Phil Henderson
I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in Political Science at the University of Toronto, I also work as the Research and Operations Manager for the Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism Partnership Grant based at YorkU. Since 2024 I have been appointed as an Adjunct Research Professor in the School of Canadian Studies at Carleton University, where I teach several graduate seminars as a Contract Instructor.
My first book, On the Shores of Anger: Canadian Colonialism and Settler Resentment, is due out with Fernwood Publishing in 2025. And my second book, Institutionalizing Canadian Imperialism: A Social Theory of Settler Statecraft is under contract with UBC Press. This work emerges from my dissertation, "In and Against Canada" (2022), which investigated contemporary theories of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism.
My current research program investigates the interrelations between Indigenous land/water defenders and (self-)organized workers in what's presently known as Canada. As part of this research I am acting as lead editor on an in-progress volume, The Work of (Anti-)Colonialism: Organized Labour and Indigenous Struggles in Canada, which emerged from a Connections Grant funded project of the same name.
My teaching expertise is situated at the intersections of Canadian Politics, Political Theory, Indigenous Politics, and Labour Studies, with particular foci on the methods of both studying and engaging politics 'from below.'
Presently, I am a board member for Peace Brigades International--Canada, the Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies, and the Society for Socialist Studies. As Programming Chair, I coordinated the Socialist Studies 2024 Conference under the theme "Sustaining Socialist Futures."
Supervisors: Michael Asch, Rita Kaur Dhamoon, Justin Paulson, John Borrows, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, and Dale Turner
My first book, On the Shores of Anger: Canadian Colonialism and Settler Resentment, is due out with Fernwood Publishing in 2025. And my second book, Institutionalizing Canadian Imperialism: A Social Theory of Settler Statecraft is under contract with UBC Press. This work emerges from my dissertation, "In and Against Canada" (2022), which investigated contemporary theories of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism.
My current research program investigates the interrelations between Indigenous land/water defenders and (self-)organized workers in what's presently known as Canada. As part of this research I am acting as lead editor on an in-progress volume, The Work of (Anti-)Colonialism: Organized Labour and Indigenous Struggles in Canada, which emerged from a Connections Grant funded project of the same name.
My teaching expertise is situated at the intersections of Canadian Politics, Political Theory, Indigenous Politics, and Labour Studies, with particular foci on the methods of both studying and engaging politics 'from below.'
Presently, I am a board member for Peace Brigades International--Canada, the Canadian Association of Work and Labour Studies, and the Society for Socialist Studies. As Programming Chair, I coordinated the Socialist Studies 2024 Conference under the theme "Sustaining Socialist Futures."
Supervisors: Michael Asch, Rita Kaur Dhamoon, Justin Paulson, John Borrows, Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark, and Dale Turner
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Peer Reviewed Articles by Phil Henderson
I investigate Richard-Yves Sitoski’s (settler) brownfields. In this intensely located book of poetry—which Sitoski describes as a “poetic ‘autogeography” of Owen Sound”—identifying the presence of what I call settler fatalism in the face of the Anthropocene and its attendant brownfields. I suggest this fatalism is brought about by a melancholic attachment to the processes of wastelanding that are endemic to settler colonization. The final section of this paper contrasts the settler fatalism of Sitoski with the still ambivalent, though more generative poetry of Liz Howard (Ashinaabek). I suggest that Howard’s Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent approaches the Anthropocene not as a terminal epoch, but as what Donna Haraway calls “a boundary event”.
Chapters in Edited Volumes by Phil Henderson
Course Syllabi by Phil Henderson
In order to fulfill this goal, we'll be taking an issues-based approach wherein we'll consider specific political struggles week-by-week. This will allow us to historicize those struggles and place them in the local/global contexts that shape them. Importantly, while these are approached individually, we'll also be flagging how these issues intersect/overlap with one another. To that end, the course is divided into four sections, the first of which will provide theoretical/analytical lenses by which to understand a number of supranational structures of power. Section two studies the politics of land, considering such political movements as decolonization, secession, environmentalism, and housing justice. Section three studies labour struggles, including the state of the labour movement, migrant worker justice, and feminist struggles over unwaged and socially reproductive labour. Finally, in the third section, we consider both policing and the decline of the social welfare state as challenges for establishing security of person.
Through a historically informed account of state development in Canada, we will develop our understanding of how core institutions—such as the Parliament, the Cabinet, the Judiciary, etc.—operate on their own and interact with one another. In doing so, we will also seek to understand that government is not outside of, or apart, from society, but rather reflects a relative balance of power amongst competing social forces. Institutions of government being one way amongst many that dominant groups seek to reproduce their interests in relatively stable ways.
