Settler-defined education is not nourishing: Kemeyawi Wahpepah, Schooling Stories: Native and Indigenous Narratives of Settler Colonialism and Dislodgement, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2026

27Jul26

Abstract: Settler colonialism is a system of domination which has received little attention in educational research. This study explores how settler colonialism is reproduced and resisted in United States schools from the perspective of Native and Indigenous students. Guided by theories of reproduction and resistance, settler memory, and Indigenous refusal, this study draws on 133 in-depth interviews conducted with 45 Native and Indigenous students to explore how they make meaning out of their experiences in school from kindergarten through college. Part I: Curriculum finds that they regularly encounter Indigenous erasure, misrepresentation, disavowal and dysagency at school, and that they resist these reproductive mechanisms of settler colonialism through a strategy of ‘shifting’ the curriculum. Part II: Commemoration finds that students regularly encounter hegemonic forms of commemorative pedagogy at school, and that they resist these reproductive mechanisms of settler colonialism through calls for a counter-commemorative pedagogy. It argues that ‘shifting’ the curriculum and counter-commemorative pedagogy are both examples of dislodgement, a flexible set of practices designed to disrupt settler colonialism in United States schools. It calls educators to develop their own contextually specific practices of dislodgement in order to bring more just and equitable systems of schooling into being.


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Settler-defined healthcare is not healthy: Artair Rogers, Logics of Extraction, Exploitation, and Control in Healthcare: Applying a Racial Capitalist Settler Colonial Frame, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2026

27Jul26

Abstract: This dissertation examines how U.S. nonprofit hospitals, grounded in a history of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and chattel slavery, function as racialized organizations that perpetuate racial health disparities through the racialized allocation of resources. Throughout the chapters, I argue that health systems not only fail to break with legacies of extraction, exploitation, control, and conquest but often benefit from historically accumulated power and property, even while claiming commitments to community investment and health equity. Chapter 1 traces the historical development and role of medical institutions, especially hospitals, in promoting racial health inequalities. Then, I demonstrate how modern health systems are built to benefit from earlier regimes of extraction, exploitation, dispossession, control, and conquest, and how health sciences knowledge production often hides these structural causes of inequality. Chapter 2 explores the federal community benefit framework through the lens of structural racism, focusing on private, nonprofit hospitals. I examine nationwide trends in community benefit spending, the value of tax exemptions, and “fair share spending”—a measure developed by the Lown Institute that compares community investments to the estimated tax-exempt value. Using the Structural Racism Effect Index (SREI) and county-level racial demographics, I assess how hospitals exhibit racialized patterns in their investment or disinvestment in communities. I contend that community benefit policies, rather than addressing structural harms, function as tools to legitimize institutional power and secure tax advantages, with the costs ultimately passed on to taxpayers and communities most in need—demonstrating how nonprofit hospitals participate in racial capitalism. Chapter 3 uses a Settler-Colonial Racial Capitalism (SCRC) framework to analyze property tax exemptions, hospital siting, and wealth building through property assets. Based on historical and modern measures of neighborhood disadvantage, racial/ethnic makeup, and inequality, I assess the predicted property values of nonprofit hospitals that benefit from property tax exemptions over 10- and 20-year periods. I show how property tax exemptions, granted to nonprofit hospitals via community benefit regulations, have enabled hospitals to amass wealth and land in historically redlined and racially segregated neighborhoods. This reveals that community benefit can serve as a tool for extraction, displacement, gentrification, and institutional wealth growth, rather than genuine community investment. Chapter 4 links these organizational and policy dynamics to population health outcomes by combining Fundamental Cause Theory with Ray’s theory of racialized organizations. Viewing hospitals as meso-level institutions that mediate state power and resource distribution, I analyze the relationship between county-level fair-share spending (community investment minus tax-exempt value) and premature mortality rates, as well as differences across racial and ethnic groups. This analysis shows how nonprofit hospitals’ community investment efforts can either help reduce or reinforce resource-based health disparities. It demonstrates that although fair-share spending may offer a marginal protective benefit for some racial groups, fair-share spending itself is rooted in sociopolitical structures that uphold racial capitalism and settler colonialism, making its effects limited and emphasizing the need for solutions centered on collective action and reimagination. Thus, Chapter 5 shifts focus to application and praxis. Drawing on critical race and decolonial theories, I first explain the need for critical theories like SCRC to assess and interrogate healthcare institutions. Additionally, this chapter highlights the importance of connecting SCRC to theories of disease distribution. Finally, I present recommendations organized around four main pillars: reclaimed narrative and remembrance, resistance and reclaimed power, redress and repair, and radical reimagination. I emphasize how memorializing institutional harms, community-governed and community-accountable health models, Land Back and reparations initiatives, and institutional redress efforts can collectively shift hospitals away from racialized extraction and toward meaningful accountability, redistribution, and community self-determination in health.


