Invasion to Embassy and beyond: Heidi Norman, ‘Thirty years after Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal politics in New South Wales 1770–1972, the Aboriginal land demand continues’, History Australia, 2026

31Oct26

Abstract: On the thirtieth anniversary of the late historian Heather Goodall’s seminal and most cited work, Invasion to Embassy: Land in Aboriginal Politics in New South Wales, 1770–1972, this essay canvases the central thesis and how this ran counter to dominant narratives about Aboriginal activism in south-eastern Australia. It asks how recognition of land rights, and changes in the relationship between Aboriginal people and governments, informs Aboriginal politics today.


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Intersections and settler colonialism: Terry Wotherspoon, ‘Contradictory intersections of class and race in settler colonial societies’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2026

31Oct26

Abstract: Consideration of the social positions and experiences of Indigenous people within settler colonial societies poses challenges to conventional understandings of race and class. Indigenous peoples, displaced and marginalized through the development of colonial structures, have also demonstrated remarkable resiliency, contributing in significant ways to the development of settler societies. While they often share similar positions and circumstances with other minoritized groups based on class and racial factors, they are distinguished by their longstanding relationships with lands and waters, their encounters with colonization, and their rights and status as Indigenous or first peoples. This article, focusing on the Canadian context, explores the implications that these Indigenous experiences hold for understanding the intersections among capitalist relations and colonialism, in conjunction with the emergence of and struggles against contemporary systems of inequality and oppression.


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Classic: Dinah Wouters, Susanna de Beer (eds), Classical Receptions and Settler Colonialism: A Reader, University of Groningen Press, 2026

31Oct26

Description: This reader presents a carefully selected collection of primary texts, ranging from antiquity to the modern era, to explore the entangled histories of classical reception and settler colonialism. The “classics” here encompass texts and ideas from the ancient Mediterranean, the Roman Empire, and the Bible, which acquired canonical status in European literature. Settler colonialism, meanwhile, denotes the occupation of new lands by settler societies, characterized by territorial domination, legal imposition, and the suppression of Indigenous cultures. Offering mostly Latin sources in combination with translations, this anthology investigates how Greco-Roman and Biblical traditions were mobilized to justify and structure settler colonial projects. It examines how classical ideas shaped territorial claims, legal systems, and religious frameworks on slavery, superiority, and power. Intended for university teaching, this volume bridges classical reception studies, settler colonial studies, and related fields. It provides accessible primary materials to deepen understanding of how antiquity’s legacy has shaped colonial and postcolonial worlds, and invites reflection on the responsibilities of scholarship today.


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Settler conscription: Daniela Bascuñán, ‘Reimagining Refugee Childhoods: From Settler Conscription to Relational Ways of Welcome and Belonging’, in Zuhra Abawi, Nidhi Menon, Sofia Noori, Alana Butler, Hassina Alizai (eds), Refugee Education in Canada: Navigating the Politics of Belonging, Emerald, 2026

31Oct26

Abstract: Refugee resettlement in Canada does not occur in a vacuum rather through processes shaped by global relations of power such as imperial intervention, various colonialisms, extractive economies, racialized citizenship, hegemonic border controls, and neoliberal governance. When refugee children are forced out of their homelands, they are already enmeshed in some of the interlocking geo-political dynamics that render their homelands unsafe. When they arrive in Canada, they get channelled into modes of belonging that align with the settler state; this is particularly true in schooling systems. In this chapter, the author argues that refugee childhoods in Canada can be understood within a spatialized configuration of displacement, settlement, and settler colonial nation-building. Understanding that settler colonialism is a node within the broader global matrix makes visible how refugee children are spatially situated inside logics connected to those that shaped their departure, rather than outside them. The chapter examines how schooling becomes a key site where refugee children are oriented towards a future as settlers through curriculum, everyday practices, and narratives of national benevolence. At the same time, the analysis turns to Indigenous conceptions of relational belonging to propose an alternative ethical horizon. Rather than framing belonging as assimilation into the settler nation, the chapter considers how refugee children might have opportunities to cultivate forms of relation rooted in Indigenous presence and sovereignty, in such a way that honours the complexity of their lived worlds.


