Digital Colonialism and the Fourth Industrial Revolution - Preventing Exploitative Bio-economies

As the traditional use of non-human genetic resources in research and development is increasingly ceded to computerised research activities, current frameworks for access and benefit-sharing face an impending identity crisis. The absence of international consensus on the regulation of digital sequence information presents a critical point of social division between the Global North and Global South, whereby a culture of "open data" promises immeasurable opportunity in high-income nations and threatens a wave of digital bio-piracy for vulnerable communities. This article critically evaluates these problems and considers solutions which draw on Indigenous Data Sovereignty principles. To do so, it uses the recent experience in Queensland to explore how the law might reconcile and balance these competing interests. Insofar as Queensland is one of the most mega biodiverse regions on earth, boasts a globally competitive life sciences sector, and has a vibrant and longstanding Indigenous population, it offers a unique case study.

Making the road caminando de otra manera: Co-constructing decolonial community psychologies from the Global South

Current discussion on coloniality dismantles structures embedded in neoliberal capitalism that maintain and perpetuate social pathologies. Theories and praxes emerging from Abya Yala (North, Central, and South America) provide academic and nonacademic contributions to co-construct community psychologies de otra manera (otherwise). These accountable ways of knowing and acting in cultural context and local place, become ways of making counterculture to inform decolonial community psychologies. The epistemologies of the Global South have produced invaluable teachings for transformative revisions of community psychology within frameworks that go beyond liberation and toward decoloniality. Activist women and decolonial feminists from the Global South, contest patriarchal rationality and universalism and co-construct new ways of being, thinking-feeling, sentipensar, and acting. Decolonial paradigms weave networks of solidarity with communities in their struggles to sustain Indigenous cosmovisions, delinking from western-centric ideologies that are not anthropocentric and promote sustainability, epistemic and ecological justice, and Sumak Kawsay/Buen Vivir (wellbeing) that includes the rights of the Earth. This paper deepens into decolonial community psychologies from Abya Yala that are making the road caminando (walking) de otra manera by applying methodologies of affective conviviality with communities, sentipensando, and co-authoring collective stories that weave pluriversal solidary networks within ecologies of praxes into colorful tapestries of liberation. These are the proposed coordinates to sketch pathways toward decoloniality.

From rhetorical "inclusion" toward decolonial futures: Building communities of resistance against structural violence

In this paper, we name and uplift the ways in which Miya community workers are building communities of resistance as ways to address the manifold colonial, structural (including state-sponsored), and epistemic violence in their lives. These active spaces of refusal and resistance constitute the grounds of our theorizing. Centering this theory in the flesh, we offer critical implications for decolonial liberatory praxis, specifically community-engaged praxis in solidarity with people's struggles. In doing so, we speak to questions such as: What are the range of ways in which Global South communities are coming together to tackle various forms of political, social, epistemic, and racial injustice? What are ways of doing, being, and knowing that are produced at the borders and liminal zones? What are the varied ways in which people understand and name solidarities, alliances, and relationalities in pursuit of justice? We engage with these questions from our radically rooted places in Miya people's struggles via storytelling that not only confronts the historical and ongoing oppression, but also upholds desire-Interweaving and honoring rage, grief, pain, creativity, love, and communality.

Dissident women's letter writing as decolonial plurilogues of relational solidarities for epistemic justice

Braiding our words, "dissi-dance," and desires, this article engages how various social actors, and communities-which we are a part of and belong to-challenge structural violence, oppression, inequity, and social, racial, and epistemic injustice. We thread these reflections through our written words, in subversive letters which we offer in the form of a written relational conversation among us: a plurilogue that emerges in response to our specific locations, commitments, and refusals, as well as dissents. Our stories and process of dissent within the various locations, relationships, and contexts that we occupy served as the yarn and needle to thread our stories, posed questions and reflections. Braiding, threading and weaving together, we animate deep decolonial inquiries within ourselves, and our different cultural contexts and countries. Refusing individualism-the illusions of objectivity as distance, the academic as expert, and the exile of affect and emotion on academic pages-we choose to occupy academic writing and ask: What if academic writing were stitched with blood and laughter, relationships and insights, rage and incites? What if, at the nexus of critical psychology and decolonizing feminism, we grew an "embodied praxis?" Unlike academic writing, traditionally designed to camouflage affect, connection, relationality and subjectivity, these letters are unapologetically saturated in care and wisdom toward a narrative-based embodied practice: decolonial plurilogues of relational solidarities for epistemic justice. Our plurilogue of dissent offers a view to advance community research and action with goals of liberation, decoloniality, and community wellness.

