Safety, Securitization and the Carceral Web: Who's Public?

Abstract

This paper explores the implications and impacts of private security presence in the Vancouver Public Library. Historically situating local security culture demonstrates how punitive ideology creates populations predisposed to violence and exclusion, both physical and epistemic. Within the city of Vancouver Indigenous, Black and poor populations are the primary communities strategically pre-categorized as “bad” and pre-emptively subjected to increased surveillance and policing, entwining local communities within globalized practices of racial capitalism. The beliefs and practices of removal or violence as punishment form the backbone of the carceral web in Canada permeating settler colonial pedagogy. The securitization of the public library encroaches upon crucial access to pedagogy that reflects marginalized epistemologies. Methodologically, this paper aims to validate embodied knowledge and lived experience as resistance to the Western scientific research paradigm that tends to replicate pre-existing carceral and colonial norms.