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AI settler stereotyping: Sandra De Berduccy, ‘A genealogy of stereotypes: the representation of Indigenous Peoples with generative AI’, in Andreas Rauh et al, Artificial Intelligence, Art and Indigeneity: Between Dreams and Hallucinations, University of London Press, 2026, pp. 121-133

31Oct26

Excerpt: From the moment we first started generating images with Midjourney in the context of the AIAI project, we noticed that the images evidenced a great many preconceived ideas about Indigenous Peoples, representing them in ways that are over-simplified and that do not draw on the cultural specificity of the communities in question. This bias in the representation of Indigenous Peoples has its genealogy in how they have been portrayed throughout the history of photography. To analyse these recurrent forms of stereotypical representation, this chapter looks back at a selection of photographs of Indigenous Peoples that were taken in South America at the end of the nineteenth century. In this period, aspects such as the mise-enscène, the pose, the use of a background screen, as well as the alteration of cultural norms in terms of clothing and jewellery, began to impact the way we perceive Indigenous Peoples. An enlightening example is the case of photographic images of the Mapuche people which played a foundational role in the way outsiders have viewed that community. Today, we see these visual conventions reappearing in images generated by Artificial Intelligence tools like Midjourney, thus suggesting that historical bias in the representation of Indigenous Peoples is not just ongoing, but that it is being reproduced and amplified by these new generative technologies.


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Fourth World rising: Michael Humeniuk, The Fourth World in the global Village: Indigenous Anti-Colonialism, Media, and Exchange in the Global Sixties, PhD dissertation, University of Waterloo, 2026

31Oct26

Abstract: This dissertation investigates how advancing media⎯print, radio, and television⎯became an integral part of Indigenous political resistance and cultural revitalization in the decades following 1960. This period witnessed an increase in global communications technology. As technologies developed and contributed to globalization, they were utilized, adapted, and re-worked by Indigenous peoples and other colonized peoples to take their struggles for self-determination international. The dissertation argues that not only did these technologies allow Indigenous peoples to produce works that spoke to their concerns, but they also allowed other like-minded peoples to join in their struggle. In an era of anti-colonial thinking, advances in print, communication, and travel allowed colonized peoples to communicate, cooperate, and exchange theories, rhetoric, and political methods. Furthermore, it allowed for a global network of support amongst this contingent of the global population encapsulated in Fourth World interventions into the “global village.” It centres Indigenous Fourth World political action in Canada within this global consciousness of anti-colonialism and political re-imagining. It argues that a level of cross-pollination occurred among political activists, particularly Indigenous activists in Canada and the United States, but also internationally, connecting these movements through their methods, goals, and shared history, and through the use of advancing communications technologies, including literature, print, radio, and travel. By focusing on questions of exchange⎯ideas, culture, theory, rhetoric, modus operandi, relationships⎯rather than a particular movement or singular locale, this dissertation demonstrates that Indigenous peoples both contributed to and drew from cooperation between anti-colonial and decolonial thinkers and activists to gain domestic and international recognition of their rights and used it as a system of support to gain concessions in Canada.


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The sound of settler decolonialism: Van Armenian, Decolonization to Degenociding: Reimagining Settler Canadian and Indigenous Futures Through Music, PhD dissertation, University of Ottawa, 2026

31Oct26

Abstract: This dissertation is a literature-based, interdisciplinary philosophical inquiry that examines whether, in light of Canada’s human rights obligations and ongoing cultural genocide identified by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada and the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, creating meaningful spaces for Indigenous musics and worldviews within Canadian society can shift settler understandings, nurture reconciliation, advance decolonial praxis, and thereby contribute to what I call degenociding Canada. Using a rhizomatic framework inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, the dissertation brings into relation four interlocking assemblages: decolonial praxis, Indigenous voices, human rights discourses, and sound studies. Methodologically, it combines Critical Discourse Analysis with a Human Rights Based Approach and centres Indigenous and Global South voices in order to develop an accountable, non-extractivist mode of inquiry. Its central claim is that the continued invisibilizing of Indigenous presence harms both Indigenous and settler children, denies their dignity, and leaves Canada in dissonance with its obligations concerning education, participation, and cultural life. Performative reconciliation remains one of the dissertation’s central concerns. In response, the dissertation theorizes music as a transformative space through which legal obligation, ethical responsibility, Indigenous resurgence, and human flourishing may be rehearsed together. Across these assemblages, state obligations, Indigenous-defined protocols, and settler responsibilities converge in a shared field of accountability. Music thus becomes a relational practice capable of unsettling colonial listening habits and reorienting Canadian public life toward dignity, accountability, and more truthful relations. The dissertation culminates in the Degenociding Plateau, modelled through the rehearsal logic of a string quartet, which brings into disciplined relation Indigenous grounded normativity and protocol, decolonial reorientation, Human Rights Based accountability, and music’s cultural resonance. Degenociding shifts the conversation from apology to obligation, from symbolic inclusion to accountable transformation, and from colonial inheritance toward the difficult, unfinished work of more ethical futures.


