Afsoun Afsahi

The climate crisis is testing the limits of representative democracy. The global nature of the crisis, its urgency and technical complexity, the polycentric governance context it creates, the democratic issues raised by climate injustice, and the barriers to including future generations and nature pose daunting challenges for representative institutions. Together, these challenges contribute to a twofold deficit of democratic legitimacy. The climate crisis makes robust democratic engagement and the inclusion of all affected interests in collective decision-making more difficult, which undermines democratic legitimacy procedurally, and contemporary democracies’ inability to respond effectively to the threat of climate change undermines their legitimacy substantively. In this context, political representation, which promises responsive, efficient, rational governance without the need for the direct participation of all, is more essential than ever. However, representation following the standard model—with its narrow focus on electoral representation at the nation-state level, its unidirectional conception of responsiveness and static conception of constituency, and its abstract individualism, anthropocentrism, and bias towards the present—is poorly suited to meeting the current challenges. I argue that reimagining democratic representation can help remedy democracy’s double legitimacy deficit. I analyze contemporary theories of representation that seek to move beyond the limitations of the standard model by accounting for the changing sites and scope of representation in the real world and addressing the under- and misrepresentation of certain kinds of interests. I suggest that the most promising ideas from a climate perspective include integrating informal political representatives, embracing certain types of elite mobilization, leveraging representation to promote deliberation, and designing supplementary forms of representation for social groups, discourses, nature, and future generations. Each of these ideas compensates for particular shortcomings of standard electoral representation, but each also suffers from its own deficits. In response, I propose a systemic approach to democratic representation that attends to the interactions between multiple forms and sites of representation. In addition to designing new criteria for evaluating representation’s democratic legitimacy at the individual level, theorists need to develop an understanding of the conditions that promote democratic legitimacy at the level of the representative system.

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The Indian Act controls and validates Indigenous peoples’ identity, membership, and sovereignty. First Nations have absorbed colonial mentalities surrounding authenticity have been absorbed by some First Nations and has been reified in certain dialogues surrounding resurgence. These colonial mentalities have had an especially negative effect on urban Indigenous people and have led to their existence as legitimate, self-determining entities going unrecognized. There is a tension between in resurgence theories that call for the complete separation of First Nations and Canadian government and Urban Indigenous governance. Urban Indigenous collectives represent the intermixing of Indigenous and Canadian culture and their governance systems rely on the overlapping authority and power. The nature of urban Indigenous governance further reveals the necessity of relational sovereignty and creating an environment in which multiple forms of power can co-exist.

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Graphic novels are a tool to track and resist the silencing of transgender youth. I firstprovide a literature review including a brief framing of trans youth identity, an analysis of theviolence targeting transgender youth in the United States and Canada, a theoretical framing forepistemic violence (including a general framework on hermeneutical injustice, testimonialquieting and testimonial smothering) with a specific focus on the epistemic violence targetingtransgender people. Second, I analyze why graphic novels are uniquely positioned for studyingepistemic violence facing trans youth. Third, I contend that while trans youth currently facemassive amounts of visible and direct forms of violence (legal attacks on rights, high rates ofphysical assault, etc.), studying the epistemic violence is imperative as the silencing of transyouth's voices leads to these other forms of violence and is deeply harmful in and of itself. I usegraphic novels as an analytical tool to track this epistemic violence and the impacts of thisinjustice. Finally, I consider the emancipatory potential in graphic novels as unique vehiclesthrough which trans youth's voices can be heard and honoured. My central argument is thatgraphic novels provide a unique visual medium through which trans folks can both communicatethe reality of epistemic violence facing trans youth and combat it by providing a different set oflanguage resources, encouraging audience engagement and giving trans youth their voices.

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In recent years, participatory mapping projects initiated by historically and presently marginalized groups, including those undertaken by Indigenous peoples, have been gaining prominence in scholarly discourses. Examined predominantly under the framework of counter-mapping, much of this scholarship is focussed on how Indigenous communities in various locales mobilize traditional knowledge systems to demarcate their territories in resistance to colonial and capitalist incursions. In taking these discourses as a point of departure, this thesis argues that by positing Indigenous participatory mapping initiatives solely in the form of resistance to (neo)colonial dispossessory acts, the framework of counter-mapping occludes their prefigurative and democratic potentialities. Examining Indigenous mapping projects in settler colonial contexts, this thesis proposes an alternative approach to examining these initiatives— as a process of prefigurative world-building where communities can realize their democratic potentialities by participating in decision-making regarding what is mapped and how. Not only do these initiatives serve a generative refusals to dispossessory acts, but they also disrupt coercive territorial and civic boundaries imposed by the colonial ‘democratic’ state. I begin by critically examining the role of cartography, colonial notions of space, sovereignty, and boundaries operate to create and uphold coercive settler colonial borders. I then explore existing approaches to boundaries and borders in democratic theory, revealing how the separation of the territorial and civic questions of borders obscures their interconnectedness and their implication in coercively, contingently, and destructively including Indigenous lands and bodies into the bounds of the settler state. This coercive inclusion is further reified through (neo)colonial dispossessory acts justified by invocations of democratic legitimacy and sovereignty by the colonial state. Indeed, it is these dispossessory acts that projects and scholarly discourses on counter-mapping highlight resistance towards. I then lay out a theoretical framework for examining Indigenous participatory mapping as a form of prefigurative world-building, grounding this framework in cartographic undertakings in the Amazonas and on Turtle Island. The thesis concludes with an examination of the implications of the presented arguments for the theory and practice of democracy, emphasizing the importance of untethering democracy from its dominant, Western state-centric conceptions and redefining it to include subaltern participatory initiatives.

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Abolition and abolitionist movements have the ability to address the dismantling of multiple oppressive structures and institutions, including slavery, policing, prisons, detention centres, and borders. The scope of this paper focusses on the prison and carceral aspects of abolition in an effort to provide an anti-colonial, intersectional analysis of Canadian prisons. In addition to a general intersectional analysis of the Canadian carceral system, this thesis specifically examines sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR) violations in Canadian prisons and the lack of Reproductive Justice (RJ) for those who are incarcerated. This paper ultimately argues that if we take the meaning of intersectionality seriously, recognizing that colonial violence, criminalization and incarceration, and reproductive violence are interconnected and reinforcing forms of oppression, we understand that there can be no Reproductive Justice without abolition. Abolition is a crucial step in the fight for Reproductive Justice in Canada because the Canadian carceral system not only jeopardizes the self-governance and body sovereignty of individuals, but also the self-governance, self-determination and sovereignty of Indigenous peoples on their own territories, acting as a continuation of genocide. The Reproductive Justice framework and subsequent movement(s) can help us address SRHR in Canadian prisons from an intersectional standpoint. Dismantling the carceral system — a key “actor” in the settler state of Canada — is a crucial point on the path to intersectional, decolonial Reproductive Justice for all people.

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