Our approach to this course is divided into three broad sections, each of which will account for four seminars or roughly 1/3 of the course. Section 1: Key Concepts lays the basis for the more empiri- cal work that follows, in these seminars we’ll explore theoretical models for explaining/understanding settler colonialism, as well as theories of labour power and organizing models for the labour movement. Section 2: Key Contexts situates the study of labouring activities (ie. the realities of work) within settler colonial contexts, in order to better understand how settler colonialism is made—so that we can then consider how it might be unmade. Finally, Section 3: Key Contingencies, explores concrete interrela- tions between Indigenous and labour struggles, primarily—though not exclusively—within the territo- ries presently known as Canada. This course was cross-listed in Canadian Studies, Political Economy, Political Science, Social Work, and Sociology.
Likely, this is a relatively novel place from which to begin considering the question of decolonization, especially as that word has been increasingly taken up within halls of powers like parliament, the boardroom, or the university. But by beginning here, we can hopefully more easily see that decolonization is a process of worldmaking: it demands, aims at, and enacts fundamental transformations in the basic order of social relations. While we will study this from the point of view of territories presently known as Canada, the course takes the Canadian state itself as a core problem to be interrogated. As such, our scales of analysis are not state-centric but rather telescopic: considering what an irresistible process decolonization looks like for both the Indigenous nations within Canada and for the peoples of the world negatively impacted by Canada.
Dissertation by Phil Henderson
MA Thesis by Phil Henderson
The author’s inquiry into these issues emerges from his own experience as a settler, and as an attempt to understand what motivates the aggression and resentment that many elements within his own community direct towards indigenous peoples. Because of these motivations, much of this thesis is grounded in discussions about the ways in which the author’s home community, in the southern Ontario riding of Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, is predicated in ongoing acts of colonization. From burial ground reclamations, to mob violence, to the problems inherent in combatting white supremacy without at once critiquing settler colonialism, each of the examples brought forward in this thesis attempts to analyze why this community of settlers seemingly throbs with a collective anger and indignation that is continually directed at the Saugeen Anishinaabek.
Guest Lectures by Phil Henderson
A paper delivered to Dr. Biswas-Mellamphy's Women, Sex, and Politics (POLISCI 3421F) at the University of Western Ontario. This paper was delivered to an undergraduate seminar as an introduction to Butler's work on theory of sex/gender/desire, and was accompanied by a vibrant discussion.
I investigate Richard-Yves Sitoski’s (settler) brownfields. In this intensely located book of poetry—which Sitoski describes as a “poetic ‘autogeography” of Owen Sound”—identifying the presence of what I call settler fatalism in the face of the Anthropocene and its attendant brownfields. I suggest this fatalism is brought about by a melancholic attachment to the processes of wastelanding that are endemic to settler colonization. The final section of this paper contrasts the settler fatalism of Sitoski with the still ambivalent, though more generative poetry of Liz Howard (Ashinaabek). I suggest that Howard’s Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent approaches the Anthropocene not as a terminal epoch, but as what Donna Haraway calls “a boundary event”.
In order to fulfill this goal, we'll be taking an issues-based approach wherein we'll consider specific political struggles week-by-week. This will allow us to historicize those struggles and place them in the local/global contexts that shape them. Importantly, while these are approached individually, we'll also be flagging how these issues intersect/overlap with one another. To that end, the course is divided into four sections, the first of which will provide theoretical/analytical lenses by which to understand a number of supranational structures of power. Section two studies the politics of land, considering such political movements as decolonization, secession, environmentalism, and housing justice. Section three studies labour struggles, including the state of the labour movement, migrant worker justice, and feminist struggles over unwaged and socially reproductive labour. Finally, in the third section, we consider both policing and the decline of the social welfare state as challenges for establishing security of person.
Through a historically informed account of state development in Canada, we will develop our understanding of how core institutions—such as the Parliament, the Cabinet, the Judiciary, etc.—operate on their own and interact with one another. In doing so, we will also seek to understand that government is not outside of, or apart, from society, but rather reflects a relative balance of power amongst competing social forces. Institutions of government being one way amongst many that dominant groups seek to reproduce their interests in relatively stable ways.
Our approach to this course is divided into three broad sections, each of which will account for four seminars or roughly 1/3 of the course. Section 1: Key Concepts lays the basis for the more empiri- cal work that follows, in these seminars we’ll explore theoretical models for explaining/understanding settler colonialism, as well as theories of labour power and organizing models for the labour movement. Section 2: Key Contexts situates the study of labouring activities (ie. the realities of work) within settler colonial contexts, in order to better understand how settler colonialism is made—so that we can then consider how it might be unmade. Finally, Section 3: Key Contingencies, explores concrete interrela- tions between Indigenous and labour struggles, primarily—though not exclusively—within the territo- ries presently known as Canada. This course was cross-listed in Canadian Studies, Political Economy, Political Science, Social Work, and Sociology.
