Belabouring the labour of Palestinian labour: Anonymous, ‘Superfluous Labor: The Settler Colonial “Turn” in the Study of Palestine’, Qui Parle (2026) 35, 1, 2026, pp. 121-163

03Oct26

Abstract: No one following the critical academic study of Palestine and Israel over the past decade and a half could fail to observe the dramatic proliferation of the category of settler colonialism. This article examines the intellectual historical conceit of one prominent strand, those studies taking after Patrick Wolfe’s influential theorization. Where many scholars observe a renewal or return to an earlier tradition of studying Zionism, the author argues that recent developments represent a paradigmatic turn. This is, moreover, often a highly “motivated” interpretation that aims for the history to adhere to the preferred theoretical schema (specifically, the superfluity of native labor to the settler economy), rather than striving to incorporate the unfolding of a dynamic struggle and its contemporary analysis. To demonstrate this shortcoming, the article then samples a selection of English- and Arabic-language sources from the apparent interim in the theorization of Zionist settler colonialism. These works, responsive to their conjuncture between the June War and the First Intifada, not only deploy many concepts and theories that are illegible in the Wolfean paradigm but also demonstrate a concerted recovery of the history and struggles of the Palestinian working class and their relevance to the struggle for national liberation.


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Biopolitical settler colonialism: Dawit Tesfay Haile, ‘Settler colonial biopolitics at the border: a transnational entanglement of law, medical sciences, and migration control at Ellis Island’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

02Oct26

Abstract: Migration from Europe to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is known for its confrontation with racialized and gendered migration control. In line with this, this paper aims to analytically extend the migration control of that period to the biopolitics of settler colonialism. By patchworking transnational archives (in the United States and the Netherlands), it investigates how medical and immigration control infrastructures were established at Ellis Island (US) and how they operated to identify ‘undesirable immigrants’. Using the lens of biopolitics of settler colonialism, it pays attention to (1) the dominant racialized and medicalized imaginaries behind migration control, (2) the particular socio-spatial arrangement of migration inspection at Ellis Island, and (3) the transnational biopolitical entanglements at play, in the sense that administrative practices at Ellis Island informed practices of commercialized services (Holland America Line) and local authorities in the Netherlands. By empirically and analytically foregrounding the biopolitical formations inherent to settler colonialism in general, and the transnationalized medicalization of border control in particular, this paper shows how the construction of the ‘undesirable migrant’ simultaneously (re)produced the settler colonial imaginary of ‘whiteness’ as well as the imaginary of physical and mental fitness of the nation.


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At this point we should not ‘care’: Girish Daswani, ‘How Anthropology Can Harm Students During a Genocide’, American Anthropologist, 2026

30Sep26

Abstract: This essay is about the harm that is committed in the name of care. More specifically, it is about student requests for support during the ongoing genocide in Palestine and an anthropology department’s use and weaponization of the language of “care” to do the exact opposite: to cause harm. I examine how the language of care for students and the exception of Palestine are weaponized by administrators—including anthropologists—to silence and shut down conversations about, and support for, Palestine. I demonstrate how the “permission to narrate” stems from certain methods of attention that speak to the university’s alignment with settler colonialism, neoliberal capitalism, and anti-Palestinian racism, even as the university officially acknowledges settler land relations and shares statements about “Diversity, Equity, Inclusion” (DEI). Indeed, such acts of care are often based on the condition that settler-colonial and capitalist relations remain unchanged—that colonial whiteness remains unchanged—and any attempts to unsettle these liberal, institutional-settler relations will be met with purposeful occlusion and harm.


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What settler colonialism therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers: Janna Lynell Martin Rogers, Human Categorization: A History of Race Science and Trafficking Indigenous Remains’, MA dissertation,   Oklahoma State University, 2027