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Settler-defined indigeneity is an invented tradition: Julia Silverman, Unmaking Tradition: Indigenous Artistic Revitalization and Craft Knowledge During the ‘Indian New Deal’, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2026

27Jul26

Abstract: “Unmaking Tradition” analyzes three government- and museum-sponsored projects during the 1930s and 1940s that sought to “revitalize” customary Native American arts. Amidst the WPA’s unprecedented federal investments in the arts and the Indian Reorganization Act’s reversal of assimilationist Indian policy, the interwar period marked an era of broad reckoning—both within and outside of Indigenous communities—regarding what “tradition” meant and the place of tradition(s) within modern artistic practice. This dissertation argues that craft became a central medium for Native artists and intellectuals to reframe colonial tropes of tradition, authenticity, and historical study that dominated the study and sale of their artwork. Craft revitalization, for these projects’ participants, did not denote an unproblematic return to a presumed period of “cultural purity”; rather, it was a modern impetus to redefine ancestral images and craft practices to resist ongoing intellectual and political settler-colonialism. This argument unfolds over three case studies. Chapter 1 discusses the WPA-funded Seneca Arts Project, an attempt to create a modern Seneca ethnographic collection. This chapter illustrates how copying and historical replication became modes for Seneca artists to test the plasticity of Seneca notions of tradition. Chapter 2 turns to the Hopi Silver Project, a museum’s attempt to invent an “authentic” Hopi style of jewelry, thereby sending ancestral Hopi images into economic circulation in defiance of Hopi cultural protocols. Analyzing two Hopi artists’ reinterpretation of the project after World War II, I illustrate how these artists developed aesthetic strategies to harness image circulation reparative ways. Chapter 3 addresses the Nome Skin Sewers Cooperative Association, an Iñupiaq collective commissioned by the US Army to create fur parkas and mukluks for soldiers during World War II. Fur sewing, I argue, represented a place-based form of knowledge that resisted incorporation into extractivist systems of western science and capitalism, thereby providing a basis for Iñupiaq political advocacy. Together, these chapters highlight how Indigenous participants contested these projects’ top-down directives, articulating “craft knowledge” as a living practice that defied outsiders’ desires to codify, taxonomize, and define it.


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The incivility patrol: Debojoy Chanda, ‘Gendering “Incivility”: Dissent in American Academia in the Era of Zionism’, in Purna Banerjee, Priya Singh (eds), Fractured Spaces: Intersectional Approaches to Migration and Displacement, Springer 2026, pp. 179-194

27Jul26

Abstract: This chapter demonstrates how Zionism, as a structuring ideology of settler colonialism, has come to delimit the contours of dissent, academic freedom, and acceptable speech within American higher education through a gendered politics of “civility.” Taking as its point of departure the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s “un-hiring” of Palestinian American scholar Steven Salaita in 2014, it situates this incident within a longer genealogy of American academia’s complicity in the occupation of indigenous and Palestinian lands. It argues that Zionist discourse operates through a masculinist grammar which renders Palestinian dissent ‘uncivil,’ excessive, and disposable, while simultaneously feminizing and precarizing dissenting academic labor. By reading Salaita’s case alongside contemporary crackdowns on pro-Palestinian campus protests following Israel’s war on Gaza since October 2023, the chapter illustrates how the First Amendment of the United States Constitution functions at cross purposes with settler colonial amnesia embedded within land-grant universities. The analysis further connects the gendering of Palestinian voices to the adjunctification and disposability of contingent academic labor, showing how dissenting scholars are cast as surplus, waste, or reserve labor by neoliberal American universities. The chapter contends that the policing of ‘incivility’ in American academia reproduces settler colonial power by regulating speech, gender, and belonging under contemporary geopolitical pressures.


