I Am Nobody Here: Institutional Humanism and the Discourse of Disposability in the Lives of Criminalized Refugee Youth in Canada

Abstract

This article uses the concept of “institutional humanism” to explicate how the ideology of humanism is deployed through a biopolitical “discourse of disposability” to dehumanize, objectify, and animalize racialized and criminalized refugee youth in Canada, setting them in opposition to mainstream Whites who are deemed normal, rational, and autonomous—in essence, human. This article identifies four mechanisms of disposability: the expulsion of criminalized refugee youth from school and the labor market, the “revolving door” of the criminal justice system, the creation of deportability, and disinvestment in programs for youth. The treatment of criminalized refugee youth as disposable is part of an epistemological and ontological exercise that creates and enforces a boundary between those defined as human and those who are excluded from the set of “bodies that matter.” The study was conducted through qualitative interviews with criminalized refugee youth and professional adults who work with them. The interview data are set within the web of theoretical relationships among humanism, posthumanism, animalization, institutional policy, and categorizations based on race, gender, class, ability, age, and immigration status, demonstrating how these theoretical nodes attain bolder relief when operationalized under performativity.