Christopher Powell | Toronto Metropolitan University (original) (raw)
Books by Christopher Powell
This important collection of essays expands the geographic, demographic, and analytic scope of th... more This important collection of essays expands the geographic, demographic, and analytic scope of the term genocide to encompass the effects of colonialism and settler colonialism in North America. Colonists made multiple and interconnected attempts to destroy Indigenous peoples as groups. The contributors examine these efforts through the lens of genocide. Considering some of the most destructive aspects of the colonization and subsequent settlement of North America, several essays address Indigenous boarding school systems imposed by both the Canadian and U.S. governments in attempts to "civilize" or "assimilate" Indigenous children. Contributors examine some of the most egregious assaults on Indigenous peoples and the natural environment, including massacres, land appropriation, the spread of disease, the near-extinction of the buffalo, and forced political restructuring of Indigenous communities. Assessing the record of these appalling events, the contributors maintain that North Americans must reckon with colonial and settler colonial attempts to annihilate Indigenous peoples.
Contributors. Jeff Benvenuto, Robbie Ethridge, Theodore Fontaine, Joseph P. Gone, Alexander Laban Hinton, Tasha Hubbard, Kiera L. Ladner, Tricia E. Logan, David B. MacDonald, Benjamin Madley, Jeremy Patzer, Julia Peristerakis, Christopher Powell, Colin Samson, Gray H. Whaley, Andrew Woolford
From networks to fields to figurations to discourses, relational ideas have become common in soci... more From networks to fields to figurations to discourses, relational ideas have become common in social science, and a distinct relational sociology has emerged over the past decade and a half. But so far, this paradigm shift has raised as many questions as it answers. Just what are 'relations', precisely? How do we observe and measure them? How does relational thinking change what we already know about society? What new questions does it invite us to ask? This volume and its companion volume Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues bring together, for the first time, the leading experts and up-and-coming scholars in the field to address fundamental questions about what relational sociology is and how it works.
From networks to fields to figurations to discourses, relational ideas have become common in soci... more From networks to fields to figurations to discourses, relational ideas have become common in social science, and a distinct relational sociology has emerged over the past decade and a half. But so far, this paradigm shift has raised as many questions as it answers. Just what are 'relations', precisely? How do we observe and measure them? How does relational thinking change what we already know about society? What new questions does it invite us to ask? This volume and its companion volume Applying Relational Sociology: Networks, Relations, and Society bring together, for the first time, the leading experts and up-and-coming scholars in the field to address fundamental questions about what relational sociology is and how it works.
Why have the largest mass murders in human history taken place in the past hundred years? Why hav... more Why have the largest mass murders in human history taken place in the past hundred years? Why have European colonizers so often denied the humanity of the colonized? In Barbaric Civilization, Christopher Powell advances a radical thesis to answer these questions: that civilization produces genocides.
From its beginnings in the early twelfth century, the Western civilizing process has involved two interconnected transformations: the monopolization of military force by sovereign states and the cultivation in individuals of habits and dispositions of the kind that we call "civilized." The combined forward movement of these processes channels violent struggles for social dominance into symbolic performances. But even as the civilizing process frees many subjects from the threat of direct physical force, violence accumulates behind the scenes and at the margins of the social order, kept there by a deeply habituated performance of dominance and subordination called deferentiation. When deferentiation fails, difference becomes dangerous and genocide becomes possible.
Connecting historical developments with everyday life occurrences, and discussing examples ranging from thirteenth-century Languedoc to 1994 Rwanda, Powell offers an original framework for analyzing, comparing, and discussing genocides as variable outcomes of a common underlying social system, raising unsettling questions about the contradictions of Western civilization and the possibility of a world without genocide.
This book can be purchased through regular bookstores, or direct from the publisher at http://mqup.mcgill.ca/book.php?bookid=2636
Papers by Christopher Powell
Proceedings of the HCI International
1. Introduction This paper is concerned with the evaluation of a speech output Web browser for th... more 1. Introduction This paper is concerned with the evaluation of a speech output Web browser for the blind and visually impaired, with special reference to how it supports users in building conceptual models of the World Wide Web in the way that sighted users do. The browser named ...
