Mining Aboriginal success: The politics of difference in continuing education for industry needs

Abstract

This article uses a study of a northern School of Mining to interrogate questions about the relationship being negotiated between aboriginality and neoliberalism. Aboriginal Peoples have long fought for control over education as central to their right of self‐determination. There are now many examples of programming and policies oriented to Aboriginal people in Canadian public post‐secondary institutions. Alongside these Aboriginal gains, there has been a neoliberal restructuring of post‐secondary education. This restructuring has served to open spaces to contest established colonial rationalities, technologies of power, and normed subjectivities in education, but it has also increasingly oriented schooling to economic goals, particularly skilling workers for local labour markets. Through neoliberal reforms, Aboriginal Peoples have achieved new forms of increased recognition. Elements of these changes correspond to Aboriginal Peoples’ long‐standing demands and vital aspirations. However, neoliberal governmentality continues to condition the possibilities for change. I argue the intertwining of Aboriginal self‐determination with efforts to restructure education to better serve labour markets has shaped an aporetic terrain, where neoliberalism, under the banner of social justice, has itself become the vehicle for a limited version of justice demanded by marginalized communities. This advances a partial form of recognition which necessarily leaves aspects of Aboriginal claims unanswered.

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