Unsettled? Kendra E. Fortin, Bryan S. R. Grimwood, Corey W. Johnson, Jennifer Holman, Helle C. Haven Petersen, Victor Mawutor Agbo, Peggy Vacalopoulos, ‘Divinity and unsettling tourism memories’, Leisure, 2026

24Jun26

Abstract: In this article, we examine intersections of tourism, settler colonialism, and Christianity through a collaborative, unsettling approach. Framed by settler colonial theory and postcolonial theology, and drawing on collective memory work involving Settler-Christian graduate students in Canada, we illuminate how religious travel experiences are constructed in relation to settler colonialism. More specifically, our article interrogates Settler-Christian travel memories to reveal a discourse of divinity structured by contested meanings of service, land, evangelism, and material religiosity. In foregrounding memory as method and site of inquiry, we critically analyze religious tourism as a space for unsettling Settler identity, negotiating responsibilities, and reflecting on theological complicities. The participatory methodology encourages critical self-location and co-creation of knowledge, highlighting the transformative potential of collaborative research in confronting settler colonialism within faith-based leisure travel. The research extends critical tourism scholarship by illuminating ethical and spiritually situated responsibilities that Settler-Christians grapple with to envision decolonial futures.


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Still Indigenous: Freddy Cabral, We are Still Lipan: Identity Erasure, Settler Colonialism, Historical Memory and the Persistence of the Non-Reservation Lipan Apache, PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at El Paso, 2026

24Jun26

Abstract: This dissertation challenges the long-standing historical narrative that the Lipan Apache disappeared in the late nineteenth century. Instead, it argues that the non-reservation Lipan Apache survived through strategic adaptation, mobility, kinship networks, and cultural continuity across the United States-Mexico borderlands. By examining the Lipan experience under Spanish colonial rule, Mexican governance, the Republic of Texas, and the State of Texas, this study demonstrates that shifting political regimes consistently pursued Indigenous land, labor, and subordination through structures of settler colonialism and racial hierarchy. Using the frameworks of settler colonialism, white supremacy, genocide studies, oral history, and autoethnography, this dissertation shows how military campaigns, legal systems, racial classification, and archival erasure worked together to marginalize the Lipan Apache and to legitimize settler expansion. However, these systems failed to eliminate Lipan identity. Instead, many Lipan families responded by migrating to Mexico, intermarrying, adapting their language, participating in Catholicism, and concealing their identity within Mexican and Mexican American communities. What many historians interpreted as a disappearance was often a deliberate survival strategy. Methodologically, this dissertation combines archival sources with oral testimonies, family interviews, and community memory to reconstruct histories often absent from official records. These sources reveal that Lipan identity endured through storytelling, kinship, ceremonies, and intergenerational knowledge transmission into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Ultimately, this study contributes to Indigenous, borderlands, and Texas historiography by reframing Lipan history from extinction to endurance. It demonstrates that Indigenous survival does not depend on reservation boundaries or federal recognition but can persist through community, memory, and cultural practice. The continued presence of the Lipan Apache exposes the limits of settler colonialism and challenges narratives equating invisibility with absence.


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The language of settler colonialism: Katya Kredl, ‘Québec’s Bill 96: A Case Study of Indigenous Cultural and Political Dispossession’, Journal of Critical Race Inquiry, 13, 1, 2026, pp. 23-38

24Jun26

Abstract: This article examines Bill 96 (now Law 14; 2022), a language law enforcing French as the official language of Québec, in relation to language hierarchization and Indigenous dispossession. While this bill impacts all non-French speaking individuals in Québec, it carries especially important implications for the Indigenous Peoples residing on this territory whose languages are already endangered. In this article, I explore Bill 96 as an extension of settler colonialism that legitimizes white settlers as founders and that assimilates through language. Using previous Canadian language laws as a guide, I demonstrate the dangers of exclusionary language policies. From insular decision-making strategies to strict legal enforcement, these types of policies are grounded in dominant, colonial logic and have the potential to eradicate vulnerable cultures. Using political discourse analysis (PDA), I argue that this bill ultimately threatens the survival of Indigenous cultural and political structures in Québec. Finally, I reflect on Indigenous languages as a tool of refusal to settler colonialism.