Canadian review of sociology = Revue canadienne de sociologie, 2018
In our research and teaching, should our primary or even exclusive goal be to produce description... more In our research and teaching, should our primary or even exclusive goal be to produce descriptions and explanations that can be taken as true regardless of the values of the speaker or the audience? Or should we treat all knowledge, even the most purely descriptive empirical statements, as imbued with specific ethical or political values? Is there a third option? What does "value-neutrality" even mean? Each of us has our own answers to these questions, and the answers vary quite a lot. Within that variance, we can perceive loosely defined clusters of scholars with similar or compatible views. This clustering has consequences: each of us wants others to understand our work and to judge it by standards that we ourselves find legitimate, and this happens more easily when we share compatible assumptions about the relationship between facts and values. So there is an incentive for us to talk to others with views similar to our own, to find epistemological comfort zones, and not to bother trying to understand or be understood by people whose views are too different. It was with these considerations in mind that I organized the roundtable "Value-Neutral and Value-Oriented Epistemologies of the Social: A Conversation across Difference" at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Sociological Association. To expect 10 participants with differing views to reach consensus seemed unrealistic. My hope was for the participants to simply understand one another a little better coming out than going in. Therefore, I asked everyone to try not to focus on arguing for a position, but instead to explain their views in terms of their practical
Canadian Journal of Sociology, Sep 30, 2016
P sychological trauma can be defined, roughly, as the effect of an experience which the mind is u... more P sychological trauma can be defined, roughly, as the effect of an experience which the mind is unable to process, assimilate, and assign to the past. A traumatizing experience, therefore, is defined not by its intrinsic properties but by the mind's response to it (Herman, 2001). Critical trauma studies takes this anti-essentialist insight one step further by examining how social relations and cultural meanings produce trauma, in two ways. First, relations of denigration and oppression entail traumatizing experiences for individuals and groups-through class, race, gender, sexuality, and so on. Second, the concept of trauma is, itself, socially constructed and performative. This interesting, often insightful collection explores the socio-cultural dimensions of trauma across a wide variety of settings, including war in Afghanistan and Chechnya, Iran's Evin Prison, the Nazi holocaust, and sexual and racial violence in America. Several contributors write from experiences with activism, victim advocacy, or therapeutic practice, and several reference personal traumas of their own. Many of the contributions take an explicitly feminist or intersectional approach. The editors, Monica Casper and Eric Wertheimer, are professors in Gender and Women's Studies and in English, respectively, and the collection is highly interdisciplinary with contributions from Africana studies, justice studies, communications studies, and comparative studies as well as from more traditional disciplines like philosophy, religious studies, English, and sociology. The book includes an introduction that speaks to the context, themes, and aims of the collection. Some chapters are written using conventional social science methods: a content analysis of laypersons' writings on forgiveness, for instance, or a case study of one New Orleans family's experiences after Katrina. Others are personal, even poetic: a written translation of a performance art piece about Fallujah; an extended meditation on one girl's silence in Evin Prison; a bitter and yet hopeful lecture on surviving sexual abuse. Other chapters combine the clinical and the personal: a literary analysis of trauma and forgetting in Cormack McCarthy's The
ABSTRACT This important collection of essays expands the geographic, demographic, and analytic sc... more ABSTRACT This important collection of essays expands the geographic, demographic, and analytic scope of the term genocide to encompass the effects of colonialism and settler colonialism in North America. Colonists made multiple and interconnected attempts to destroy Indigenous peoples as groups. The contributors examine these efforts through the lens of genocide. Considering some of the most destructive aspects of the colonization and subsequent settlement of North America, several essays address Indigenous boarding school systems imposed by both the Canadian and U.S. governments in attempts to "civilize" or "assimilate" Indigenous children. Contributors examine some of the most egregious assaults on Indigenous peoples and the natural environment, including massacres, land appropriation, the spread of disease, the near-extinction of the buffalo, and forced political restructuring of Indigenous communities. Assessing the record of these appalling events, the contributors maintain that North Americans must reckon with colonial and settler colonial attempts to annihilate Indigenous peoples. https://www.dukeupress.edu/Colonial-Genocide-in-Indigenous-North-America/
Genocide Studies and Prevention, 2015
Social Studies of Science, 2001
This paper discusses the concept of “proto-genocide” with reference to the conflict in Sri Lanka.
