Moral responsibility and increasing responsiveness

I suggest that moral responsibility should primarily be interpreted as a practice of accountability in which we engage socially and politically. We hold one another responsible for our actions, inactions and negligence by praising and blaming one another. We hold one another as liable for our agency by asking for explanations and excuses for perceived misconduct and by asking for reparations for harm caused, and compensation for, unfair benefits accrued. This practice of accountability is fundamental to how we relate to others, since being in good relationships with others and being in good social standing depend on our adequate engagement in this practice. There is no durable relationship of trust, care and friendship with someone held to be morally responsible but who remains unaccountable and unresponsive to blame and demands for explanations, excuses or reparation.Footnote ⁸

While I recognize the relevance and significance of pursuing a decolonized and unsettled future through a consideration of moral responsibility,Footnote ⁹ I want to caution against the role played by innocence in this project. To see why this is an issue, we need to consider that when we engage in the practice of demanding accounts by holding morally responsible, we strive for an underlying objective that may be thwarted by centring guilt and innocence.

Following Manuel Vargas's (Reference Vargas2013) “agency cultivation model,” I hold that through the practice of political responsibility, we pursue the objective of “fostering a certain sort of agency, namely, agency that is sensitive to moral considerations” (Holroyd, Reference Holroyd, Hutchison, Mackenzie and Oshana2018: 140). Through praise and blame and by requiring that we give account for our actions, we bring one another to be more sensitive and responsive to moral and political considerations. The practice of moral responsibility is thus justified by its role in the pursuit of a world in which we become “better beings” (Vargas, Reference Vargas2013).

Similarly, Cheshire Calhoun (Reference Calhoun1989) developed an account of blame as appropriate when someone is indeed blameworthy but also when blaming someone, even if they are not strictly blameworthy, can effect beneficial “social change” (McKenna, Reference McKenna, Hutchison, Mackenzie and Oshana2018: 43). On this view, while a settler, for instance, may not be blameworthy given their socialization, it could still be appropriate to blame them in order to produce transformation of their agency and to move them toward greater responsibility, thus contributing to the pursuit of a decolonized and unsettled future. Similarly, engaging in discourses of blame, guilt and innocence would make sense in settler colonial contexts because it would allow us to become better agents. This is reflected, for instance, in Matt James's (Reference James2021: 381–82) argument that the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and its structural focus, needs to be complemented by a retributive attribution of sanctions against blameworthy wrongdoers; this is because it “warns successors that they might some day face similar judgment” and can increase accountability and thus make us better agents and help to realize a more just world.

Innocence and the corruption of responsiveness

I am concerned, however, that the driving force of innocence in this model makes the practice susceptible to corruption. To appreciate this, we need to consider how blame and guilt are said to produce the desirable objective of making us better agents. Indeed, it is common among moral philosophers to present blame as an important tool in the joint pursuit of improved moral conduct.Footnote ¹⁰ If blame can play this role, it is because of a deep-seated desire to avoid blame and guilt—that is, a desire for innocence. As Jules Holroyd explains Victoria McGeer and Philip Pettit's (Reference McGeer, Pettit and Shoemaker2015) views, while not agreeing with them: “The sanctioning component of the blame serves to fulfil the promised threat that accompanies the exhortation ‘attend to reasons or else’” (Holroyd, Reference Holroyd, Hutchison, Mackenzie and Oshana2018: 160). Since blame functions as a form of accusation and condemnation of an agent's conduct, it is expected that agents will seek to avoid the conduct that led to blame. We can say that there is moral comfort in innocence.

There is debate on whether blaming will produce “backlash” or distract from acting responsibly (Holroyd, Reference Holroyd, Hutchison, Mackenzie and Oshana2018: 150; Young, Reference Young2011: chap. 6), but Holroyd (Reference Holroyd, Hutchison, Mackenzie and Oshana2018: 150) notes that some empirical studies show that “holding each other responsible [through blame and other moral confrontations] may well increase sensitivity to moral reasons.” We can make sense of this by considering that agents desire to be proper moral agents, whether this is because they genuinely desire to be moral agents or simply because they covet the “social standing” that comes with being someone who can “be called to account” (Vargas, Reference Vargas, Hutchison, Mackenzie and Oshana2018: 121). In either case, the result should be the same, and agents should be seeking to avoid blame and guilt through greater responsiveness and attentiveness to moral considerations.

