South of settler colonialism? Ayala Levin, ‘The Location of Theory: Settler Colonial Knowledge Production, Among Other Interstices of Empire, and South–South Exchange’, Architecture, 6, 3, 2026, #137

20Aug26

Abstract: This essay complicates the distinction between of “North” and “South” as spaces of knowledge production—which usually entails the privileging of the South as an emancipatory space—by directing attention to Southern actors’ imbrication with forms of colonialism. It calls for situating both Northern and Southern actors within networks of global knowledge exchanges by critically examining their positionality vis-à-vis colonial relations domestically and internationally. More specifically, it asks how interstitial colonial positions gave rise to new centers of knowledge production and expertise in the postcolonial world. It considers these positions not as static identities but as strategic, adaptative, dynamic, relational, and contingent upon geopolitically determined itineraries of global exchange.


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Triangular encounters, rurally: Debbie Parker, Jeanna Emms, Michelle Lam, Don Boddy, Malika Pruthi, Mitch Tilk, ‘Immigration, settler colonialism, and Indigenous sovereignty: The role of community-based education in anti-racism, relationship-building, and shared futures’, Frontiers in Education, 2026

20Aug26

Abstract: The Canadian context is one in which settler colonialism used legal lies like the Doctrine of Discovery and Terra Nullius to lay claim to land already occupied, used, and cared for by Indigenous Peoples1 since time immemorial. After arrival, settlers “began to act less and less like guests and more and more as lords” (Manuel, 2015, p. 4). Not much has changed. Today, settler descendants still hold political power, including the ability to determine who can arrive and settle, set immigration target numbers, prioritize destinations, determine policy, programs, and practices, allocate resources, and even decide which cultural specificities are acceptable and how identities are defined. For Indigenous community members, immigration can be a reminder of supports not equally available to their communities, decisions made without adequate consultation, and additional burden on already dispossessed lands. This article begins with an exploration of Canada’s immigration system, including a critical view of Indigenous-newcomer-settler relations and Canada’s portrayal as a welcoming, inclusive nation. As First Nations, newcomer, and settler authors, we argue that inclusivity is not possible when standing on stolen land. Critical views, however, must be joined to creative possibilities, lest we all drown in despair. Within a 3-way Venn diagram describing Indigenous-settler-newcomer relations, overlapping areas can signal tension but may point to solidarity, hope, and healing. These possibilities can be uniquely explored in a rural environment, where relationships are constrained and bolstered by geography. Portage la Prairie is near four First Nations communities and a popular destination for immigration – a unique microcosm for exploring broader movements in Canada. Weaving our stories and experiences together within this case story, we share newcomers’ emotions encountering knowledge about why their dream country is not what they had anticipated, costs borne by Indigenous community members and leaders educating about true history, along with their motivations, and the negotiations undertaken by settlers finding their roles. Using interest convergence, we argue that for such initiatives to be sustainable, they must be beneficial to all three groups. We conclude by examining the role of education in building community, sharing knowledge, and redefining who tells the stories of Canada.


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An existential question: Oscar Davis, Damian Cox, ‘Indigenous Existentialism in the Films of Warwick Thornton’, Film-Philosophy, 30, 2–3, 2026, pp. 380-400

20Aug26

Abstract: Existentialist philosophy, in particular the work of Franz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, was crucial to early postcolonial theorising and, as demonstrated in the work of Brendan Hokowhitu, continues to be an important perspective for understanding Indigenous postcolonial experience. Existentialism is a valuable tool in the on-going attempt to gain clarity about the nature of racist oppression and ways of overcoming it. We focus on two films by Warwick Thornton: Samson and Delilah (2009) and Sweet Country (2017) that together form a study of an Indigenous existentialism, and in contrasting ways illustrate both the difficulty of, and possibility of, emergent transcendent agency in postcolonial environments.


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Representing settlers: Fan Yang, Jessie Liu, Yijia Zhang, ‘Chinese Diaspora-Settler Gazes on Rednote: How Platforms Reinforce Colonial, Relational-feminist, and Middle-class Representations’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2026

20Aug26

Abstract: This paper studies how contemporary Chinese diasporic settlers represent their experiences of Australia on Rednote (Xiaohongshu), a visually oriented social media platform with a predominantly young, female user base. Analysis of 248 Rednote posts by Chinese migrants in Australia reveals recurring portrayals of Australia as an empty land of leisure, a site of Chinese female liberation, and a space of upward mobility, framed through colonial imaginaries, relational feminism, and middle-class privilege. These representations, which echo settler colonial narratives of Australia, raise critical questions about how colonial representations are reproduced on contemporary platform cultures, and how migrants are situated within Australia’s settler colonial structures and visual regimes. Bringing Australian studies, settler colonial studies, and platform studies into dialogue, we argue that Rednote’s ostensibly apolitical, consumerist orientation, with its algorithmic privileging of monetizable, middle-class, feminine lifestyle content, works as a key vector for normalising and reinforcing colonial visual imaginaries of Australia, feminism, and middle-classness among Chinese diasporic settlers, while obscuring the material and historical realities of Australia.