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Land impact and environmental seizure: Lydia Moorman, ‘Indigenous Land Seizure & Environmental Injustice: Impacts of Settler Colonialism’, Journal of Earth and Life Science, 2026

27Jul26

Abstract: The fields of conservation and environmentalism prioritize ecosystem health, yet both emerged from western frameworks that displaced and criminalized Indigenous land stewardship. The idealization of “pristine wilderness” narratives served to justify the removal of Indigenous peoples from their homelands and erased millennia of sustainable land stewardship that had maintained ecological balance long before western conservation existed. These narratives not only misrepresented Indigenous relationship with land but also constructed a false dichotomy between humans and nature that positioned Indigenous presence as a threat rather than a source of ecological knowledge. Simultaneously, anthropogenic expansion; such as pipelines, mining, railroads, and other extractive infrastructures, violated Indigenous sovereignty and intensified ecological disruption. These processes are not isolated historical events but ongoing forms of environmental racism that produce disproportionate harm to Indigenous communities through land dispossession, cultural erasure, and the degradation of ecosystems central to cultural health and identity. Current political rollbacks on environmental protections further exacerbate these injustices by weakening tribal consultation, expanding extractive development, and undermining Indigenous governance. Effective conservation and sustainability require Indigenous leadership, recognition of sovereignty, and the restoration of land-based governance systems that have supported ecosystems for generations. Repairing these fields demands centering Indigenous authority rather than erasing or appropriating Indigenous knowledge. Without Indigenous-led decision-making, conservation and environmental sustainability efforts risk reproducing the same colonial structures that created ecological and social harm in the first place.


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One paradigm among many: Nida Alahmad, ‘Deexceptionalizing not Reinventing: Genocide, Palestine, and Zionism’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2026

27Jul26

Excerpt: The Israeli genocide in Gaza amplified debates that question the paradigmatic, and sometimes also epistemic, foundations of different fields of scholarship, including Genocide Studies. These discussions are motivated by a need to re-examine key questions when addressing how the political problem of Palestine’s colonization and occupation can be framed in search of emancipatory politics. This essay is a theoretical intervention that zooms in on those discussions in the context of the Israeli genocide in Gaza. It offers a critique which prioritizes a sociologically grounded and historically sensitive approach to deexceptionalize paradigmatic experiences when re-examining conceptual categories such as genocide. These debates have brought together related, even if distinct, strands of literature: Settler Colonial Studies (SCS), decolonial theory’s epistemic decolonization, Indigenous studies, Genocide Studies, and studies that focus on Palestine, Israel, and Zionism respectively. One result of this convergence, which is the focus of this critique, is an attempt to produce new conceptual categories (e.g. a reconceptualization of genocide) to decolonize knowledge and, possibly, pave the way for political possibilities of a just future. In this essay, I propose an alternative approach that centres political questions through deexceptionalizing paradigms that inform conceptual categories rather than replacing one hegemonic narrative (or paradigm) with another in an attempt to reconceptualize concepts. The proposed approach opens the space for political imagination rather than locks the discussion in epistemic games.


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The sex of settler statues: Sharon Crozier-De Rosa, Vera Mackie, Ana Stevenson, Andrea Witcomb, ‘Statuary and a Gendered Reckoning with Australia’s Settler-Colonial Past’, in Sherene Baugher, John H. Jameson (eds), Monuments, Statues, and Commemorations of Women, Routledge, 2026

23Jul26

Abstract: It has long been commented – particularly by feminist scholars – that women are underrepresented in statues in public places. Statues across the Commonwealth and former British Empire overwhelmingly depict prominent white men who engaged in military pursuits, colonising ventures, politics, or industry. In recent years, these statues have become sites of protest because of their association with imperialism, militarism, dispossession, and oppression. Women, on the other hand, tend to be depicted in statuary as allegorical figures, representing abstract qualities of love, charity, or compassion. In these countries, Queen Victoria (1819–1901) stands out as one of the few ‘real’ women to be memorialised in statuary. However, in Australia, a settler-colonial nation that still maintains close ties with the British metropole, statues of Victoria have attracted criticism and protests. Not content for this monarch to be the sole representation of actual women, demands have emerged for a more diverse memory landscape, as seen in the Monument of One’s Own campaign, as well as campaigns for the memorialisation of specific women. To examine stories emerging from female statuary erected in Australia since 2021 for what they reveal about national memory, this chapter focuses on three case studies featuring Indigenous athlete and politician Nova Peris (b. 1971), pioneering politicians Dame Enid Lyons (1897–1981) and Dame Dorothy Tangney (1907–1985), and wartime nurse Vivian Bullwinkel (1915–2000). We analyse the intersections of gender, ethnicity, and racialised positioning as they play out against prevailing masculinised narratives of colonialism, the sporting nation, and the so-called ‘working man’s paradise’.


