(En)countering the Organizing Logics of the Canadian-State: Immigrant Perspectives amidst Settler-Colonial and Climate Crises

Abstract

Academic inquiry of the climate crisis is incomplete without attending to the impacts of settler-colonialism. By building on analyses and critiques of settler-colonial theory, this thesis argues that modern climate change and Canadian settler-colonialism are intertwined crises that must be linked and read together. With the perceived absence of racialized immigrant perspectives surrounding these crises, narrative methodologies and semi-structured interviews were used to showcase the opinions of immigrant-settlers living in Nova Scotia. Their stories, in addition to interviews with social movement activists, revealed insights into the organizing logics of the Canadian-State in promoting settler-ignorance. It also revealed some of the barriers and challenges that immigrants face with respects to engaging in grassroots politics within the diaspora. In addition to a critical self-reflection of activist-scholarship, this thesis contributes to discourses related to settler-environmentalism, Thobani’s theorizations of racial triangulation and the pathways for settler-solidarity with Indigenous resurgence across Canada and Abiayala.