Human rights violations as humanist performance: Dehumanizing criminalized refugee youth in Canada

Abstract This paper explores the dehumanization of criminalized refugee youth. The concept of “institutional humanism” is used to explicate how the ideology of humanism is deployed through the denial of rights 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. Drawing on qualitative interviews with criminalized refugee youth and professional adults who work with them, the paper shows how institutional policy regulates inclusion in the human community by specifying who may be denied human rights. 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. The paper demonstrates how these theoretical nodes attain bolder relief when operationalized using a theory of performativity. In contrast to conventional analyses of dehumanization, rather than arguing for an extension of liberal humanism, the paper seeks a transformation away from humanism.