This paper uses the concepts of ethnosphere and ethnodiversity to frame the stakes of cultural ge... more This paper uses the concepts of ethnosphere and ethnodiversity to frame the stakes of cultural genocide in the context of the emerging global society. We are in an era of rapid global ethnodiversity loss. Global ethnodiversity is important because different cultures produce different solutions to the subjective and objective problems of human society, and because cultures have an intrinsic value. Rapid ethnodiversity loss is a byproduct of the expansion of the modern world-system, and Lemkin's invention of the concept of genocide can be understood as a dialectical reaction to this tendency. The current phase of globalization creates pressures towards global monoculture, but movements towards polyculture can be observed. Genocide scholars have an interest in three underdeveloped lines of inquiry: measuring ethnodiversity loss; constructing valid measures of the vitality and life or death of cultures; and developing techniques for resolving social differences without the need for cultural consensus. Abstract: This paper uses the concepts of ethnosphere and ethnodiversity to frame the stakes of cultural genocide in the context of the emerging global society. We are in an era of rapid global ethnodiversity loss. Global ethnodiversity is important because different cultures produce different solutions to the subjective and objective problems of human society, and because cultures have an intrinsic value. Rapid ethnodiversity loss is a byproduct of the expansion of the modern world-system, and Lemkin's invention of the concept of genocide can be understood as a dialectical reaction to this tendency. The current phase of globalization creates pressures towards global monoculture, but movements towards polyculture can be observed. Genocide scholars have an interest in three underdeveloped lines of inquiry: measuring ethnodiversity loss; constructing valid measures of the vitality and life or death of cultures; and developing techniques for resolving social differences without the need for cultural consensus.
Conceptualizing Relational Sociology, 2013
Different relational sociologists have different phenomena in mind when they use the word "relati... more Different relational sociologists have different phenomena in mind when they use the word "relation." For some, relations are concrete network ties between individuals or groups, while for others relations are something more abstract, such as relative positions in a field. For some authors, relations are the elementary unit of analysis for all sociology, while for others relations are one type of emergent social structure among others. In this chapter, I present the rudiments of a radically relational sociological epistemology, based on but extrapolating beyond relational elements in the works of By "radically relational" I mean an epistemology that contains no residual dualist elements and therefore treats all social phenomena, including individuals themselves, as constituted through relations. 1 This epistemology assumes naturalism and monist materialism but adopts an agnostic stance toward realism. It also applies reflexively to itself. In keeping with this agnosticism, I present the key points of this framework as guidelines for epistemic practice rather than as statements about what it is.
Conceptualizing Relational Sociology, 2013
Norbert Elias and Social Theory, 2013
Norbert Elias and Social Theory, 2013
Journal of Genocide Research, 2007
... life of a collectivity involves something more than the sum of its individual parts.Lemkin&#x... more ... life of a collectivity involves something more than the sum of its individual parts.Lemkin's functionalism. Jump to section. ... Lemkin's two faces? In the course of any particular episode of organized mass violence directed towards a ...
Social theory is like an ongoing conversation among a group of very old friends (and enemies). Or... more Social theory is like an ongoing conversation among a group of very old friends (and enemies). Or, it's like Season 5 of LOST. Either way, people who come in half-way through, find it hard to tell what's going on. Teaching classical theory is our way of filling in the back-story.
This important collection of essays expands the geographic, demographic, and analytic scope of th... more This important collection of essays expands the geographic, demographic, and analytic scope of the term genocide to encompass the effects of colonialism and settler colonialism in North America. Colonists made multiple and interconnected attempts to destroy Indigenous peoples as groups. The contributors examine these efforts through the lens of genocide. Considering some of the most destructive aspects of the colonization and subsequent settlement of North America, several essays address Indigenous boarding school systems imposed by both the Canadian and U.S. governments in attempts to "civilize" or "assimilate" Indigenous children. Contributors examine some of the most egregious assaults on Indigenous peoples and the natural environment, including massacres, land appropriation, the spread of disease, the near-extinction of the buffalo, and forced political restructuring of Indigenous communities. Assessing the record of these appalling events, the contributors maintain that North Americans must reckon with colonial and settler colonial attempts to annihilate Indigenous peoples.