Yet when we consider how practices can be corrupted, we can appreciate how this very same motivation—avoiding blame—may short-circuit the fostering of moral agency. A corrupted practice is a parasitic practice that relies on an uncorrupted practice to remain in effect. It takes the form of, and remains broadly recognizable as, the uncorrupted practice, but it deviates from its substance by pursuing a different objective than the constitutive aim of the original practice. For instance, lying can be said to be a corruption of communicative actions: a lie is expected to be taken as a true statement and relies on the continuation of true statements to function as a lie, but it does not contribute to the sharing of propositions held to be true (Allard-Tremblay, Reference Allard-Tremblay2014). I contend that moral responsibility can be corrupted when accountability is driven by the moral comfort of innocence in ways that thwart actual responsiveness to moral considerations and demands for answers.

To see this, we need to appreciate how the comfort of innocence can be achieved by retaining the form of responsiveness to blame but by actively exculpating the agent and shielding them from blame. Moral responsibility is corrupted when responsiveness to blame no longer aims for a discursive engagement in accountability but for the pre-emption of guilt. There are various ways in which agents can improperly engage in practices of moral responsibility. Young (Reference Young2011: 114) writes, for instance, that “the language of blame in political debates . . . often impedes discussion that will end in collective action, because it expresses a spirit of resentment, produces defensiveness, or focuses people more on themselves than on the social relations they should be trying to change.” She adds that “rhetorics of blame in public discussion of social problems . . . usually produce . . . unproductive blame-switching.” In her view, this is “a natural and appropriate reaction” (Reference Young2011: 117). Even if the examples provided by Young do not all constitute corrupted practices of moral responsibility—defensiveness is still within the bounds of the practice, unlike systematic and disingenuous blame-switching—they all make clear that if what motivates us is achieving the comfort of innocence, then we should not expect agents to adopt only actions consistent with proper responsible moral agency. Indeed, for Paulo Ravecca and Elizabeth Dauphinee (Reference Ravecca and Dauphinee2022: 42), this is a fundamental problem with innocence; the comfort it provides perversely motivates “an epistemological and political blockage to a genuine examination of our individual and collective circumstances” and thus blocks moral responsiveness.

While the discussion of settler moves to innocence takes the form of a discussion about moral responsibility and of unwarranted exculpation of guilt, I suggest that they can in fact be interpreted as corrupting the practice. Tuck and Yang (Reference Tuck and Wayne Yang2012: 9) discuss six settler moves to innocence that all point to the fact that “directly and indirectly benefiting from the erasure and assimilation of Indigenous peoples is a difficult reality for settlers to accept. The weight of this reality is uncomfortable; the misery of guilt makes one hurry toward any reprieve.” They point to the moral comfort of innocence and its motivating power.

In the case of the first move to innocence they discuss, “settler nativism,” this comfort is achieved through a pre-emptive denial of needing to answer for one's conduct and position. As Tuck and Yang (Reference Tuck and Wayne Yang2012: 10) explain: “Settlers locate or invent a long-lost ancestor who is rumored to have had ‘Indian blood,’ and they use this claim to mark themselves as blameless in the attempted eradications of Indigenous peoples.” In doing so, settlers reposition themselves in ways that shield them from having to engage in accountability practices by providing reasons for why they are not to be blamed. Ultimately, however, the practice of moral accountability is corrupted because there is no dialogue of moral responsibility—only an unresponsive justification of innocence through the denial that the settler should even be called to account in the first place.

A focus on innocence thus not only risks sustaining defensive refusals of guilt and blame-switching but may also lead to disingenuous engagement in the practice of moral responsibility through pre-emptive assertions of innocence. It shows that there are further limitations, beyond the practical hurdles identified by Young, to relying on the appeal of innocence in the search for a decolonized and unsettled future. It also shows, beyond Tuck and Yang, that what is needed is not only an empirical critique of claims to innocence but a rethinking of the very frame of innocence, given that people will not only sometimes provide the wrong response to blame, as shown by Young, but may also corruptingly centre their innocence rather than pursue responsible moral agency. Focusing on denying the innocence of settlers may thus remain unproductive.