The Case for Decolonising the Dental Curricula in the UK

Students across disciplines in UK universities are demanding decolonisation of their education. These demands aim to resist the white European colonial endeavour that create racist inequalities. To address racial inequalities, the dental discipline has predominantly focused on diversity rather than decolonisation. By using two inter-related referents of decolonisation to dental caries and cosmetic dentistry, this article demonstrates the epistemic violence exerted through the objective hierarchised knowledge practices in dentistry. First, by starting from the position of racisms, empire and slavery, the enduring colonial patterns of power and hierarchies come into view. We see how knowledge production in dentistry has neglected the interconnected histories of colonialism, racial capitalism and patriarchy that continue to shape oral health inequalities and work towards promoting white supremacist beauty ideals. Moreover, the interconnected character of inequalities - race, class and gender - begin to emerge. Second, by proceeding from the place of colonialism, the limits of dental knowledge and the violence embedded in knowledge practices emerge. This highlights the need for new ways of knowing. To decolonise is to confront and weaken the dental discipline's entanglement with the enduring colonial patterns of power and hierarchies that are complicit in maintaining inequalities. Diversity without decolonisation will simply subsume marginalised voices into the existing hierarchised knowledge paradigm and continue to reproduce a hierarchised, unequal world. I argue that if dental schools want to address racial and intersectional inequalities, they need new transformative ways of learning and knowing to equip students to work towards social justice in the outside world.

Barriers and facilitators for Indigenous students and staff in health and human services educational programs

Indigenous Peoples are underrepresented in many of the Health and Human Services Educational Programs (HHSEP, e.g.: Nursing, Social Work). As various studies have reported the benefits of diversifying HHSEP, the barriers and facilitators of increasing the number of Indigenous Peoples in these professions must be identified. The purpose of this exploratory study is to identify and understand the barriers and facilitators Indigenous Peoples face when entering, learning or working in HHSEP. A narrative approach was used in the facilitation of culturally safe sharing circles with Indigenous students and staff to collect perspectives based on their individual experiences in HHSEP. Inductive thematic analysis was used to identify emerging themes in participant experiences and the impact of those experiences on participation in learning and working at the university in these educational programs. Results from this exploratory study identified current academic structures and ideologies rooted in colonialism, that act as barriers for engagement and inclusion of Indigenous students, staff, and clinical and academic faculty. These findings shaped the main themes of this study including negotiation of identity in different spaces, negotiating colonial structures in HHSEP, and negotiating changes and transitions in HHSEP. We anticipate these preliminary results will act as a catalyst for uncovering further changes to be made regarding attitudes, procedures, and practices present in an academic environment that limit the inclusion of Indigenous Peoples in HHSEP.

Native and Indigenous Populations and Gastric Cancer: A Worldwide Review

Gastric cancer is a worldwide concern, particularly for Indigenous populations who face greater disparities in healthcare. With decreased access to screening and critical treatment delays, this group is experiencing adverse health effects. To determine what factors drive these disparities, a systematic review was performed in PubMed. This revealed a lack of research on gastric cancer specific to this population. The literature primarily focused on subset analyses and biological aspects with sparse focus on determinants of health. The results informed this presentation on factors related to Indigenous gastric cancer, which are influenced by colonialism. Indigenous populations encounter high rates of food shortage, exposure to harmful environmental agents, structural racism in the built environment, H. pylori, and compromised healthcare quality as an effect of colonialism, which all contribute to the gastric cancer burden. Putting gastric cancer into a cultural context is a potential means to respond to colonial perspectives and their negative impact on Indigenous patients. The objective of this manuscript is to examine the current state of gastric cancer literature from a global perspective, describe what is currently known based on this literature review, supplemented with additional resources due to lack of published works in PubMed, and to present a model of gastric cancer through the lens of a modified medicine wheel as a potential tool to counter colonial healthcare perspectives and to honor Indigenous culture.