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Violence is a settler feeling: Michael Lechuga, The Far-Right Rhetoric of Dog Whistles: Settler Feelings and Unspeakable Acts, Palgrave, 2026

24Jun26

Description: This open access book and examines how far-right dog whistles fuel real-world colonial violence in Settler America. Contemporary attacks like the El Paso Walmart and Buffalo Tops shootings are not isolated acts of extremism—they are direct extensions of an ongoing settler colonial logic, echoing historical massacres like Sand Creek in their targeting of Indigenous, Black, and other racialized communities. These contemporary acts are distinct: individuals move from coded signal to violence with little to no rational deliberation in between. Far-right media and rhetoric have become sophisticated emotional activation systems, bypassing reason entirely. Therefore, dog whistles operate on multiple registers simultaneously—triggering immediate reactions of fear, anger, and disgust while also tapping into a deeper, longer-simmering sense of grievance embedded in settler culture. The result is a media and rhetorical landscape where coded language activates violent political upheaval, manufacturing division, justifying elimination, and mobilizing violence all while maintaining a veneer of plausible deniability. This book offers an urgent framework for understanding how that signaling operates, why it is so effective, and what it means for how we study political communication, media, and the ongoing project of settler colonialism in America.


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Settler colonial embeddedness: Joseph Rafael Kaplan Weinger, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Colonial Settlement, Splintered Sovereignty, and the Making of an Injurious Alliance, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2026

23Jun26

Abstract: This dissertation develops a sociological account of colonial settlement by examining the historical formation and contemporary operation of the Israeli settler–state compact in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It asks how political projects that instrumentalize violence are carried out when the actors who advance them occupy disparate social and institutional locations, and how variable coordination shapes outcomes. Drawing on multi-sited ethnography conducted in the Occupied West Bank among Israeli settlers, soldiers, state and military officials, and Palestinians living in the rural frontiers of Areas B and C, alongside semi-structured interviews and extensive archival research, the study reconstructs the processes through which territorial expansion and coercive governance are produced through interaction. The dissertation advances a theory of colonial embeddedness to capture the historically produced entanglement of state institutions and settler networks in the joint exercise of rule. Rather than treating settler–state alignment as given, it shows how this relationship is assembled through contingent yet patterned processes, including path-dependent institutional repertoires, learning through diffusion and adaptation, institutional transformation, and the empowerment of extra-state actors. These processes redistribute coercive capacity across formal and informal actors, producing what the study terms splintered sovereignty: a governing arrangement in which domination is delegated and unevenly coordinated. Empirically, the dissertation traces the evolution of Zionist settlement from its late-Ottoman and Mandate-era foundations through the territorial reconfigurations of 1948 and 1967 and into the contemporary West Bank. It argues that war functions as a critical juncture that reorganizes the conditions under which colonization proceeds, opening space for actors to reconfigure territorial rule and set durable trajectories of expansion. Colonial violence emerges through relational mechanisms: settler actors deploy territorial and vigilante violence and, together with state actors, give rise to deprivation, predation, constraints on social reproduction, and manipulations of futurity. Their articulation is mediated through mechanisms such as social appropriation, entryism, bureaucratic forbearance, and role collapse, which blur the boundary between state and non-state authority. Palestinian contention, in turn, reshapes these dynamics by delaying, disrupting, exposing, and possibly entrenching practices of domination. By foregrounding process over teleology, the dissertation shows that dispossession and displacement arise from shifting configurations of embedded rule. In so doing, it contributes to sociological debates on state formation, the organization of political violence, and the nature of colonial rule.


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Settlers in the north: Eugene Kontorovich, Erielle Azerrad, ‘Settlers in Syria: Turkey’s Population Transfers and the Geneva Conventions’, Emory International Law Review, 40, 2026, pp. 535-564

23Jun26

Abstract: This Article is the first work of legal scholarship to examine Turkish population transfers in northern Syria, which constitute perhaps the most aggressive movement of settler populations into occupied territory in current times. In particular, it examines the lawfulness of such movements under Article 49(6) of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from “deport[ing] or transfer[ring] parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” In a series of major military operations beginning in 2018, Turkey has seized nearly 3,000 square miles of territory in two sectors in northern Syria and established control. While it receives scant attention in the Western press or in legal academia, Ankara continues to maintain its occupation of what it terms as “buffers” or security zones, apparently indefinitely. During its occupation of these areas, Turkey has overseen the movement of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people from within its borders into the occupied areas, significantly changing the delicate demographic balance there. The migrants are primarily Syrian Arab refugees previously residing in Turkey, internally displaced persons from elsewhere in Syria, and families of Turkishbacked Syrian National Army (SNA) fighters. But Turkey apparently has steered them to entirely different areas of Syria from those where they originate. This appears to be deliberate, using the Sunni Arab settlers to displace the local Kurdish populations and disrupt ethnic composition of formerly Kurdishmajority regions. Many of the migrants take over houses abandoned by Kurds, while in some cases Turkey or private Arab foundations have financed the construction of entirely new communities for the migrants in the occupied territories.