30Sep26

Abstract: This dissertation explores the history of graverobbing in the United States and influence of Race Science on the demand for Indigenous specimens. The original contribution of this research to the historiography modernizes language to redefine graverobbing as posthumous violence in an international necro – economy of trafficking Native cadavers. Through necro – capitalism white elite men commodified decedents and built institutional legacies that continue. Academics, scientists, physicians, Christian ministers, museum professionals, private and federally funded repositories stole, mutilated, sold, and hoarded the dead in exchange for wealth, fame, and power. In the terms of international law, the posthumous violence experienced by Indigenous decedents are genocidal crimes against humanity. Through contrapuntal examination and interdisciplinary methodologies of sociology, psychology, and forensic medicine graverobbing is understood as a patriarchal structure of discursive authority by white educated men and absolute power over bodies of the dead. This dissertation resolves race science and graverobbing as science gone mad. The minds, ethics, and unchallenged claims of scientists are plagued with a fetishistic disorder akin to necrophilism. Unabashed capitalist greed targeted subjugated demographics, terrorized living communities, debased graves, and defiled freshly buried bodies. Key findings demonstrate that broader society became complicit in despoiling the dead. The phenomenon of graverobbing was normalized in a complacent society where the dead had no rights. Racialized science, racialized language of eugenics, and blood quantum pseudoscience influenced federal policy that continues to assault Indigenous identity and Indian Country in the twenty – first century. This dissertation argues that academe, historical institutions, repositories, and medical sciences still prey on nonwhite and subjugated communities. As growing numbers of Indigenous and Black scholars enter fields of museology, medicine, and the human sciences a collaborative approach is reshaping conferences, methodologies, and bioethics. The Indigenous Archaeology Collective and Society of Black Archaeologists are impacting repatriation, exalting cultural and ethnic perspectives while exercising sovereignty and human rights of living communities and the deceased. Decedents have human rights, cultural rights, sovereignty rights, repatriation rights, and the right to remain interred. All decedents should have the right to remain safe from the institutional abuse historically enforced through ideologies of ethno – supremacism.


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Settler colonialism as peer review: Nimrod Lin, ‘Zionist comparisons to settler colonies before 1948’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

28Sep26

Abstract: The present article examines comparisons made by Zionists between the Zionist colonization of Palestine and other cases of settler colonialism before 1948. Four main findings emerge from these comparisons: one, Zionist intellectuals often used comparison as a way to develop theories of colonization or to make sense of their relationship with Britain and the Palestinians. Secondly, the most involved comparisons centered on British settler colonies in Africa because Zionist commentators recognized that white settlers in Africa faced similar challenges. Thirdly, Zionist intellectuals were especially interested in labor policies. They believed that a large Jewish working class was vital for the creation of a Jewish majority and that a Jewish majority was vital for the survivability of the colony. Finally, Revisionist Zionists were especially prolific colonial comparison-makers and had an intense affective relationship with the British Empire. Although they have self-mythologized as colonial rebels in the 1940s, in the 1920s and 1930s, Revisionist Zionists often expressed solidarity with British settlers and concern for the future of the British Empire.


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The monogamous settler: T. J. Tallie, Conjugal States: The Queerness of Nonmonogamy in Settler Worlds, University of Minnesota Press, 2027

28Sep26

Description: How the rhetoric of monogamy was weaponized against Indigenous and queer lives by colonial powers in the nineteenth century. While marital monogamy is often posited as inevitable and essential, it was in fact a negotiated practice inflicted onto occupied lands to enforce social control and white settler reproduction. Conjugal States makes an ambitious and far-reaching investigation of how colonizers used monogamy to symbolize modernity, weaponized against Indigenous communities in South Africa, New Zealand, and British Columbia—and how this process was complicated by the emergence of the Mormon Church. In Conjugal States, T.J. Tallie reveals how the queer destabilizing potential of Mormon polygamy in the nineteenth century clashed with the broader aims of colonization, resulting in legal action against plural marriages and fears of Mormon “contamination” in other settler spaces. As colonial powers attempted to delineate and justify their occupation, monogamous marriage became a key method of performative civilization. By analyzing the fraught debates concerning gender, marriage, belonging, and race that arose between British settlers, Christian missionaries, South Asian migrants, and Indigenous peoples in contested territories around the world, Tallie reveals how marital practices and prohibitions shaped the contours of colonial life. A deeply archival work, Conjugal States illuminates how both monogamous marriage and colonial power were predicated on the precarity of their own control. Tallie tells the story of the enormous repercussions of this global phenomenon, providing a history of sexuality, settler colonialism, and Indigenous peoples that charts varied forms of native resistance to settler incursions.