Bioethics Rooted in Justice: Community-Expert Reflections

Based on interviews that the author and her colleagues conducted with three community organizers, activists, and health care workers-James Manigault-Bryant, Amika Tendaji, and Amber-Rose Howard-this essay emphasizes the importance of considering how the field of bioethics might be expanded with the integration of abolitionist perspectives and practices. These individuals were selected as interviewees for this special report on reckoning with anti-Black racism because of their dedication to Black abolitionist theory and practice and to centering the communities most harmed by state violence. A crucial lesson to be drawn from the conversations held with Manigault-Bryant, Tendaji, and Howard is that, without centering the experiences of Black health activists and community organizers in bioethics' research, the field is bound to uphold White supremacy, advance colonialism, and neglect entire ways of being in the world.

'Thrown into the fossil gap': Indigenous Australian ancestral bodily remains in the hands of early Darwinian anatomists, c. 1860-1916

This article examines in contextual depth the investigations of Indigenous Australian ancestral bodily remains by four influential British Darwinian comparative anatomists active between 1860 and 1919: George Rolleston (1829-1881), William Henry Flower (1831-1899), Alexander Macalister (1844-1919), and William Turner (1832-1916). It also reviews the examination of the structural morphology of the brains of four Indigenous Australians by Macalister's protégé, Wynfrid Lawrence Henry Duckworth (1870-1956). Since the 1970s, Darwinian scientists of the last third of the long nineteenth century have been represented in connection with the efforts of Indigenous Australian communities to have the remains of their ancestors returned for burial, as having acquired and investigated their skulls and other bodily structures to prove their evolutionary inferiority, and thereby legitimate their violent dispossession and near enslavement under so-called 'protective' regimes, where they struggled to maintain their families' health and well-being, their languages and culture. Racialized perceptions of Indigenous Australians as an evolutionarily primitive human type were perniciously influential among Australian-based and metropolitan British scientists, intellectuals, politicians and government officials during the last third of the long nineteenth century. However, as this article aims to show, by contextual scrutiny of the reportage of these leading four anatomists on their investigation of the skulls and brains of the first peoples of Tasmania and mainland Australia, they had no interest in proving Indigenous inferiority. They were driven by curiosity as to what investigation of the bodily remains of Indigenous Australians might disclose about the evolutionary genealogy of humankind. Hence, we would do well to see the outcomes of their investigations as having more complex connections with racialized perceptions of Australia's first peoples beyond medico-scientific circles, and the formulation of colonialist solutions for managing their future in the aftermath of dispossession by settler colonialism.

How Is Colonialism a Sociostructural Determinant of Health in Puerto Rico?

Puerto Rico is experiencing a public health crisis driven by effects and processes of US colonialism in the archipelago, such as the exclusionary application of federal health policy, an exodus of health care professionals, and the long-term effects of unequal distribution of health care funding in the unincorporated territories. Compound effects of multiple disasters, including Hurricane María, repeated earthquakes, and the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as relentless privatization and fragmentation of the health care system, have led to very poor health outcomes. Puerto Rico's case clearly shows the negative effects of colonialism on public health. This article specifies what decolonization requires from a public health standpoint to promote health equity.

Counterstorytelling as Epistemic Justice: Decolonial Community-based Praxis from the Global South

In this paper, we present community-anchored counterstorytelling as a form of epistemic justice. We-the Miya Community Research Collective-engage in counterstorytelling as a means of resisting and disrupting dehumanization of Miya communities in Northeast India. Miya communities have a long history of dispossession and struggle - from forced displacement by British colonial rulers in the early 19th century to the present where they face imminent threats of statelessness. Against this backdrop, we theorize "in the flesh" to interrogate knowledges and representations systematically deployed to dispossess Miya people. Simultaneously, we uplift stories and endeavors that (re)humanize Miya people, creating/claiming cultural, knowledge, and political spaces that center peoples' struggles and resistance. Across these stories, we offer counterstorytelling as a powerful mode of recentering knowledges from the margins-a decolonial alternative to neoliberal epistemes that maintain institutions/universities as centers of knowledge production.