The illusion of computable responsibility

Pursuing the moral comfort of innocence makes sense when it is assumed that it can be achieved. This requires guilt to be something that can be exculpated or, at least, released through forgiveness. It also requires an account of how to act responsibly to avoid blame and guilt. This often takes the form of required actions or conduct and of a specification of what one ought to do. On this view, responsibility is understood as specifiable, distributable and measurable. More importantly, once specified, responsibility can be discharged, and one can thus move to innocence—one can do one's share and no longer categorically be called to action. If one decides to do more, this is no longer one's responsibility but one's supererogatory contribution.

This dischargeable view of responsibility can be associated with what Shalini Satkunanandan (Reference Satkunanandan2015: 2) refers to as a calculating approach to responsibility, one that “takes human responsibility as something amenable to calculation—as a series of debts that can be identified in advance, reckoned up, negotiated, balanced out, and discharged.” This calculating view of responsibility underlies what Young (Reference Young2011: 98) calls the liability model of responsibility, which “include[s] all such practices of assigning responsibility under the law and in moral judgement that seek to identify liable parties for the purposes of sanctioning, punishing, or exacting compensation or redress.” Liability is easier to negotiate when responsibilities, blame and guilt can be distributed and when compensation and punishment can be calculated. Indeed, as Young (Reference Young2011: 11) notes, the “absolving function” of discourses that make it possible to fully discharge one's personal responsibility, and thus to achieve the moral comfort of innocence, helps to explain the centrality of such approaches to moral responsibility.

Problematically, however, such calculating approaches can function, counterintuitively, as barriers to accountability and to increased sensitivity to moral and political considerations. While Satkunanandan argues that the calculating view of responsibility is “part of our ordinary way of articulating and discussing our responsibility,” she is also clear that it often prevents us from being attentive to the complexity and deep ways in which our relationships to others entail more than debt-like measurable calculations (Satkunanandan, Reference Satkunanandan2015: 2). Indeed, the fact that our responsibility is seen as something that can be calculated and discharged is precisely what makes it also possible to deny responsibility by claiming to already have done our fair share or paid our just due. Further, problematically, for such calculating approaches to responsibility is the possibility that one may not have a computable share of guilt or blame that can be discharged toward innocence. While there is, arguably, moral anxiety associated with unabsolvable guilt, undischargeable responsibility and unspecifiable compensation, I suggest that this may precisely be the case in contexts of structural injustice and that acting responsibly requires an appreciation of this fact.

Simply in virtue of one's position in an unjust structure, one contributes to sustaining that unjust structure in a multiplicity of indiscriminable ways, including through daily actions. As Young explains, “social-structural processes” (Reference Young2011: 53) are “background conditions of action” (107), and the opportunities and constraints they constitute for individuals appear “objective” (53, 55); yet they exist “only in actions” and generally result from “the unintended consequences of the combination of the actions of many people” (53). My concern here is not how social structures produce injustice—I take this for granted. It is rather the idea that such structures, and the corresponding social positions they constitute, are produced and consolidated through the actions and interactions of individuals, often going about their daily affairs without intending to produce unjust outcomes. As Young notes, structures are sustained notably by people following formal and informal rules (55) and by their “routine or habitual” conduct (61). The production of structural injustices is thus not necessarily by design or intentional but merely “a consequence of many individuals and institutions acting to pursue their particular goals and interests, for the most part within the limits of accepted rules and norms” (52, 62).