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Engineering settler colonialism: A. M. K. Peters, ‘Negotiating Methodological Tensions: Resisting Settler Colonialism in Engineering Education Research with Communities’, ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, 2026

18Aug26

Abstract: This critical theory paper reflects on my personal experience conducting my dissertation research in the discipline of engineering education with my Native Hawaiian community. There are inherent tensions that I constantly negotiate in my research practices to find ways to operate within our settler colonial discipline as someone who wants to make visible, resist, and deconstruct settler colonialism. This paper is a chance to describe these tensions, frustrations, and realizations of growth that I go through occupying a space that disvalues portions of my work. I start by reframing settler colonialism as an oppression of the natural world compared to more common framings of settler colonialism as the oppression of Natives through erasing their connection with the natural world. This reframing allows me to demonstrate how engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research are examples of physical, social, and academic processes of Western settling, respectively, based in capitalist relationships to possess the natural world inclusive of marginalized peoples. Positioning engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research as inherently settler colonial and capitalistic explains furthers how by occupying these fields, I inherently am in tension with being Native Hawaiian that opposes both settling through capitalism and possessing the natural world through colonialism. Then, I explain what these tensions are and how I negotiation these tensions through explaining my methodological commitments and what these commitments look like in my research. I outline three commitments: 1) prioritizing mutual causal relationships through cultural understandings, 2) prioritizing the natural world through genealogy, and 3) prioritizing long-term continuity through Unlearning and Taking Space. I hope my explanation of these commitments as my negotiating of the tension of being both Native Hawaiian and an engineering education research provides an example of how we can begin to challenging settler colonialism and its capitalistic relationships through our work beyond Western standards of research.


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Repair! Pauline Wakeham, Indigenous Reparations and Settler Colonial Reckoning: Re-Braiding Rights and Redress in Canada, University of Minnesota Press, 2026

18Aug26

Description: How Indigenous communities are transforming the idea and practice of reparations through their laws and leadership. In recent decades, a growing number of Indigenous groups across Canada have initiated movements for colonial reparations. Too often, the settler state has responded by attempting to enfold their work into a narrative of reconciliation that consigns colonialism to “sad chapters” of history. In this book, Pauline Wakeham calls attention to the ways that Indigenous reparations movements exceed state reconciliatory frameworks and prompt a deeper reckoning with the enduring structures of settler colonialism. To expose and redress colonial injustices, Indigenous reparations movements draw upon long local traditions of political organizing as well as transformations on the global stage since World War II. As international law formulated new instruments regarding gross human rights violations, atrocity crimes, and the reparative obligations of states, colonized peoples across the world have sought to mobilize these mechanisms in their struggles for decolonization and reparations. While international law has provided strategic tools for this work, the colonial foundations of the field continue to limit how it conceptualizes and shapes access to justice. Indigenous Reparations and Settler Colonial Reckoning traces the specific implications for Indigenous nations whose land is occupied by settler states—nations whose legal orders remain subordinated to both settler “domestic” and international legal systems. Amid this complex multijurisdictional terrain, how are Indigenous peoples carving out space to articulate their own visions of justice? To answer this question, Wakeham learns from the Inuit-led Qikiqtani Truth Commission as well as reparations movements for residential schools and the High Arctic Relocations of 1953 and 1955. These movements offer powerful lessons about the importance of centering Indigenous leadership and laws in redress processes, thereby connecting reparations to the living enactment of Indigenous rights.


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Portugueseness and settlerness: Márcia Gonçalves, ‘Ideals of Portugueseness in the Colonies: Imperial Nationalism and European Settlement in Africa’, in Márcia Gonçalves, Empire and Nation in Portugal, c.1930-1951, Palgrave, 2026, pp. 131-182

18Aug26

Abstract: In 1933, the first prize at the colonial literature competition promoted by the Portuguese colonial propaganda agency was awarded to Henrique Galvão’s novel O Velo d’Oiro (The Golden Fleece). The book, which can be read as an invitation to European settlement in the African colonies, immediately became a bestseller.


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The wage of settlerness: Zahi Zalloua, ‘Black Reconstruction in Palestine/Israel: On the Wages of Jewishness’, in Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Geo Maher, Damien M. Sojoyner (eds), Reading Black Reconstruction Today, University of California Press, 2026, pp. 119-140

18Aug26

Except: This essay turns to Black Reconstruction to elucidate the ways in which the economic and libidinal force of such a wage is equally at work in Palestine/ Israel, where, I argue, the Zionist project of settler colonialism (with its blatant anti-Palestinianness) relies on the wage of Jewishness in a way analogous to the dynamics Du Bois analyzed.


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Knowledge about settler colonialism: Joshua Myers, ‘Settler Colonial State’, in Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Sean Jacobs (eds), The Palgrave Handbook on Decolonizing International Affairs, Palgrave, 2026, pp. 107-120

17Aug26

Abstract: When John Henrik Clarke argued that Europe had not only colonized the world, it had colonized information about the world, he had seized upon a reality critical to any real understanding of the function of Western social science. In order for settler colonialism to proceed, it had to interrupt and reimagine knowledge and impose a regime of reality on those it sought to occupy. Therefore, a decolonial practice would need to take seriously other ways of producing and creating knowledge. And a truly decolonial practice would presuppose a liberationist logic in the ways we struggle to live in other ways. Thus, there are lessons in the paths pursued by anti-settler decolonization political projects that have sought to decolonize information about the world. But this is an unfinished project. Settler colonialism continues apace. We will need better models of thinking if we want to live beyond it.


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Solar settler colonialism: Myles Lennon, ‘Solar Pioneers: The Frontier Entrepreneurialism of a Sluggish Energy Transition’, Cultural Anthropology, 41, 3, 2026, pp. 692-717

17Aug26

Excerpt: Drawing from three years of ethnographic research on solar projects in NYC, I will show how this mode of market-based self-making is informed by settler imaginaries of societal progress vis-à-vis spatialized transformations when what is known as “the narrative structure of the frontier myth” organizes “entrepreneurial affects”.


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