"Every One of Us Is a Strand in That Basket": Weaving Together Stories of Indigenous Wellness and Resilience From the Perspective of Those With Lived and Living Experience With HIV/Hepatitis C Virus

ABSTRACT

This article primarily focuses on the stories shared by Indigenous women with living and/or lived experiences of HIV/hepatitis C virus from the Vancouver Downtown East Side who attended the "Awakening our Wisdom" retreat. Weaving together the story of an Indigenous approach to research that informed the design of the retreat and the findings that emerged, a basket is formed that highlights the ways settler-colonialism within Canada has produced a system of health care that has neglected the Indigenous experience. The emerging themes of Connection, Disconnection, and Reconnection offers teachings for Indigenous journeys of resilience and wellness for those living with HIV/hepatitis C virus. These findings may help health care practitioners identify health care places and spaces that are in need of decolonization and offer, from an Indigenous perspective, the next steps forward for a health care system that promotes Indigenous engagement and retention in care.

Toxic Colonialism in the Territorial Isles: A Geospatial Analysis of Environmental Crime Across U.S. Territorial Islands 2013-2017

The following study explores the geographic distribution of EPA environmental violations across the unincorporated territories within a criminological framework. Using data obtained from the EPA ECHO database, we conduct a geospatial legal analysis to identify island areas bearing a disproportionate number of green criminal activity between 2013 and 2017. Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, Mariana Islands, and American Samoa reflect a combination of green criminal patterns tied to tourism, commercial production, militarism, and nuclear testing. These remote and relatively biodiverse isles are consistently found to be bearing the burden of toxic waste which originated on the other side of the sea.

Introduction: Race science in the Latin world

This essay outlines the various analytical frameworks related to the history of race science that contribute to a "Latin" intellectual culture and tradition. In addition to defining Latinity as applied to the history of science, this article examines the troubled relationship between Latin American history and histories of science characterized as global. Similarly, it explores intellectual linkages across the Global South regarding racial mixture and the legacy of colonialism. It concludes by considering how a Latin perspective can illuminate the continued hegemony of ideas and scientific practices originating in North America and northern Europe.

Risk, rights and deservedness: Navigating the tensions of Gladue, Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder and settler colonialism in Canadian courts

In 2008, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada engaged in a public project of national reconciliation to address the ongoing impacts of settler colonialism including the disproportionate number of Indigenous adults and youth who are held in remand facilities awaiting trial or sentence as well as those who are convicted and sentenced to periods of incarceration. Efforts to further reconciliation by reducing Indigenous incarceration rates have relied largely on the courts and their application of a sentencing principle rooted in the Supreme Court's ruling in R. v. Gladue [1999] 1 SCR 688. In this article, we argue that the Gladue sentencing principle is being fundamentally undermined in the courts through risk models that actively displace the very context that Gladue reports seek to illuminate. Included in the analysis are the compounding impacts facing Indigenous individuals struggling with a complex disability like Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder.

The determinants of planetary health: an Indigenous consensus perspective

Indigenous Peoples have resiliently weathered continued assaults on their sovereignty and rights throughout colonialism and its continuing effects. Indigenous Peoples' sovereignty has been strained by the increasing effects of global environmental change within their territories, including climate change and pollution, and by threats and impositions against their land and water rights. This continuing strain against sovereignty has prompted a call to action to conceptualise the determinants of planetary health from a perspective that embodied Indigenous-specific methods of knowledge gathering from around the globe. A group of Indigenous scholars, practitioners, land and water defenders, respected Elders, and knowledge-holders came together to define the determinants of planetary health from an Indigenous perspective. Three overarching levels of interconnected determinants, in addition to ten individual-level determinants, were identified as being integral to the health and sustainability of the planet, Mother Earth.

Decolonizing global health: what should be the target of this movement and where does it lead us?

The current decolonizing global health movement is calling us to take a post-colonial perspective at the research and practice of global health, an area that has been re-defined by contemporary scholars and advocates with the purpose of promoting equity and justice. In this article, we summarize the main points of discussion from the Symposium organized by the editorial board of Global Health Research and Policy, convened in July 2021 in Wuhan, China. Experts participating in the symposium discussed what decolonizing global health means, how to decolonize it, and what criteria to apply in measuring its completion. Through the meeting, a consensus was reached that the current status quo of global health is still replete with various forms of colonial vestiges-ideologies and practices-, and to fully decolonize global health, systemic reforms must be taken that target the fundamental assumptions of global health: does investment in global health bring socioeconomic development, or is it the other way around? Three levels of colonial vestiges in global health were raised and one guiding principle was proposed when thinking of solutions for them. More theoretical discussion needs to be explored to guide practices to decolonize global health.