Since structures are enacted and sustained in such broad, diffuse and generally unintentional ways, it becomes impossible to allocate blame in any computable sense. As Young (Reference Young2011: 107) writes, “most of us contribute to a greater or lesser degree to the production and reproduction of structural injustice precisely because we follow the accepted and expected rules and conventions of the communities and institutions in which we act.” While it is true that some individuals and groups benefit from these background unjust structures and others suffer oppression, it would be wrong to say that only those who benefit are responsible. There are social structures where that can be the case—that is, where those who are oppressed are also so utterly dominated that it would be meaningless to affirm that they also participate in the social structure. Generally, however, social structures are complex, and individuals occupy diverse social positions, benefit in some ways while being oppressed in others, and exercise some power and participate in the enactment of social structures. Accordingly, I agree with Aragon and Jaggar (Reference Aragon and Jaggar2018: 451), who “find it philosophically mistaken, often pointless, and even diversionary to dissect people's contributions and intentions in efforts to parse out different degrees of individual culpability for wrongdoing.” Arguably, then, seeking to analytically completely untangle class, Indigeneity, race, gender, sexual orientation, and other social positions to arrive at a dischargeable specification of responsibility appears fanciful.

Ultimately, the point is not that an individual cannot act in morally responsible manners by accepting responsibility for contributing to unjust structures or that there is no role for the discourse and practice of moral responsibility; as Ruth Koleszar-Green (Reference Koleszar-Green2019) illustrates by differentiating between settlers, guests, hostile, and ignorant individuals, there are different ways of occupying the settler social position that are not morally equivalent.Footnote ¹² The fundamental point I am making is that even if the language and practice of moral responsibility is retained, claiming innocence eclipses the depth at which our agency is embedded in complex social structures and distracts from the importance of changing these structures.

Structural complicity and non-innocence

In contexts of structural injustice, our concern should not be mainly moral but political: our focus should not be on whether one is innocent or not but rather on how the positions we occupy require political actions to make social structures less unjust. Again, this does not mean that there can be no moral assessment of how individuals respond to their social positions. It means that regardless of this moral assessment, there would be a political remainder that would not be accounted for. One way of understanding this is to see complicity as structural and incalculable. Aragon and Jaggar (Reference Aragon and Jaggar2018: 449) provide support for this view when they write that “people are structurally complicit when they exercise their agency in ways that reinforce the unjust social structures in which they participate, regardless of their conscious intentions.” I contend that being aware of such structural complicity and recognizing that it cannot be discharged through calculation is essential for political change.

There is a further complication for calculating discourses of responsibility and the associated view of achievable innocence. This complication relates to the consequences of one's actions as part of unjust structures and when we consider how the benefits associated with such structures are visited on agents. Both issues frame agents as complicit and liable but also make it impossible to compute one's share of blame or guilt and to achieve innocence.

Even when agents challenge unjust social structures and struggle to transform them, their agency generally remains embedded within those social structures. As such, their actions risk contributing to the production of unjust consequences through these very same structures. Consider, for instance, how in a globalized capitalist economy, the consequences of one's actions extend far beyond our intentions in ways that often render ethical consumption impossible, thus making us all complicit and not-innocent: while one may opt for almond milk instead of cow's milk because one wants to reduce animal suffering and fight climate change through reduction of cow-digestion-related-gases, one ends up contributing to increased bee suffering and water-intensive monocrop agriculture (McGivney, Reference McGivney2020). Similarly, by opting for an electric car to reduce one's carbon footprint, one may end up contributing to extractive industries on Indigenous land and irresponsible water use in the Atacama Desert (Horvath and Medina, Reference Horvath and Medina2019). In these circumstances, one's attempt at responsible conduct is precisely what makes one complicit, and there is no clear way to avoid this complicity. Once again, the idea of innocence appears fanciful.

Furthermore, while the positions constituted by social structures can be comparatively considered and while some individuals may clearly benefit and others clearly be disadvantaged by the position they occupy, there is hardly any sense in which one can escape all the benefits produced by unjust structures, except in the most extreme cases of structural injustice. For instance, Alissa Macoun (Reference Macoun, Maddison, Clark and Costa2016: 86) explains how, in settler colonial contexts, “policies presented as neutral or benevolent are almost axiomatically doing some kind of colonising work”; to see this, we need to consider how “the state has been and continues to be a party to racialized colonial conflict.” This means that one who benefits from apparently beneficial or neutral state policies is also visited by the benefits arising from the colonial enterprise on which the settler state constitutively depends. One is made complicit by being on the receiving end, whether one intends it or not. Similarly, even those who are in a position of disadvantage may also benefit from some (public) goods produced by unjust structures.

