Presencing Settler Colonialism: White Settler Girls’ Engagement with Colonial Violence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Euro-Western girls are well represented within the field of girlhood studies. However, there exists a silence in the girlhood literature vis-à-vis the ways that white settler girls maintain and resist systems of colonial injustice. Everything that is known about white, North American girlhood is, therefore, predicated on a foundation of settler colonialism that has never been interrogated. The current research disrupts the colonial fixation on Indigenous “dysfunction” in order to interrogate settler identity. More precisely, drawing on girlhood theory, Indigenous feminist theories, and settler colonial theory, I examine the ways that white settler girls negotiate recently emerging discourses related to colonial violence against Indigenous women and girls. Using feminist, qualitative, narrative methods, I conducted twelve in-depth, semi-structured interviews with white settler girls, aged fifteen to seventeen, living in Winnipeg, Thunder Bay and Montreal. My analysis of the interviews offers critical insights into white settler girlhood in the following ways: the complex ways that Canadian identity and whiteness are intricately linked; the ways that white settler girls disrupt and support national narratives that erase Canada’s relationship to colonialism; the ways that Canadian curricula fail to adequately prepare settler girls to make sense of colonial violence; and the complex ways that settler girls tend to situate colonialism in the past. These insights reveal the on-going structure of colonialism in Canada and the way it shapes the identities and lived realties of settler and Indigenous girls. They also create space for further discourses surrounding the socio-political interventions required to restructure relations of colonial oppression in radical ways.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".