Counselling in an Age of Empire: Intervening in the (Re)Production of Majoritarian Subjectivity by Scott Kouri B.A., University of Victoria, 2011 M.A., University of Victoria, 2014 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in the School of Child and Youth Care © Scott Kouri, 2019 University of Victoria All rights reserved. This dissertation may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, by photocopying or other means, without the permission of the author. Supervisory Committee Counselling in an Age of Empire: Intervening in the (Re)Production of Majoritarian Subjectivity Scott Kouri B.A., University of Victoria, 2011 M.A., University of Victoria, 2014 Supervisory Committee Dr. Sandrina de Finney School of Child and Youth Care Supervisor Dr. Hans Skott-Myhre Kennesaw State University Committee Member Dr. Vikki Reynolds City University Committee Member ii Abstract In an age of unbridled global capitalism and caustic neocolonial relations to land and life, the question of the aims and approaches of doing counselling with young people, particularly those majoritarian youth who are inheriting the privileges and specters of capitalist and colonial conquest, is pertinent. This dissertation is a collection of three theoretical papers on critical counselling with majoritarian young people in the context of contemporary Empire. A critical lens drawn from decolonial analyses was applied to mainstream counselling practice and theory. By developing a map of how contemporary Empire functions as a permutation of settler colonialism and globalized capitalism, this work investigates the forms of power and discourse that structure contemporary counselling, particularly the bio-medical-industrial-complex of psychiatry and the pharmacology industry, societies of control and digital technology, affective labour, and coloniality. Practices of vulnerability, self-reflexivity, decolonization, accountability, and critique are weaved into a cartographic methodology to redefine counselling as an ethics- driven and politicized intervention in the reproduction of majoritarian subjectivity. In the 21st century, globalized capitalism and settler colonialism seek to push past material limits and appropriate the products of human relatedness—feelings, ideas, cultures, and creations. In resisting this affective extractivism, these papers explore what it might mean to position engagement, living encounter, and relationship in an ethics-based counselling paradigm of resistance and social justice. The challenge of a critical counselling praxis commensurate with such a paradigm is to find avenues to intervene in the majoritarian psyche’s capito-colonial grip on all forms of land and life. Counselling in an Age of Empire proposes that a politicized account of counselling with majoritarian subjects might prove to be a productive space for recrafting subjectivities. Through a careful critique of the majoritarian subject, in the roles of both iii counsellor and client, a praxis of counselling attentive to political context, based in living encounter, and grounded in a settler ethics of vulnerability and accountability is sketched out. Overall, the work is aimed at majoritarian students and counsellors, their teachers, and those interested in developing a counselling praxis grounded in settler ethics, critique, vulnerability, and the power of living encounter. iv Table of Contents Supervisory Committee ................................................................................................................ ii Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents ...........................................................................................................................v Acknowledgements ..................................................................................................................... vii Introduction ....................................................................................................................................1 Self-Location............................................................................................................................. 4 Scope ......................................................................................................................................... 6 Practice Problems.................................................................................................................... 11 Dissertation Overview ............................................................................................................ 15 Audience and Dissemination .................................................................................................. 20 Methodology .................................................................................................................................22 Guiding Questions .................................................................................................................. 27 Immanent Philosophy, Cartography, and Figuration .............................................................. 28 Rhizomatic Analysis ............................................................................................................... 33 Toward a Settler Ethics in Research and Practice .................................................................. 37 Decolonizing Methodologies .................................................................................................. 39 Genealogy ............................................................................................................................... 41 Settler Ethics ........................................................................................................................... 44 Social Justice in Settler Colonial Contexts ............................................................................. 48 What Is Critique? .................................................................................................................... 52 Discourse and Power............................................................................................................... 61 Care and Vulnerability ............................................................................................................ 63 Summary ................................................................................................................................. 66 Paper One: Decolonizing Counselling as Living Encounter Within Empire .........................67 Settler Colonial Contexts ........................................................................................................ 68 Counselling’s Complicity in Colonial Practices ..................................................................... 72 Networked Global Capitalism................................................................................................. 76 The Contiguity and Contradictions of Empire as Capito-Colonialism ................................... 78 Counselling Under Empire ..................................................................................................... 83 Difference, Multitude, and the Common ................................................................................ 84 Power and Affective Labour ................................................................................................... 89 v Living Encounter in a Neocolonial Globalized World ........................................................... 92 Toward a Decolonized Praxis of Counselling in Empire ........................................................ 95 Paper Two: Majoritarian Identity and Subjectivity: A Conceptual Framework................103 Identity and Subjectivity in Clinical Contexts ...................................................................... 104 Settler Location ..................................................................................................................... 106 Self-location .......................................................................................................................... 109 The Multicultural Settler Unconscious ................................................................................. 113 Consciousness Raising .......................................................................................................... 115 White Supremacy .................................................................................................................. 120 Hegemonic Masculinity ........................................................................................................ 122 Intersectionality..................................................................................................................... 127 Performativity, Trans, and Politicized Queer Theory ........................................................... 130 Posthuman Theory, Immanence, and Becomings ................................................................. 134 Minoritarian Counselling in Colonized Space ...................................................................... 142 Paper Three: Clinical Praxis in Majoritarian Space ..............................................................148 A Brief History of Critical Counselling Practice .................................................................. 152 Indigenous and Critical Counselling Literature ...................................................................