Olúfẹmi Táíwò (Reference Táíwò2022) notes a further sense in which it becomes impossible to apply moral responsibility and innocence and to compute reparations, when we consider structural injustices as historical processes in which different advantages and disadvantages develop, accumulate and consolidate over time. As he writes: “The very same racialized system that constituted a person as a chattel slave (or potentially so) also constituted other people as slave owners (or potentially so), and the same colonial social system that constitutes persons as members of the colonized group constitutes other persons as members of the colonizing group” (131). According to Táíwò, focusing on measurable and attributable guilt and blame for these historical and structural injustices is mistaken: “To build a view of reparations on these notions of binary group identity and collective responsibility is to build a house on a sand foundation. . . . To say that the ancestors of some contemporary whites were causally responsible for slavery and colonialism, whether as individuals or as organized groups, is not yet to identify a difference between white people and Black people” (118). This is in part because our relationship to historical and structural injustices is one where the details of benefits and advantages, while following discernable patterns, cannot be avoided nor fully reckoned up. Nevertheless, the calculating approach to moral responsibility makes us look for clear attributions of guilt and innocence:

This is why, similarly to Young, Táíwò puts forward a constructive view of reparations that is informed by the social positions we occupy but that focuses on our political responsibility to realize a more just world, not on the moral or collective responsibility we would have inherited in virtue of what our ancestors did.

Students in an introductory course to Indigenous Studies that I teach experience these hurdles in measuring responsibility and in thinking about how our agency is embedded in structures of injustice in ways that may unwittingly contribute to the colonial enterprise. In the course, I cover Indigenous resistance to settler colonialism, and I show the movie Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance by Alanis Obomsawin (Reference Obomsawin1993), which documents events that took place in Kanehsatake and near Montreal, Canada, in 1990. During that summer, members of the Kanehsatake Mohawk community resisted the construction of a golf course on their territory and erected barricades. The events eventually led to the deployment of the Canadian Armed Forces. I also show the movie Invasion about the Unist'ot’en Camp in Wet'suwet’en Territory and the resistance of members of that Indigenous community to the construction of a pipeline on their land (Unist'ot’en Camp, Reference Unist'ot’en2019). After watching both movies, students are rarely left indifferent. They often question the validity of the position of the state and the force with which it intervened in Kanehsatake. They also often condemn the continuation of colonial policies up to this day in Wet'suwet’en territory, notably through the denial of the necessity of free, prior and informed consent.

Yet in showing these movies, one of my ulterior motives is also to make the students think about the complex ways in which we are embedded within settler colonial and capitalist structures associated with the injustices they identified in these movies. For instance, I discuss how the pipeline at issue in Invasion is a project of the TC Energy Corporation, and I mention how various institutions that we sustain by our actions or in which we participate—such as banks and retirement funds—often invest funds in such corporations. I mention how despite our best efforts and calls to divest from fossil fuel energies, most of our daily actions still depend in important ways on petrol and sustain the structural demand that drives the construction of such pipelines: for example, petrol for the production and transport of the food we eat and for the clothes we wear and for the powering of most buses and cars we use to transport ourselves, or mazut to heat some public spaces we visit. This seems to leave the students (and me) with a sense of (structural) complicity that cannot be easily alleviated. It shows, in concrete ways, that structural injustices make it difficult, if not impossible, for agents to measure, distribute and discharge their responsibility in ways that enable them to claim innocence. It also shows that seeking or claiming innocence would prevent a deep appreciation of the complex ways in which our agency is tied to unjust social structures, even when we struggle against these structures.

In contexts of structural injustices, such as settler colonialism, we should not primarily focus on moral responsibility, guilt, blame and innocence. These are unproductive to develop an awareness of the depth at which our agency is embedded in unjust structures and of the fact that we need to act otherwise to transform these structures. A decolonized and unsettled future is not achieved by discharging one's moral responsibility and claiming innocence while leaving structures unchanged; it is better pursued by recognizing one's position and ongoing responsibility to act even if that means postponing (indefinitely) the achievement of the comfort of innocence. When moral responsibility and innocence are centred, we either ignore these required transformations or end up pursuing a fanciful objective of innocence. A decolonized and unsettled future is thus better achieved by taking responsibility to change unjust structures. I agree with Young—and Táíwò (Reference Táíwò2022), among others—that this requires “a special kind of responsibility, rather than a variation on responsibility understood as guilt, blame, fault, or liability,” which is called political responsibility (Young, Reference Young2011: 97).

