Relationality, Care and Resistance: Decolonial Feminisms in Praxis by Filipina/x Scholar-Organizers

Inspired by recent Filipina/x feminist scholarship located in Asian Canadian diasporic feminisms, five Filipina/x scholars and organizers critically reflect on the potential dimensions and directions of decolonial feminisms in our research and practice (praxis). We present four papers focused on resisting Western, colonial and extractive notions of care embedded in various local and global technologies, and community and social structures impacting access, inequities, identity and (un)belonging. Building on our respective research projects with different groups, we explore re/co-constructing notions of care through the ways in which decolonial feminisms can re-centre the dismantling and delegitimization of empire-building.

In this panel, Filipina/x diasporic and migration experiences are considered as profoundly shaped by colonial and imperialist histories in the Philippines which continue to impact the ways we come to understand ourselves and our relations to others, land, and knowledge production within the Canadian settler colonial context. Canada’s settler colonial state not only structures our movement and belonging but also shapes how knowledge in and about our communities is produced, circulated, and legitimized within academia and other institutions of power. Each at various stages of our early academic trajectories, we describe how our positionalities and embodied relationality, collectivity, care, resistance and/or (chosen) family inform our navigation of colonial histories and the in/hyper-visibilities of Filipina/x stereotypes, bodies, stories, and knowledge in Canada and globally.

We build from research showing how while Canada is not typically thought of as an “imperial” power in the classic sense (like Britain or the U.S.), it is deeply involved in contemporary forms of empire-building - especially through settler colonialism and imperial logics (Razack, 2002; Thobani, 2007), corporate extraction abroad (Butler, 2015; Coumans, 2002; Gordon, 2010; Shipley, 2017), global labour regimes (Eric, 2007; Tungohan, 2023), and transnational governance systems (Walia et al., 2021). Through decolonial feminist knowledge-making practices, we challenge extractive and colonial systems of knowledge production situated in the Canadian context while critically unpacking our complicities in them. The four papers complicate and reclaim dominant notions of care and feminisms through decolonizing and queering community-based methods, questioning global inequalities reproduced through surveillance technologies, and reconsidering care through relationality, transnationalism, kinship, resistance, and intergenerational dimensions.