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Wasted settlers: Soham Chakraborty, ‘Settlers and Colonialisms: Food, Waste, Abjection, and the Ethical Reconfiguration of Settler Relationalities in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians’, in Myra Hird, Cecilia Åsberg (eds), Oxford Intersections: Cultures of Waste, Oxford, 2026

31Oct26

Abstract: This article examines how food and waste function as central markers of settler colonial power in J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). Through an analysis of alimentary-excretory practices, the article argues that embodied distinctions surrounding eating, waste, and bodily management are crucial to the imposition and legitimization of settler colonial authority in the novel. Barbarians shows how settlers code Indigenous foodways and bodily practices as signs of barbarism, animality, and excess, naturalizing settler superiority and justifying violence against nomadic populations whose mobility threatens settler desires for xity and territorial closure. Drawing on food studies, discard studies, affect theory, and theories of abjection, the article argues that Coetzee troubles the stability of these distinctions by foregrounding the material circulation of food and waste. The magistrate’s imprisonment and exposure to hunger and waste collapse symbolic boundaries separating food and waste, human and animal, and self and other, unsettling the discursive structures that had secured his settler identity. The article argues that these experiences of abjection are not merely scenes of degradation but conditions that make possible ethical relations with historically subjugated others grounded in shared corporeal precarity. Through commensality, “eating well,” and “discarding well,” Barbarians imagines ethical relations based not on abstract recognition or liberal inclusion but on shared dependence, the discarding of hegemonic settler practices, and the risky act of sharing food across entrenched divisions. The article analyzes how Coetzee’s materialist ethics attends to the affective and alimentary infrastructures through which colonial power is lived, reproduced, and resisted.


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Foreclosing settler colonialism (also dishonestly): Rosanne Kennedy, ‘Decolonial memory frictions: Tracking the tent in activism, art and memory from Indigenous Australia to Palestine’, Memory Studies, 19, 5, 2026, pp. 1500-1524

29Oct26

Abstract: To explore the frictions of decolonising Memory Studies, a field which originated in Europe and has been driven, in part, by the study of Holocaust memory, I turn to Documenta, a prestigious German art festival. Held in Kassel in 2022, documenta fifteen marked a transition in the festival’s history, for the first time curated by a Global South artist collective. The festival, however, was derailed by controversies over antisemitism. In this article, I contribute to decolonialising the study of memory through three interconnected arguments. First, I argue that Germany’s overly broad understanding of antisemitism trivialised the decolonial initiatives pioneered at documenta fifteen and instead recentred European Holocaust memory and protected Israel’s settler colonial practices in Palestine. Second, I argue that settler colonialism offers a productive analytic frame for decolonising memory studies, enabling researchers to identify connections between histories and memories of dispossession and resistance that are often on the periphery of the field. Third, using a settler colonial analytic, I identify the tent as a recurrent symbol of dispossession and a commemorative form in anticolonial memory activism and art. To ground these arguments, I take First Nations Australian artist Richard Bell’s Embassy (2013–) installation at documenta fifteen, which features a canvas tent commemorating the Aboriginal land rights movement, as an entry point for analysing cultural memories of dispossession and resistance to settler colonialism. I then track Embassy’s (2013–) connections with Palestinian memories of dispossession, including a Palestinian festival in Jerusalem (2016), and with Emily Jacir’s (2001) Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages which were Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948, and Dina Mattar’s Summer Day in Gaza (2017). I argue that the tent, as a portable commemorative form, brings into view surprising connections between memories of dispossession and resistance to settler colonialism that we miss if we start from the Global North.


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Forgetful settlers (by design): Paulina R. Johnson, ‘Settler-colonialism’s ability to forget Nêhiyawak memory’, Memory Studies, 19, 5, 2026, pp. 1475-1484

29Oct26

Abstract: Memory is essential to Indigenous knowledge sharing, as it shapes how history, culture, and traditions are understood and maintained. Yet, the history of Settler Canada has been in contention with Indigenous understandings of the past as settler-colonialism has worked to minimize historical truths and create alternative and often blind histories. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada worked to share the lived experiences and atrocities of Indian Residential Schools and, over the last few years, has gained recognition for September 30th as the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. The overall aim has been to highlight the truths about Indian Residential Schools, but in doing so, Canadian society has normalized the narratives of trauma without moving forward to not only the 94 Calls to Action but what Reconciliation means, and the actions needed to undertake this responsibility as a collective for all of Canada and not just Indigenous Peoples. This article examines the role of memory and recollection from a Nêhiyawak (FourSpirit/Plains Cree) point of view as it examines the normalization of one of Canada’s greatest atrocities, further harming Indigenous Peoples.


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