Transforming ways of being, knowing and doing

To appreciate the significance of individual actions in challenging unjust structures, it is worth emphasizing that settler colonialism, like other structural injustices, is more than a set of formal institutions producing injustices. As a social structure, it also manifests in individual ways of being, knowing and doing. For instance, individuals may internalize settler colonial ideologies, discount and ignore Indigenous knowledges and cultures, and adopt life goals that sustain Indigenous dispossession. As Steinman (Reference Steinman2020: 561) argues: “Settler colonialism is not just expressed in pipelines threatening Native access to clean water; members of American society routinely reproduce settler colonialism when they cooperate to conceal its existence; reproduce its beliefs, justifications and practices; deny alternatives; and through additional ‘non-actions’ in a variety of settings.” This points to the recursive relationship between social structures and individual conduct: individual conduct sustains social structures, and these structures in return frame and consolidate individual conduct that sustain these structures. Aragon and Jaggar (Reference Aragon and Jaggar2018: 450) further explain this:

Ultimately, the embeddedness of our agency within these structures means that we should avoid imagining resistance to these structures as something that can be neatly separated from who we are, what and how we know and believe, and how we act and feel.

I thus suggest, following Steinman, and Aragon and Jaggar, that to the extent that social structures are sustained and consolidated by ways of being, doing and knowing, their production and reproduction can be disrupted and undermined by transforming these ways of being, doing and knowing.Footnote ¹³ Accordingly, apart from engaging in collective actions to change unjust structures, we can also seek to transform ourselves by “changing those of our own cognitive, affective, and active habits that sustain unjust social processes” (Aragon and Jaggar, Reference Aragon and Jaggar2018: 455). This idea is shared by decolonial projects in that they emphasize the ways in which coloniality structures not only formal institutions but also how we know, sense and experience the world. As Walter Mignolo (Reference Mignolo2021: 17) writes: “The world cannot be changed if the people who inhabit and make it do not change,” such that to pursue decoloniality, we need “to engage in epistemic (knowing) and aesthesic (sensing, being) reconstitutions.” We need to work on ourselves to experience and adopt other ways of being, knowing and doing; we need to engage in practices that will transform us and make us become otherwise. Similarly, it is through individual transformative engagement in practices of Indigenous resurgence that, according to Taiaiake Alfred and Jeff Corntassel (Reference Alfred and Corntassel2005: 612), we can work to transcend settler colonialism; individual resurgence will be “a strength that soon reverberates outward from the self to family, clan, community and into all of the broader relationships that form an Indigenous existence. In this way, Indigenousness is reconstructed, reshaped and actively lived.”

This points to the significance of cultivating and nurturing dispositions to act, think and feel in ways that can disrupt unjust structures. The practice of cultivating dispositions can be clarified when we consider that we can set ourselves up to facilitate certain responses or conduct. Vargas (Reference Vargas, Hutchison, Mackenzie and Oshana2018: 117) explains, for instance, that “environments can foster particular patterns of cares and commitments that shape what agents perceive as reasons. We can also restructure our environments to better exploit our cognitive and affective dispositions, and to better express and realize our cares and commitments.” To cultivate a disposition, we thus need to explore what will contribute to fostering that disposition. How this can be achieved for each and every one cannot be answered in advance. Nevertheless, such transformative work on the self is useful, if not essential, to disrupt and undermine unjust social structures.

Cultivating a disposition to transgress

Interestingly, given the pervasive nature of settler colonialism and of the coloniality of power, our daily existence and actions are shot through by them, such that, as Steinman (Reference Steinman2020: 561) puts it: “We do not have to go looking for settler colonialism so that we can oppose it. We are in it, all the time, and we can act to undermine it where we are.” We are thus awarded “countless opportunities for disruption,” which means that unsettling can take the form of a “disruptive, bounded and modest . . . agency” that can be “essentially quotidian in nature” (Steinman, Reference Steinman2020: 567). To challenge settler colonialism, we can work on refusing the ways in which our agency is framed and influenced by it, in our daily lives. Engaging in decolonial praxis, epistemic and aesthesic reconstitutions, and transforming our ways of being, knowing and doing, notably by cultivating dispositions, can be done in, and about, our everyday individual conduct.