CAEP 2021 Academic Symposium: recommendations for addressing racism and colonialism in emergency medicine

Purpose

Racism and colonialism impact health, physician advancement, professional development and medical education in Canada. The Canadian Association of Emergency Physicians (CAEP) has committed to addressing inequities in health in their recent statement on racism. The objective of this project was to develop recommendations for addressing racism and colonialism in emergency medicine.

Methods

The authors, in collaboration with a 40 member working group, conducted a literature search, held a community consultation, solicited input from expert medical, academic and community advisors, conducted a national survey of emergency physicians, and presented draft recommendations at the 2021 CAEP Academic Symposium on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion for a live facilitated discussion with a post-session survey.

Results

Sixteen recommendations were generated in the areas of patient care, hospital and departmental commitment to Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, physician advancement, and professional development and medical education.

Conclusion

Emergency physicians are uniquely positioned to promote equity at each encounter with patients, peers and learners. The 16 recommendations presented here are practical steps to countering racism and colonialism everyday in emergency medicine.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s43678-021-00244-2.

The Estrangement of U.S. Colonialism from Counseling Discourses on Social Justice: Examining Intimacy and Care as Strategies to Sustain Democratic Citizenship

In promoting social equality in the name of democratic citizenship, counseling discourses on social justice are largely disconnected from their U.S. colonial heritage. As history is typically erased from theoretical developments and research in counseling generally speaking, this essay mobilizes multiple disciplines in order to establish a conjuncture between the way counseling discourses on social justice address inequality and the way they inadvertently sustain the inequalities they seek to abolish. By grounding into U.S. colonialism as a form of imperial pragmatism in empire building, this essay explicates counseling as another technology of social control for which intimacy and care become categorically encased.

Webs of reciprocity: Colonial taxation and the need for reparations

My BJS lecture considered how dominant understandings of distributive justice and welfare have been conceptualised through the "nation" and argued that a more adequate framing requires them to be addressed also in the context of colonial and imperial relations. It argues that a just politics in the present has to account for this history and that one way of doing this effectively would be through a reparative frame. In this short response, I engage with the commentaries on my lecture.

Red Brick Imperialism: How Vernacular Knowledge Shaped Japanese Colonial Expertise in Northeast China, 1905-45

This article analyzes the influence and mechanism of Japanese imperialism by examining red brick building in Manchuria (Northeast China). Manchuria's extreme climate and geography led Japanese experts to work with Chinese brick masons. They absorbed Chinese laborers and artisans' vernacular knowledge, translating it into their technical expertise and rebranding it as part of their technological superiority. Studying documents in Russian, Japanese, and Chinese reveals that technology transfer is an interactive yet uneven process between various actors and the environment. This article further complicates the depiction of Japanese imperialism in Northeast China, arguing that imperialism builds on an appropriation and erasure of local knowledge. At the intersection of imperialism and nationalism, red brick became the staple building material in Northeast China, influencing how people build there even today.

Colliding Bodies: Prostitutes, Soldiers, and Venereal Diseases in Colonial Egypt

This article explores attempts to control outbreaks of venereal diseases among prostitutes and imperial soldiers in Cairo and Alexandria leading up to and through World War I. Seeking to move beyond the usual colonial framing of center-periphery, it considers two British imperial outposts-Egypt and Australia-in conversation. The war brought thousands of Australian soldiers to Egypt, leaving their mark on Egypt and becoming marked by their time there, sometimes in indelible and deadly ways, as bodies and bodily fluids collided, and microbes passed between colonial and imperial subjects. The article argues that the highly racialized and classed system for regulating foreign and local prostitution that British officials implemented in Egypt to protect soldiers exacerbated rather than contained the spread of venereal diseases.

Relations of extraction, relations of redistribution: Empire, nation, and the construction of the British welfare state

The consolidation of the British welfare state in the mid-twentieth century did not only coincide with the systematic dismantling of the British Empire but was significantly shaped by the empire that preceded it. The story that tends to be told about the welfare state, however, situates it firmly within the national context. Such understandings go on to shape contemporary political debates centered on questions of entitlement and concerns over legitimacy. In this article, I reassess the standard accounts of taxation and welfare that are claimed to be central to the construction of the nation to demonstrate how taking the empire into account offers the possibility of a different political response to the challenges we are faced with today.