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Place and self (even settlers should think about it): Kerri Malloy, ‘Invoking Place to Confront the Settler-Colonial Self’, in Saghar Shahidi-Birjandian, Sarah Seiselmyer-Snyder (eds), Intergenerational Survivors of Genocide and Mass Atrocities: Lived Experiences of Knowledge Providers, Routledge, 2026

23Jul26

Abstract: Genocide was not a term Kerri Malloy grew up knowing, though its legacy shaped his family’s story. Coming to understand that his Indigenous ancestors survived United States extermination efforts meant confronting genocide not as distant history but as something deeply personal. The realization that his existence was predicated on the loss of other lives sparked his drive to examine humanity at its worst. His work goes beyond detached academic inquiry into genocide, drawing instead on the lived experiences and memories of family members who endured and fell victim to United States violence, weaving together intimate family stories with broader historical narratives. He grapples with how Indigenous voices and experiences have been systematically erased from official historical accounts. His scholarship emerges directly from the genocidal violence the United States inflicted on his family and the Yurok and Karuk communities. He reflects on what it means to pursue this research while navigating spaces such as policy circles, universities, and professional settings where Indigenous people remain vastly outnumbered. He confronts, too, how his work itself carries danger.


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Stepping out of the shadows: Aiswarya Sethumadhavan, Saraswathy Selvarajan, ‘Narrating otherwise: tracing settler colonial shadows and Indigenous futurism in the works of Darcie Little Badger’, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2026

23Jul26

Abstract: This study examines how Darcie Little Badger portrays the aftermath of settler colonialism on the Lipan Apache people in Elatsoe, A Snake Falls to Earth, and Sheine Lende: A Prequel to Elatsoe, and how these novels engage in the process of biskaabiiyang. Employing close reading textual analysis using settler colonial studies and Indigenous futurism, the study reveals that Little Badger subtly exposes settler colonial strategies, such as the elimination of food sources, authorised killings of Indigenous people, and the stereotypical attitudes of those in power, by using a nonlinear narrative style that often shifts between the past and speculative futures. The study explores how speculative worldbuilding, storied landscapes and spiral temporalities contribute to Indigenous continuity and biskaabiiyang. As theorised by Wolfe, territoriality has been the ultimate settler-colonial objective for the elimination of Indigenous peoples from their traditional territories, which Little Badger criticises. The study further proposes the concept of ‘narrative biskaabiiyang’ to describe how Indigenous futurism storytelling reconnects Indigenous cultures, land relations and storytelling with futures through storied landscapes and spiral temporality, thereby sustaining Indigenous survivance and continuity.


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Settler colonialism is an infrastructure not an event: Sarah Montoya, ‘Networking the Nation: Settler Colonialism as an Analytic in Critical Infrastructure Studies’, in Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, James Smithies (eds), Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities’, University of Minnesota Press, 2026

22Jul26

Excerpt: At the core of discussions of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructures are land and property ownership, the understandings of which are shaped by settler colonialism in the United States and administered by a constellation of global settler state formations. Settler colonialism names an orientation to the world and life; it is a way of being and relating to land, peoples, objects, and knowledge that prioritize the liberal humanist citizen-subject and the creation and acquisition of property and possession, and it is deeply characterized by white supremacy and enforced through various forms of targeted violence (Estes et al., 59, 107). When utilized as an analytical approach, settler colonial studies insists on making legible the relationship between land, infrastructure, private property, and the project of settler statecraft. This framework extends research in electronic and digital colonialism and makes explicit the spatial and racial violence required to maintain settler society. Bringing forth the connections between the settler state, surveillance projects realized through the military-industrial complex, and the impact of commercial interests in the shaping of the use of internet technology, this chapter argues that a web of networked settler logics emerges through a critical reading of ICT infrastructure that links the development of the telegraph, telegraphone, and the internet to settler colonial property regimes in the United States. While this chapter applies settler colonial studies as a lens through which to analyze ICTs in the United States, it is important to approach other geopolitical sites with attention to their specific imperial and colonial histories and understand that occupation is quotidian, ongoing, and altered by local conditions. The goal of this chapter is to confront and dismantle narratives of settler technological supremacy and consider anticolonial and decolonial approaches in critical infrastructure studies (CIS).


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