Raced and risky subjects: Risk as a neoliberal mechanism for structural exclusion

Racialised communities are often viewed through a lens of risk across a variety of domains.
Policing and judiciary institutions employ notions of risk through practices of profiling and sentencing. The neighbourhoods where racialised communities reside are often designated high risk by those who live outside them. These communities also made “at risk”, those who are not just a risk to others, but a risk to themselves; and certainly within institutional research ethics processes risk is applied to denote a distinct vulnerability.

Risk is central to the way contemporary organisations and institutions operate, and their partnerships and collaborations with racialised communities are also negotiated through a neo-liberal understanding of risk. The tools and frames of neo-liberalism are often implemented to sustain and explain away systemic inequities, for example, obscuring contemporary forms of racism. Risk discourses, and practices of risk management, are particularly effective in substantiating barriers to partnerships, collaborations, as well as efforts for self-determination as a strategy towards structural inclusion.

Neoliberal risk discourses and practices propagate inequitable relationships, grounded in extractive approaches. This ultimately can continue to enact particular forms of violences on racialised communities, whilst claiming symbolic and material benefits for risk averse organisations and institutions. This creates a dynamic of shared successes, whilst engaging in distancing from failures, which then become evidence of the supposed inherent risk and deficit of these communities.

This presentation aims to examine how risk is actively deployed within the context of work with racialised communities, to not only construct a “raced and risky subject”, but also perpetuate forms of misrecognition that aids in the maintenance of structural exclusion.

The mental health care of mixed-blood Indigenous-Black women in colonial Canada

As an invisible segment of the Canadian population, mixed-blood Indigenous-Black women, suffer from the ramifications of a paucity of knowledge regarding their mental health and mental health care. Indigenous Peoples and Black Peoples in the diaspora have joined together in familial relationships for over 400 years, yet there is an absence of acknowledgement of the existence of this marginalized group in Canada. For Indigenous and Black Peoples, mental health care services are often culturally unsafe and inappropriate, and lack a critical understanding of the importance of gender, culture, and race as determinants of health. These issues undermine the likelihood of Indigenous-Black women seeking and receiving appropriate mental health care, with the added potential of misdiagnoses due to cultural and racial differences.
Within my lived experiences as a perceived Indigenous-Black woman, I explored the consequences of intersections such as gender, culture, and race, vis-à-vis mental health care. I privileged a decolonizing, Black feminist, intersectional approach to investigate Indigenous-Black women’s experiences with health care systems, and preferences for treatment and healing. As such, nine self-identified women engaged in digital storytelling within the ProclaimingOurRoots.com project, as well as semi-structured interviews, and community mapping – all embedded within an arts-informed community-based participatory action research methodology.
In effect, this research explored mental health concerns, barriers and facilitators of mental health care, treatment sought in the past and present, and preferred types of treatment and support. Consequently, this research adds to the scarce knowledge regarding the mental health care of Indigenous-Black women. It may help create safer environments, assist women in participating in their mental health care, and make the prospect of such care more desirable. It may offer insight into developing culturally proficient mental health care strategies, while providing steps toward culturally proficient service providers.

Accessing unseen archives: Using the Freedom of Information Act in asylum-seeker research

Previous research suggests that asylum seekers are at an increased risk of self-harm, and that being detained may further elevate such risk. Whilst concerns regarding rates of self-harm among asylum seekers - in both detained and community-based settings - have been frequently raised by academics, health practitioners, lawyers, human rights organisations, as well as at government and other Inquiries, until recently little systematic research regarding self-harm among the entire Australia asylum seeker population existed. This has been largely due to the lack of publicly accessible data. In this presentation, I will report and reflect on the process of using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to examine the epidemiology of self-harm in the Australian asylum seeker population across four original research studies conducted between 2017 - 2019. More specifically, I will discuss the challenges I faced as a researcher in gaining access to data via these archives, as well as the ethical and methodological concerns that arose during the research process. Finally, expanding on the suggestions of Savage and Hyde (2014), I will highlight the value in using the FOIA as a tool to facilitate research – especially that which occurs at the boundaries – by community psychologists, as well as other allied researchers and practitioners.