Likely, this is a relatively novel place from which to begin considering the question of decolonization, especially as that word has been increasingly taken up within halls of powers like parliament, the boardroom, or the university. But by beginning here, we can hopefully more easily see that decolonization is a process of worldmaking: it demands, aims at, and enacts fundamental transformations in the basic order of social relations. While we will study this from the point of view of territories presently known as Canada, the course takes the Canadian state itself as a core problem to be interrogated. As such, our scales of analysis are not state-centric but rather telescopic: considering what an irresistible process decolonization looks like for both the Indigenous nations within Canada and for the peoples of the world negatively impacted by Canada.
The author’s inquiry into these issues emerges from his own experience as a settler, and as an attempt to understand what motivates the aggression and resentment that many elements within his own community direct towards indigenous peoples. Because of these motivations, much of this thesis is grounded in discussions about the ways in which the author’s home community, in the southern Ontario riding of Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, is predicated in ongoing acts of colonization. From burial ground reclamations, to mob violence, to the problems inherent in combatting white supremacy without at once critiquing settler colonialism, each of the examples brought forward in this thesis attempts to analyze why this community of settlers seemingly throbs with a collective anger and indignation that is continually directed at the Saugeen Anishinaabek.
A paper delivered to Dr. Biswas-Mellamphy's Women, Sex, and Politics (POLISCI 3421F) at the University of Western Ontario. This paper was delivered to an undergraduate seminar as an introduction to Butler's work on theory of sex/gender/desire, and was accompanied by a vibrant discussion.
This is because the language of civil disobedience, as it is deployed throughout dominant liberal academic literature seems to be inextricably tied to, and instantiate a reification of, the (settler) state. In as much as the canonical literature is concerned, those who commit acts of civil disobedience tend to be conceptually emplaced as subjects within a temporality signified through the state. The civilly disobedient subject(s) are not viewed as resistant to the prevailing political order: they are emplaced within the state and within the state’s claim to legitimate political obligation.
Affixing such discourses to Standing Rock reproduces the logic that the American government is itself a given or apolitical body. This works to disappear the processes of historic and ongoing settler colonization by normalizing the settler colony’s claim to authoritative rule over Indigenous peoples. I propose the ethical and political imperative of abandoning discourses of civil disobedience, in favour of those that more fully respect the anticolonial struggle at Standing Rock.
These reflections on settler anger are grounded in a discussion of an ongoing dispute between the Saugeen Ojibway First Nation and the Township of South Bruce Peninsula over ownership of Sauble Beach. I highlight the ways in which reactionary populism is used by local politicians to evacuate the emancipatory power of popular unrest by intertwining the legitimate grievances of poor and working people suffering under neoliberalism, with an active reinvestment in processes of colonial dispossession that strive to erase, marginalize, and remove Indigenous peoples.
I consider the now infamous comments of Larry Miller (MP Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound), which set the tone for the 2015 debate around the the niqab. Incensed by Zunera Ishaq’s assertion of her right to wear the niqab, Miller pronounced on local radio that if she does not want to show her face when “joining the best country in the world” Ishaq should “stay the hell where [she] came from.” In and of themselves, Miller’s comments reveal the power of settler colonization to naturalize the presence of the actively dispossessing white body within the territories of sovereign Indigenous peoples. Settler coloniality conceals the irony of Miller legitimatizing his authority to dictate the dress of Muslim women through a tacit appeal to the normality of his own culture. Frustratingly, however, those who denounced Miller’s remarks often reproduced many of the foundational premises of Canadian settler colonization. Most commonly, anti-Miller responses relied upon the trope that the Canadian character was inherently multicultural and beneficent, a fact which is assumed prima facie. Discourses of this variety may shutdown the overt racism of Miller-esque figures, but they simultaneously displace and discredit Indigenous peoples and their allies by making the violence necessary for Canada’s very existence unspeakable.
Inevitably, a ‘now’ is produced by popular media, and is fed back through the pores of the cultural unconscious, serving as a phantasmic fog around an unacknowledged intention to project ourselves and our world into the future. That is to say that the ‘now’ is really, also, the ‘then’ and this imagined ‘then’ retroactively clouds the possibilities of the ‘now’. Imagined futurities pro- scribe the potentialities of any present - what cannot be done later must certainly be out of reach now. Such is the conceit of the Enlightenment mind, which burrows its way into the post-human.
In an effort to diagnosis the debacle of embedding the ‘now’ into imagined futurities, I propose a queering of the popular malaise. Spike Jonze’s Her (2013) is widely regarded as a post-human film. But while we may be comforted thinking that this film provides representations of diasporic bodies, in the guise of the post-human character Samantha, an infernal resurrection has occurred. In Her, I find reborn the same rigid gender-sex-sexuality axis that has plagued Enlightenment thinking for so long. In rejection this, I assert that as post-humans our popular portrayals, and our academic writings ought to provoke and promote queerness wherever it emerges. For without an embrace of the radical queerness that sits near the core of post-humanism, our imaginings serve only to reproduce old epistemic violences.