Contributors. Jeff Benvenuto, Robbie Ethridge, Theodore Fontaine, Joseph P. Gone, Alexander Laban Hinton, Tasha Hubbard, Kiera L. Ladner, Tricia E. Logan, David B. MacDonald, Benjamin Madley, Jeremy Patzer, Julia Peristerakis, Christopher Powell, Colin Samson, Gray H. Whaley, Andrew Woolford
From networks to fields to figurations to discourses, relational ideas have become common in soci... more From networks to fields to figurations to discourses, relational ideas have become common in social science, and a distinct relational sociology has emerged over the past decade and a half. But so far, this paradigm shift has raised as many questions as it answers. Just what are 'relations', precisely? How do we observe and measure them? How does relational thinking change what we already know about society? What new questions does it invite us to ask? This volume and its companion volume Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues bring together, for the first time, the leading experts and up-and-coming scholars in the field to address fundamental questions about what relational sociology is and how it works.
From networks to fields to figurations to discourses, relational ideas have become common in soci... more From networks to fields to figurations to discourses, relational ideas have become common in social science, and a distinct relational sociology has emerged over the past decade and a half. But so far, this paradigm shift has raised as many questions as it answers. Just what are 'relations', precisely? How do we observe and measure them? How does relational thinking change what we already know about society? What new questions does it invite us to ask? This volume and its companion volume Applying Relational Sociology: Networks, Relations, and Society bring together, for the first time, the leading experts and up-and-coming scholars in the field to address fundamental questions about what relational sociology is and how it works.
Why have the largest mass murders in human history taken place in the past hundred years? Why hav... more Why have the largest mass murders in human history taken place in the past hundred years? Why have European colonizers so often denied the humanity of the colonized? In Barbaric Civilization, Christopher Powell advances a radical thesis to answer these questions: that civilization produces genocides.
From its beginnings in the early twelfth century, the Western civilizing process has involved two interconnected transformations: the monopolization of military force by sovereign states and the cultivation in individuals of habits and dispositions of the kind that we call "civilized." The combined forward movement of these processes channels violent struggles for social dominance into symbolic performances. But even as the civilizing process frees many subjects from the threat of direct physical force, violence accumulates behind the scenes and at the margins of the social order, kept there by a deeply habituated performance of dominance and subordination called deferentiation. When deferentiation fails, difference becomes dangerous and genocide becomes possible.
Connecting historical developments with everyday life occurrences, and discussing examples ranging from thirteenth-century Languedoc to 1994 Rwanda, Powell offers an original framework for analyzing, comparing, and discussing genocides as variable outcomes of a common underlying social system, raising unsettling questions about the contradictions of Western civilization and the possibility of a world without genocide.
This book can be purchased through regular bookstores, or direct from the publisher at http://mqup.mcgill.ca/book.php?bookid=2636
Proceedings of the HCI International
1. Introduction This paper is concerned with the evaluation of a speech output Web browser for th... more 1. Introduction This paper is concerned with the evaluation of a speech output Web browser for the blind and visually impaired, with special reference to how it supports users in building conceptual models of the World Wide Web in the way that sighted users do. The browser named ...
