Settler Colonial Socialization in Public Sector Work: Moving from Privilege to Complicity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this piece, we ask, what are the risks of a pedagogy and politics that begins and ends with privilege? What does it mean to declare privilege when embedded in institutions of the settler colonial state? These questions are raised through an ongoing project where we interview provincial public sector workers on Treaty 6, 7 and 8 (Alberta, Canada) and Coast Salish Territories (British Columbia, Canada) about their implications in settler colonialism through public sector work. In the project, we articulate the interdisciplinary framework of settler colonial socialization to consider the space between individuals and structures – the meso-space where settlers are made by learning how to take up the work of settler colonialism. For these reasons, in our research we ask, “what do the pedagogical processes of settler colonial socialization tell us about how systemic colonial violence is sustained, and how it might be disrupted or refused in public sector work?” In this paper, we narrow our focus to the declarations of privilege that many of our interview participants are making. We reflect on these declarations and consider whether focusing on settler complicity and Indigenous refusals can better support a decolonial politics for settlers working in the public sector. We argue that declarations of privilege risk reproducing settler-centric logics that maintain settler colonialism, settler jurisdiction, and settler certainty, and we reflect on how to orient participants (and ourselves) towards the material realization of relational accountability and towards imagining otherwise.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".