Kinship as an introduction to Ineigeneity? Rene M. Ramirez, Kinship: Settler Families and Indigenous Communities, PhD dissertation, Loyola University, 2026

17Sep26

Excerpt: The topic of kinship is often invoked by indigenous theorists when discussing the unique relationship that indigenous peoples hold to land. The Indigenous philosopher, Brian Burkhart, defines kinship as a “function of locality and an extension of the meaning of being-from-the-land.” That is, kinship is simply a fact of our being from a land. Unlike migrants and settlers who may reside on and own the land under settler colonialism, those indigenous to it share a special connection which cannot be reproduced or accessed by others.


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Settlers have only one future: Jess Maginity, Prophesy and Propaganda: Rational and Relational Epistemologies in Right-Wing and Anishinaabe Science Fiction, PhD dissertation, University of Delaware, 2026

17Sep26

Abstract: Whether they want to be or not, science fiction writers act as social theorists. By juxtaposing two diametrically opposed traditions of science fiction, major works of right-wing sf and major works of Anishinaabeg sf, this dissertation argues that how we come to know what we know determines the kinds of futures we are capable of imagining. While Indigenous futurist novels model the importance of navigating multiple perspectives, right-wing novels model the importance of doubling down on a supposed truth. In each of the Indigenous novels that I study, relationships are the key to meaningful knowledge and a desirable future. In each of the right-wing novels that I study, a privileged discourse is the source of valuable knowledge and the guide for survival. This dissertation shows that an epistemological framework that depends on a set of rules to provide infallible truth is much more amenable to justifying subjugation and genocide than one which accepts a reality complicated enough to accommodate diverging interpretations. In a very real way, the difference between these two sets of texts is simply that one demands the future and the other demands a future.


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Dilapidated settler structures: Madeleine J. S. Léger, Vicious Dilapidation: On Crumbling Settler Places in the Maritimes, PhD dissertation, Georgetown University, 2026

17Sep26

Abstract: This dissertation is about places—what they are, why they matter, and how they contribute to making the world we share. I chart a triangular relationship between built materialities, histories, and social imaginaries to articulate how places come about, expand and constrain possibilities, and shape communities and projects. I focus on contested places to account for, and critique, settlers’ placemaking practices in colonized landscapes, with a particular attention to those processes on Mi’kma’ki, Wolastokuk, and Peskotomuhkatik, or what are commonly called the Maritime Provinces of Canada. The dissertation proceeds through an investigation of dilapidating settler structures in these places and the practices that sustain them. In Chapter One, I examine settlers’ nostalgic engagements with abandoned barns to problematize settler romanticizations of colonized landscapes. Chapter Two is about covered bridges and the difficulties of preserving places by holding onto their material components. In Chapter Three, I consider community negotiations around the construction of the Confederation Bridge to introduce my enactive account of placemaking and theorize placial change. This account explains what places are and why they matter; it also articulates the ways settler placemaking contributes to colonization. Chapters Four and Five are about the aboiteaux of the Chignecto Isthmus. Through an investigation of their history, I articulate an account of placial health and differentiate “places” from “nature”; through an investigation of the present threats they pose to the Isthmus in light of rising sea levels, I explain how histories constrain available possibilities for healthy placemaking in the present, and I chart some short-term avenues for enacting healthier places in an unjust world.


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AI targets Indigenous peoples: M. S. Khan, Y. El-Lahib, A. Al Ashoor, ‘AI and Medical Colonialism: Complicities, Tensions, and Contradictions’, in C. El Morr, A. Saab, E. Salem Sokhn (eds), AI for Epidemic Preparedness, Springer, 2026, pp. 483-498