Concurrently, within critical feminist thought, critiques have emerged against the supposed stability by which bodies are ontologically constituted as only fleshy material. This shift away from biological determinism occurs in the works of Judith Butler, N. Katherine Hayles, and Donna Haraway. Taken together, these authors provide the theoretical framework of “body drift,” a phenomenon described by Arthur Kroker in his 2012 book of the same name as “how we circulate so effortlessly from one medium of communication to another; it is how we explore intimately and with incredible granularity of detail the multiplicity of bodies that we have become.”
With this in mind, I use cognitive science in conjunction with the canon of critical feminism to assert that under the RMA’s leading edge it is only fleshy bodies that are displaced from battle. These archaic bodies are replaced by a hybridity of steel and flesh - the drone. This spectral figure of the drone haunts the emancipatory moment that unshackled the human subject from the chains with which the double helix held the body. A self-aware bodily drift, the drone is the negative undoing of the emancipatory potential which Kroker emphasizes. Though it fulfills the ontological criteria of body drift, the drone reproduces the same systems of oppression, violence, and death against which the critical feminist school has historically set itself.
Letter to local editors in Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound, following the successful reelection of MP Larry Miller in 2015.
Throughout Souls, Du Bois frequently makes oblique, metaphorical, and handful of direct comments about ‘Indians’. By his recurrent summonings of this figurative ‘Indian’, Du Bois’ writing typifies Kēhaulani Kauanui’s (Kanaka Maoli) observation that Indigenous peoples have consistently “haunted a long night of American dreams”. I propose to trace the spectral figure of the “Indian” in Souls, with the particular aim of parsing how it acts as a refractionary element within Du Bois’ writing - that is, as a point of deflection that directs his thought. I assert that Du Bois’ work in Souls regularly invokes, and subsequently refuses, ‘Indianness’ - occasionally directly, more regularly through mnemonic chains - in order to organize his thinking and the political project that grows out of this work.
Unpublished; All Rights Reserved; Do Not Copy, Print or Site without the express permission of the Author
Unpublished; All Rights Reserved; Do Not Copy, Print or Site without the express permission of the Author
For the average Canadian, colonialism is a historical phenomena. The relationship between the indigenous nations of North America and the early settler-state are widely regarded with horror, shock and condemnation. Luckily, the mainstream argument asserts, the liberal-democratic program has left such colonial relationships behind, and today the Canadian state is able to interact with its indigenous citizens in an open and balanced way.
The reality, however, is that indigenous nations remain firmly outside of the liberal-democratic program. This is a result of their own perseverance and tenacity. For these nations, liberal-democracy is nothing more than a rebranding of the historic settler-state project of colonialism. The Idle No More movement has shown us that resistance to this project is still very much alive.
The author of this paper seeks to establish a deeper understanding of the persistent colonial relationship, which the Canadian state seeks to maintain over indigenous nations. Furthermore, the author intends to undermine this relationship, encouraging a rethinking of indigenous national self-determination, outside (and perhaps in opposition to) the settler-state’s authority. ""
When determining public policy, historical realities are often ignored in favour of egalitarian forms of action. Many liberals believe that providing an equal standard of justice, through aid and relief, is the best way to properly address social inequalities. However, the author asserts, this approach misses its mark, and belittles the important character of the historical relationships of injustice which characterize our world.
In this article, the author examines the strengths, weaknesses, and underlying assumptions in the arguments of both Janna Thompson and Richard Vernon. Having summarily presented both arguments, the author reveals how little attention is given to the specific harm of a past injustice, within the current discourse.
The article then turns to addressing this shortcoming by putting forward a methodology, whereby previous harms and historical relationships can be incorporated into our metrics of justice."
For the average Canadian, colonialism is a historical phenomena. The relationship between the indigenous nations of North America and the early settler-state are widely regarded with horror, shock and condemnation. Luckily, the mainstream argument asserts, the liberal-democratic program has left such colonial relationships behind, and today the Canadian state is able to interact with its indigenous citizens in an open and balanced way.
The reality, however, is that indigenous nations remain firmly outside of the liberal-democratic program. This is a result of their own perseverance and tenacity. For these nations, liberal-democracy is nothing more than a rebranding of the historic settler-state project of colonialism. The Idle No More movement has shown us that resistance to this project is still very much alive.
The author of this paper seeks to establish a deeper understanding of the persistent colonial relationship, which the Canadian state seeks to maintain over indigenous nations. Furthermore, the author intends to undermine this relationship, encouraging a rethinking of indigenous national self-determination, outside (and perhaps in opposition to) the settler-state’s authority.