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Settlers, locals, strangers: Bethany Lacina, Strangers and Settlers: Migration Politics in a Local’s World, Oxford Academic, 2026

23Jun26

Description: Do people have special rights in a place if they are one of the locals? The belief that they do is common worldwide. Yet, entitlement to place has little role in most accounts of migration politics. Instead, accounts of migration politics are a showdown between culture and economics, in-group identities and material incentives. Strangers and Settlers moves past that stand-off by considering domestic and international migration simultaneously. Being local is normative even within national and ethnic groups and when the material stakes of migration are low. Both domestic and international migration politics takes place within that pro-local status quo. Using information from censuses, public opinion, mobility laws, and political parties, Strangers and Settlers describes a world of nested hierarchies of locals, offering new insights about migration politics. How mobile has the world become since the 1950s? How do migrants and minorities think about migration policy? What is the political economy of mobility control and why is immigration more regulated domestic migration? What do anti-migration activists ask for if they cannot have a sealed national border? The answers to these questions start with the fact that it’s a local’s world.


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Catty settlers: Zoei Sutton, Kate Hall, ‘”Feral Catastrophe”: Analysing the Narrative Construction of Australian Cats’, in Georgina Endfield, Poul Holm (eds), Oxford Intersections: Environmental Change and Human Experience, Oxford, 2026

23Jun26

Abstract: Feral, pest, savage, invaders: cats have long been painted as the villains in Australian histories, continuing to wreak havoc on biodiversity and the welfare of prized ‘native’ species. But where do these ideas come from? Could it be that selective ecological narratives have presented a simplistic account of feline pasts and presents, obfuscating the complex human–animal–environment entanglements that actually exist? This chapter critically explores human–cat relations in Australia, drawing a multidisciplinary approach to explore themes of anthroparchy, dis/utility, settler colonialism, and extinction. Existing narratives from scientific, popular cultural, and governance discourses will be analysed using a social constructivist lens, with key themes brought to life in feline-centric vignettes to demonstrate alternative constructions of cats as minded, emotional, oppressed, and capable of coexistence with humans and other animals. This unique methodological approach effectively foregrounds non-human animals in the narratives that often cause them to become invisible them, offering a rich and multifaceted contribution to the representation of non-human animals. This multidisciplinary method allows us to imagine a future where cats have been freed from the narratives which trap and cast them as villains, and present socio-scientifically supported possibilities through which this might be achieved.


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Partnership or containment? Hemopereki Simon, ‘Possessing the Awa: Te Awa Tupua, legal personhood and the continuities of settler/invader colonialism’, Territory, Politics, Governance, 2026

23Jun26

Abstract: This article offers a critical Indigenous analysis of the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017, celebrated as an innovative fusion of Māori cosmology and Western law through the legal personhood of the river. While positioned as a hallmark of bicultural partnership, the Act exemplifies bicultural containment – a state strategy that symbolically includes Māori worldviews while preserving the juridical supremacy of the settler state. Drawing on Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s theory of the white possessive, Unger and Henderson’s contextuality, and critiques of biculturalism as a ‘zombie’ concept, the paper shows how Te Awa Tupua functions as a ‘settler move to innocence’, reframing whakapapa, mana and kaitiakitanga within government regimes. Rather than advancing mana motuhake, the settlement embeds Māori relational ontologies into governance structures accountable to ″the Crown″. Legal personhood, while symbolically powerful, is constrained by co-governance mechanisms, racial capitalism and biopolitical control, ensuring sovereignty over ‘resources’ remains with the state. Situating Te Awa Tupua within the trajectory of Crown–Māori relations, the article argues that biculturalism has shifted from responding to Māori demands for justice to regulating them within narrow confines. Genuine decolonisation requires the return of land, water and decision-making authority grounded in tikanga and Indigenous governance, not symbolic recognition.


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The face(book) of settler colonialism: Lora Chapman, ‘Settler-Australian anxieties and the savagery of Facebook: notes from Alice Springs’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

23Jun26

Abstract: In an age when social media is fully embedded within the human experience and identity, it also offers up opportunities for the re-enactment of dispossession and the development of stigma. In this article, I examine data from the remote Central Australian town of Alice Springs’ social media forums, describing a novel medium via which ongoing moral violence is levelled at young Aboriginal people. Settler constructions of Aboriginality are examined in some detail, along with their implications for the town’s settler and Aboriginal communities. I argue that posts from these pages are not only symptomatic of historical violence and dispossession, but that they are also manifestations of violence in themselves. In addition, I consider the ways that these processes might contribute to lived experiences of disadvantage for young people, by extending the reach of surveillance and equating to a novel form of moral violence, as defined by Didier Fassin.


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