Leslie Robertson

Several regions of North America and Europe are experiencing a devastating drug overdose epidemic. In Canada, the province of British Columbia (BC) has the highest death rates due to drug toxicity. Peer workers, people with lived and living experience with substance use who use that lived experience in their professional work, are at the frontlines of responding to the overdose crisis through roles such as peer-witnessing of substance use, outreach services, mobile overdose response, delivery and collection of harm reduction supplies, and advocacy. Whilst peer workers have been the subject of interdisciplinary scholarship which examines their utility to harm reduction initiatives and their workplace conditions, they have not yet been involved in arts-based collaborative projects. This thesis examines an arts-based collaboration rooted in tenets of Participatory Action Research (PAR) and Values-Based Cartooning in which I worked with three peer workers from the suburban Lower Mainland to create a series of graphic vignettes. The comic strips reflect peers’ experiences working throughout the overdose crisis within contexts of escalating street violence, deepening socioeconomic inequities, and pervasive instances of drug poisoning. I describe the intricacies of collaboration between an academic researcher and people who use(d) substances, including the effects of deeply entrenched power dynamics, processes of analysis and reflection, and the capacity of art-based projects to elicit nuanced manifestations of agency and power. This thesis describes both the strengths and downfalls of an arts-based collaboration and offers practical insights for future projects.

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Lake Babine Nation is currently in negotiations with the Prince Rupert Gas Transmission Pipeline Project regarding the construction of a 950km liquid natural gas pipeline through their traditional territory. While the project has been approved, Nation members continue to express their concerns regarding construction camps, facilities designed to accommodate up to 1000 temporary workers. Increased rates of sexual violence, sexually transmitted infections, and domestic abuse are some of the impacts they are most concerned about. While the initial goal of my research was to voice the concerns of Babine women, I was frequently confronted by prolonged silences, long pauses, refusals, and hesitations in my research encounters. This thesis reflects my critical engagement with silence as it emerged in interviews, negotiations, public discourse, and in the lived experience of Indigenous women in Lake Babine Nation. The questions that motivated this analysis attend to silence as a concept, experience, and method. What follows is the genealogy of the silences encountered: the silences incited by colonialism, the silences mobilized by marginalized people to negotiate institutions that seek to silence them, and the embodied silences of those who live with the embodied consequences of sexual violence. The purpose of my focus on silence has not been to impose a grand theory of silence on my research participants. Rather, the goal has been to attend to the pauses and gaps as they emerged in the research process, in a non-binary way. By extending silence, Babine women invited me to reflect on my positionality, the structures of domination in which we are implicated, and on their embodied and affective realities. What I find myself left with is silence as invitation—an invitation to learn, to unsettle colonial and racial relationships, to refuse, to resist, and to listen. Through a concerted focus on silences that surround sexual violence against Indigenous women, we may begin to see how anti-violence work can contribute to processes of decolonization and self-determination. This research establishes silence as a legitimate focus of investigation in qualitative research that may be approached with the same rigor with which we approach that which is spoken.

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This thesis calls for a change in the way we think about articulating suffering and its meanings. It is an analysis of 1.5 and second generation Cambodian postmemory work in North America. I describe the music, film, visual art, poetry and performance art that have been produced by these generations as “postmemory” work because the creators invoke memory that they have not lived themselves or have forgotten. The work of these generations that relate to the Cambodian genocide relies on intergenerational communication with their parents to retell family stories. In their countries of resettlement, Cambodians have faced a lack of social capital, economic hardships, underrepresentation and generational dissonance. In these contexts, reconciling past and present has not been a priority, particularly in a culture which has been found to attribute weakness to discussing violent pasts (Kidron, 2010). Silence on a past of genocide has been a consequence of these factors. While silence on violent pasts is a dominant trait in the diaspora, there are those who choose to speak out about their family’s experience. Using their family stories of genocide, 1.5 and second generation Cambodians explore multivalent issues that impact their present lives. I use the works of Socheata Poeuv, Prach Ly and Anida Yoeu Ali as well as my own to exemplify how the past is engaged in the present. When we bear witness to the postmemory work of Poeuv, Ly and Ali we see a bridging of generations and beliefs and the continual development of a Cambodian diaspora identity. Silence is linked to the maintenance of cultural ideas. By examining instances of 1.5 and second generation public expression, I show the diaspora as a community that also has shifting ideologies. I recognize that silence and speaking out can both exist within the North American Cambodian diaspora. Bringing together the literature on silence while analysing postmemory work allows for an understanding of the variation in ways that individuals and families within a community engage and make meaning of the past.

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