Canadian review of sociology = Revue canadienne de sociologie, 2018
In our research and teaching, should our primary or even exclusive goal be to produce description... more In our research and teaching, should our primary or even exclusive goal be to produce descriptions and explanations that can be taken as true regardless of the values of the speaker or the audience? Or should we treat all knowledge, even the most purely descriptive empirical statements, as imbued with specific ethical or political values? Is there a third option? What does "value-neutrality" even mean? Each of us has our own answers to these questions, and the answers vary quite a lot. Within that variance, we can perceive loosely defined clusters of scholars with similar or compatible views. This clustering has consequences: each of us wants others to understand our work and to judge it by standards that we ourselves find legitimate, and this happens more easily when we share compatible assumptions about the relationship between facts and values. So there is an incentive for us to talk to others with views similar to our own, to find epistemological comfort zones, and not to bother trying to understand or be understood by people whose views are too different. It was with these considerations in mind that I organized the roundtable "Value-Neutral and Value-Oriented Epistemologies of the Social: A Conversation across Difference" at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Sociological Association. To expect 10 participants with differing views to reach consensus seemed unrealistic. My hope was for the participants to simply understand one another a little better coming out than going in. Therefore, I asked everyone to try not to focus on arguing for a position, but instead to explain their views in terms of their practical
Canadian Journal of Sociology, Sep 30, 2016
P sychological trauma can be defined, roughly, as the effect of an experience which the mind is u... more P sychological trauma can be defined, roughly, as the effect of an experience which the mind is unable to process, assimilate, and assign to the past. A traumatizing experience, therefore, is defined not by its intrinsic properties but by the mind's response to it (Herman, 2001). Critical trauma studies takes this anti-essentialist insight one step further by examining how social relations and cultural meanings produce trauma, in two ways. First, relations of denigration and oppression entail traumatizing experiences for individuals and groups-through class, race, gender, sexuality, and so on. Second, the concept of trauma is, itself, socially constructed and performative. This interesting, often insightful collection explores the socio-cultural dimensions of trauma across a wide variety of settings, including war in Afghanistan and Chechnya, Iran's Evin Prison, the Nazi holocaust, and sexual and racial violence in America. Several contributors write from experiences with activism, victim advocacy, or therapeutic practice, and several reference personal traumas of their own. Many of the contributions take an explicitly feminist or intersectional approach. The editors, Monica Casper and Eric Wertheimer, are professors in Gender and Women's Studies and in English, respectively, and the collection is highly interdisciplinary with contributions from Africana studies, justice studies, communications studies, and comparative studies as well as from more traditional disciplines like philosophy, religious studies, English, and sociology. The book includes an introduction that speaks to the context, themes, and aims of the collection. Some chapters are written using conventional social science methods: a content analysis of laypersons' writings on forgiveness, for instance, or a case study of one New Orleans family's experiences after Katrina. Others are personal, even poetic: a written translation of a performance art piece about Fallujah; an extended meditation on one girl's silence in Evin Prison; a bitter and yet hopeful lecture on surviving sexual abuse. Other chapters combine the clinical and the personal: a literary analysis of trauma and forgetting in Cormack McCarthy's The
ABSTRACT This important collection of essays expands the geographic, demographic, and analytic sc... more ABSTRACT This important collection of essays expands the geographic, demographic, and analytic scope of the term genocide to encompass the effects of colonialism and settler colonialism in North America. Colonists made multiple and interconnected attempts to destroy Indigenous peoples as groups. The contributors examine these efforts through the lens of genocide. Considering some of the most destructive aspects of the colonization and subsequent settlement of North America, several essays address Indigenous boarding school systems imposed by both the Canadian and U.S. governments in attempts to "civilize" or "assimilate" Indigenous children. Contributors examine some of the most egregious assaults on Indigenous peoples and the natural environment, including massacres, land appropriation, the spread of disease, the near-extinction of the buffalo, and forced political restructuring of Indigenous communities. Assessing the record of these appalling events, the contributors maintain that North Americans must reckon with colonial and settler colonial attempts to annihilate Indigenous peoples. https://www.dukeupress.edu/Colonial-Genocide-in-Indigenous-North-America/
Genocide Studies and Prevention, 2015
Social Studies of Science, 2001
This paper discusses the concept of “proto-genocide” with reference to the conflict in Sri Lanka.
