Abstract

The Cambridge Tax Discussion Group’s first meeting of 2021 will take place on Thursday 21st January, to be held online on Zoom. The hour long-meeting will start at 17:00 UK time. No knowledge of tax is required in order to attend.

Our presenter will be Canadian academic Kyle Willmott, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, who will be discussing “Toward a Fiscal Sociology of Colonialism”.

Kyle Willmott is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. Working between political sociology, fiscal sociology, and economic sociology, his research attends to the cultural politics of taxation, Indigenous-settler relations, settler colonialism, and liberalism. His work has been published in Economy and Society and Critical Social Policy. He is Mohawk from the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte First Nation.

The presentation will examine the strategic role of tax in relation to Canada’s colonial administration of Indigenous nations and the broader role of tax in relation to settler colonialism. Kyle will discuss some of the ongoing analytical problems in tax scholarship in relation to colonialism and look to build an approach that focusses on the informal and ideational life of tax. The case study examines the First Nations Financial Transparency Act, which paired ideas about transparency with taxation, accountability, and citizenship. Kyle aims to show how the state bureaucracy aimed to re-make Indigenous political identity around ‘taxpaying’.