship violence. Through the participatory process, collaborators troubled what constitutes and qualifies violence, how violence is talked about, and made more explicit connections between interpersonal, community, and state violence. The visual and participatory approach was instrumental in reconceptualizing and making meaning from the complexities of violence in their lives and their communities; in particular, image-based storytelling challenges the role of language in facilitating and constraining the (un)speakability of violence.

In this paper, we discuss an assignment we developed whose goal was to “unsettle” settler consciousness and critically foster a grounded politics of location amongst our postsecondary students. We analyze some of the important and sundry risks of taking learning from the classroom to the land, focusing on some of the assignment’s assumptions, effects, contradictions and complications. Drawing upon Moten & Harney’s urging of a “studying with and for,” Stuart Hall’s “politics without guarantees,” and Leanne Simpson’s “land as pedagogy,”we present our experiment in teaching as an exciting opportunity for learning – one that though rooted in aspirations towards more decolonial presents in our classrooms, is still always also deeply implicated in who gets made as a subject with access to the goods and protections of the colonial present within and outside of the university.

In November 2011, the British Columbia Supreme Court released its judgement in Reference re: s.293 of the Criminal Code of Canada, upholding the prohibition on polygamy as constitutional. The Polygamy Reference, as it is known, concluded that the pressing and substantial objective of s. 293 is the prevention of harm to women, to children, and to the institution of monogamous marriage. This paper analyzes the submissions made by the feminist legal education organization, West Coast LEAF, one of the few feminist 'voices' taken seriously by the court. The apprehension of polygamy's harms was central to the Reference case. West Coast LEAF offered one of the most nuanced interpretations of how the criminal prohibition on polygamy should be interpreted with respect to harm. Yet as this paper argues, its position conceals and is underpinned by racialized relations of power that, however unwittingly, give weight to and indeed require the racial logic of white settler state sovereignty articulated in the Polygamy References' overall narrative.

This special issue of the Onati Socio-Legal Series offers inter-disciplinary, feminist perspectives that collectively ‘re-think’ the institution of marriage, not only in the field of legal discourse and institutions but also in the humanities and social sciences as well as through activisms. With a focus on jurisdictions in Europe, North America and Africa, the articles included in this issue challenge normative assumptions about marriage, reconsider forms of conjugality, re-write judicial interpretations and problematize legal and activist interventions and reasonings.

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As part of the U.S. federal elections in November 2008, voters in California narrowly passed Proposition 8, a ballot initiative that eliminated same-sex marriage rights in that state. Against this political-legal backdrop, the movie Milk, based on the life of gay activist Harvey Milk, was released to audiences across North America. Proposition 8 and its aftermath infused social and cultural meaning into the critical acclaim Milk publicly received, and the movie itself became a way to both galvanize and anchor support for gay (marriage) rights. I contend that there is a particular racialization of queer sexuality and proximity to whiteness that links this moment of law and culture together. The paper examines the “knitted-togetherness” of the film’s racially normative representations and the racializing of homophobia that occurred on both sides of the Proposition 8 debate, one that continues the protracted fractioning of race as separate from sexuality within mainstream lesbian/gay politics

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