This paper uses the concepts of ethnosphere and ethnodiversity to frame the stakes of cultural ge... more This paper uses the concepts of ethnosphere and ethnodiversity to frame the stakes of cultural genocide in the context of the emerging global society. We are in an era of rapid global ethnodiversity loss. Global ethnodiversity is important because different cultures produce different solutions to the subjective and objective problems of human society, and because cultures have an intrinsic value. Rapid ethnodiversity loss is a byproduct of the expansion of the modern world-system, and Lemkin's invention of the concept of genocide can be understood as a dialectical reaction to this tendency. The current phase of globalization creates pressures towards global monoculture, but movements towards polyculture can be observed. Genocide scholars have an interest in three underdeveloped lines of inquiry: measuring ethnodiversity loss; constructing valid measures of the vitality and life or death of cultures; and developing techniques for resolving social differences without the need for cultural consensus. Abstract: This paper uses the concepts of ethnosphere and ethnodiversity to frame the stakes of cultural genocide in the context of the emerging global society. We are in an era of rapid global ethnodiversity loss. Global ethnodiversity is important because different cultures produce different solutions to the subjective and objective problems of human society, and because cultures have an intrinsic value. Rapid ethnodiversity loss is a byproduct of the expansion of the modern world-system, and Lemkin's invention of the concept of genocide can be understood as a dialectical reaction to this tendency. The current phase of globalization creates pressures towards global monoculture, but movements towards polyculture can be observed. Genocide scholars have an interest in three underdeveloped lines of inquiry: measuring ethnodiversity loss; constructing valid measures of the vitality and life or death of cultures; and developing techniques for resolving social differences without the need for cultural consensus.
Conceptualizing Relational Sociology, 2013
Different relational sociologists have different phenomena in mind when they use the word "relati... more Different relational sociologists have different phenomena in mind when they use the word "relation." For some, relations are concrete network ties between individuals or groups, while for others relations are something more abstract, such as relative positions in a field. For some authors, relations are the elementary unit of analysis for all sociology, while for others relations are one type of emergent social structure among others. In this chapter, I present the rudiments of a radically relational sociological epistemology, based on but extrapolating beyond relational elements in the works of By "radically relational" I mean an epistemology that contains no residual dualist elements and therefore treats all social phenomena, including individuals themselves, as constituted through relations. 1 This epistemology assumes naturalism and monist materialism but adopts an agnostic stance toward realism. It also applies reflexively to itself. In keeping with this agnosticism, I present the key points of this framework as guidelines for epistemic practice rather than as statements about what it is.
Conceptualizing Relational Sociology, 2013
Norbert Elias and Social Theory, 2013
Norbert Elias and Social Theory, 2013
Journal of Genocide Research, 2007
... life of a collectivity involves something more than the sum of its individual parts.Lemkin&#x... more ... life of a collectivity involves something more than the sum of its individual parts.Lemkin's functionalism. Jump to section. ... Lemkin's two faces? In the course of any particular episode of organized mass violence directed towards a ...
Social theory is like an ongoing conversation among a group of very old friends (and enemies). Or... more Social theory is like an ongoing conversation among a group of very old friends (and enemies). Or, it's like Season 5 of LOST. Either way, people who come in half-way through, find it hard to tell what's going on. Teaching classical theory is our way of filling in the back-story.
Studies in Political Economy, 2002
Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research, 2010
This chapter maps out four influential positions in the sociology of morality taken by Weber, Sim... more This chapter maps out four influential positions in the sociology of morality taken by Weber, Simmel, Durkheim, and Marx. These authors’ differing substantive claims about morality are understood in terms of their differing epistemic strategies, fundamental conceptual assumptions that frame sociological inquiry. Epistemic strategies, most often divided simply into holism and methodological individualism, are here classified according to Kontopoulos’s five-part
Colonial Genocide in Indigenous North America, 2014
Knowledge can never truly “be apolitical"; it only appears so when it operates in harmony with so... more Knowledge can never truly “be apolitical"; it only appears so when it operates in harmony with some particular institutionalized formation of power relations. "Post-truth" politics entails a rejection of particular relations of epistemic authority, in favour of other relations which are inimical to scientific and scholarly independent. To adapt, sociology must account for its own sources of support and for the goods it has to offer. Amongst the latter, our area of greatest weakness is our ability to assist social actors in solving problems. We must become more useful. Of course, how and to whom is a crucial question.