Considering the extent to which coloniality models the economy, authority, intimate relationships, and cultures through imposed terms, and thus constitutes what counts as right conduct within those areas (Mignolo, Reference Mignolo2021), I suggest that one significant disposition we can nurture so as to disrupt settler colonialism is precisely to transgress those imposed terms. A disposition to transgress is a disposition to cross imposed boundaries and to question, refuse and challenge the varied ways in which power and social structures frame, influence and limit conduct. Transgressive conduct, by departing from standards of expected conduct, has the potential to disrupt the otherwise uninterrupted reproduction of social structures such as settler colonialism.

Without transgressing norms of civility by calling out the chairperson that once again mispronounces the name of the Indigenous nation they are acknowledging, without transgressing imposed gender norms and queering the family, without taking a knee during the national anthem, without transgressing the boundaries of respectful conduct toward the flag, power and settler colonialism go uninterrupted, unchallenged and disappear as features of the social world. Transgressing the limits that power creates and imposes discloses these limits precisely as contingent impositions. A disposition to transgress is thus a disposition that serves to demystify the limits imposed by power and to disclose ways of acting otherwise that depart from conduct that reproduces current unjust social structures.Footnote ¹⁴

The illustrations of transgressive conduct just provided are context dependent. Cultivating transgression is not about any specific act that must be carried out—what counts as a transgression depends on the specific shapes taken by power in one's context and on existing social norms. Since settler colonialism is “shape-shifting” (Alfred and Corntassel, Reference Alfred and Corntassel2005: 601), so will be its transgressions and what it means to dispose oneself to transgress it. Cultivating transgression is about becoming more aware of the significance of challenging power and of taking steps to dispose ourselves to do so in our daily individual actions. It is nevertheless useful to consider concrete examples of how this may be pursued. This is even if, as pointed out by a reviewer, the second example I discuss may not be applicable to contexts where, for instance, walking the land is a practice of settlement. This is because these examples relate to specific expressions of settler colonialism and cannot be universalized, albeit they may be instructive for those who are similarly positioned.

First, in “Everyday Decolonization: Living a Decolonizing Queer Politics,” Sarah Hunt and Cindy Holmes (Reference Hunt and Holmes2015: 156) look at “decolonization at the level of interpersonal relationships, families and homes” in ways that “highlight the intimate and everyday practices of allyship and decolonization that are often made invisible when we focus solely on social action strategies taking place in more ‘public’ spaces.” One example they discuss is the parenting practice of allyship adopted by Holmes as a White parent:

This is the cultivation of a disposition to transgress through the calling into question of the givenness of (racial and colonial) social structures. It thus fosters conduct that undermines settler colonialism.

Second, Senka Eriksen (Reference Eriksen, Corntassel, Alfred, Goodyear-Ka’ōpua, Silva, Aikau and Mucina2018: 75) writes in “Fearless Regeneration: Walking with Decolonial Intention on Indigenous Land” about walking as a decolonial everyday practice that allows one to “see and feel” one's relationship to the land and to thus engage in the reconstitution of ways of being and sensing. It also allows one to challenge and transgress settler colonial norms and expectations. When one walks, one can no longer rush from one place to another, as when one is driving or taking public transit. One is led to question the imperative to produce ever more and to be as busy as possible by reducing the time between tasks and meetings. By choosing to walk, one “can begin to see that settler colonial reality is a permeable manifestation that primarily exists because it is enacted upon by many bodies willing to accept this reality as status quo. Its entire existence is wholly based on the imaginations of people immersed within capitalistic imperialism and shape shifting colonial confabulations” (76). By walking with decolonial intentions, one can cultivate a capacity to perceive the shallowness of the reality and expectations created and sustained by unjust structures such as settler colonialism and capitalism and thus a disposition to transgress them.