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Indigenous peoples define health as self-determination (I know, right?): Laura Gemmell-Sinnott, Miriam Laugesen, Robin Quigg, ‘How do Indigenous peoples define health? A systematic review of definitions across Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States’, Qualitative Research in Health, 2026, #100874

28Sep26

Abstract: Indigenous peoples in Canada, Australia, the United States, and Aotearoa New Zealand experience persistent and preventable health inequities driven by colonisation, systemic power imbalances, and the imposition of Western biomedical frameworks that fail to reflect Indigenous understandings of health. A systematic literature review was conducted using the PRISMA-2020 protocols, identifying 644 records in Scopus and PubMed, of which 31 studies met the final eligibility criteria. Five themes emerged: holistic wellbeing; cultural knowledge; connection to land; relationships; and self-determination. Across the included studies, findings indicate that many Indigenous communities hold different perspectives of health. Dominant Western frameworks, including the World Health Organisation definition of health, remain insufficient to accommodate Indigenous health needs. This study offers a new perspective on how Indigenous communities define and conceptualise health and examines the implications for reorienting health policy and practice to better reflect community- and culture-driven, self-determined definitions of wellbeing.


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More food for settler thought: Molly Stollmeyer, Kristen Lowitt, Catherine Littlefield, Charles Z. Levkoe, Peter Andrée, Patricia Ballamingie, ‘Motivations driving settler food movement organizations in Canada to engage with Indigenous peoples’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

28Sep26

Abstract: Food systems, in terms of the processes, structures, and relationships that bring food to our plates, are deeply embedded in historical and ongoing processes of colonialism. In settler colonial countries, this reality is contributing to growing attention to and engagement with Indigenous peoples and communities in food systems scholarship and practice. This paper asks: what motivates settler-led food movement organizations to engage in relationship building with Indigenous peoples and communities and their associated food system concerns, and what effects do these motivations have for food systems governance? We address these questions by drawing upon interviews with settler-led food movement organizations across Canada. We consider the intrinsic and extrinsic factors – encompassing experiences, values, and flashpoints – that move settlers to act or provoke a response. Our findings identify reconciliation, land relations, and knowledge systems as three interconnected themes shaping motivations for settlers to build relationships with Indigenous peoples in food systems governance. Overall, this research advances more participatory food systems governance that takes the distinctiveness of Indigenous rights and worldviews seriously. Our analysis speaks to the need for settlers to clarify motivations, shift toward ever more meaningful action, and remain self-reflexive.


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Settlers representing settlers: Cole Virk, The settler culture of colonial spectacle: A study of settler colonial erasure and assimilation of Indigenous representations, PhD dissertation, University of Sheffield, 2026

28Sep26

Abstract: This investigation examines how settler colonialism obscures Indigeneity behind the settler Indian caricature. Making Indigenous presence visible, legible, and accessible within the settler colonial landscape of South Florida when attributed within settler colonial Indian representations around tourism. To analyse how settler colonial structures create these Indian representations, this thesis explores the ancestral land of the Seminole and Miccosukee peoples. In this, the field of study does not analyse Indigenous representations but rather settler Indian representations. To perform this, I draw on settler colonial theory, decolonial thought, and Indigenous scholarship. This introspection allows the research to situate and understand colonialism as an enduring structure that continues to organise space, memory, and visual culture in the present. While also being grounded in a decolonial methodological orientation, the thesis engages with urban and rural environments, tourist infrastructures, and public-facing cultural sites across South Florida to examine how representations are colonially manipulated. Through attention to visual, spatial, and textual forms, I examine and display how Indigenous representations circulate within everyday settler spaces, not as contemporaneous political subjects, but as aestheticised symbols that appear detached from land, history, and futurity. Thus, by situating South Florida as a site where spectacle and colonial power intersect, this research contributes to wider conversations in decolonial geography, visual culture, and Indigenous studies. Overall, this work highlights the need to reconsider the unfettered display and consumption of Indigenous representations. This remains central to the reproduction of the settler colonial order of assimilation and erasure. Thus, an active acknowledgement and engagement with the coloniality of representation is needed that frames Indigenous peoples within their own economic, social, and representational sovereignty.


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Redestricting other peoples: Robert Vargas, Paola Del Toro, Christina Cano, Xing Zhang, ‘Settler colonialism and community protection from redistricting’, Geoforum, 2026, #104830

28Sep26

Abstract: Much research on the urban racial politics of redistricting focus on the period of the “redistricting revolution” after 1965. This study takes a more historical approach to this topic by asking: how have select communities within cities managed to avoid ever being redistricted from their founding in the 19th century to the present? Using digitized ward boundaries from Chicago and Milwaukee from their founding to the present, we discovered the importance of the legacy of settler colonialism for answering this question. Specifically, logics of settler colonialism have protected select communities in Chicago and Milwaukee from ever being redistricted through three mechanisms: 1) settlement formation, 2) state law protection, and 3) litigation protection. We conclude by discussing the implications for studying the urban racial politics of redistricting.


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