17Sep26

Abstract: In this chapter, we interrogate how artificial intelligence (AI) systems have been used as a tool to facilitate medical colonialism in global health contexts. While often framed as a neutral tool in health and medical care, we disrupt conceptualizations of AI as separate from contemporary issues of colonial and imperial control. Drawing on critical scholarship, we disrupt claims of AI as solely contributing to the betterment of communities by situating it within its contemporary applications that intensify medical colonialism. Particularly, we conceptualize AI as part of a broad technological infrastructure that utilizes health data in processes of datafication and automation as tools of surveillance, experimentation, and subjugation in contexts such as Canada, Gaza, and New Zealand/Aotearoa. In doing so, we point to the ways in which AI development and deployment are part and parcel of the current Western colonial and imperial project that seeks to dominate the Global South. Specifically, we demonstrate how health priorities are used to justify and facilitate the normalization of violence against individuals and communities using mechanisms such as Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS) or constructing a Genocidal Surveillant Assemblage (GSA). To set a decolonial agenda for global health, the chapter asserts that medical practitioners and health care institutions must challenge the techno-specificities of their field, thereby contending with the realities of AI in extracting and exploiting patient data. We use data sovereignty as a framework to move forward and unsettle the ways in which the ownership, access, and use of patient data or data collected from communities more broadly may transform issues of data collection and governance. Ultimately, this discussion calls into question the role and functions of AI as part of health care technologies and practices that are intensifying coloniality at large.


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Consent and consultation against settler colonialism: Priscylla Joca, Rebeca Macias Gimenez, ‘Learning about Democracy through Disputes over the Meaning of Indigenous Consent and Consultation’, Democratic Theory, 2026

17Sep26

Abstract: Disputes over the meaning of Indigenous consultation and free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) are disputes about democracy. When states reduce these processes to procedural compliance, they collapse plural democratic traditions into a single, statecentric framework. This article explores how Indigenous democratic consultation and consent practices stem from self-determination, rooted in Indigenous cosmopolitics and legal orders. It examines self-determination through historic treaties, international human rights, and domestic law in Canada and Brazil, then analyzes autonomous FPIC protocols from Indigenous peoples across the Americas. Building on Tully, Napoleon, Rivera Cusicanqui, and Mills, the article demonstrates that state-centered consultation cannot engage with Indigenous cosmopolitics. Through treaties and protocols, Indigenous peoples have coordinated across incommensurable legal orders, enacting democracy as the coordination of plural legal and political traditions.


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Tensed settlers: Ryan Tan Wander, Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West, Texas Tech University Press, 2024

17Sep26

Description: In today’s cultural and political climate of relative LGBTQ+ inclusion, Settler Tenses: Queer Time and Literatures of the American West provides a literary history that rewrites our understanding of when and how queerness began to align with US nationalism and settler colonialism, tracing the discursive production of masculinities in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century literatures of the American West. Current scholarly understandings often equate turn-of-the-century representations of the US frontier with hypermasculinity and heteronormativity. Simultaneously, scholars tend to view queer inclusion—that is, the civil and political inclusion of those who make up the “-Q+” of the initialism LGBTQ+—as a phenomenon of post–Civil Rights era activism. Settler Tenses provides a deeper history of queerness in US history by showing that literature created frontier masculinities that representationally yoked a range of queer bodies and subjectivities to national identity as the US consolidated its sovereignty in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Reframing and explaining anew the provenance and significance of the links between queerness and US nationalism and settler colonialism, Settler Tenses will appeal to an audience of advanced undergraduates as well as researchers and scholars in American literary studies, gender, queer, and sexuality studies, settler colonial studies, and critical race and ethnic studies.


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Pottering around with settler colonialism: Martin Crawford, Land and labour: The Potters’ Emigration Society, 1844-51, Manchester University Press, 2024

17Sep26

Description: Land and Labour narrates the history of the Potters’ Emigration Society, the most widely discussed project of its kind in the era of mass migration to America. Founded by the revived potters’ union in 1844, and the brainchild of a young Welsh-born activist, William Evans, it sought to solve the problems of surplus labour by changing pottery workers into farmers on land acquired in Wisconsin through a subscription and lottery scheme. The book examines the Society’s industrial and Owenite origins, including the impact of the 1836–37 strike and 1842 riots, and competition from rival labour organisations and Feargus O’Connor’s Chartist Land Plan. In 1848, short of funds, the Society opened its doors to other trades and regions. At its peak it comprised over one hundred branches, including members in Scotland, Lancashire and London. Beset by naivety, over-ambition and the inherent difficulties of transatlantic communication, the Society collapsed at the beginning of 1851. Land and Labour is based on intensive research into British and American newspapers, passenger lists, census, manuscript, genealogical and other sources. Despite the Society’s failure, its history offers a unique insight into working-class dreams of landed independence in the American West and illuminates the complex and contingent nature of transatlantic emigration in the mid-nineteenth century.


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Deportation is a form of incarceration: Monisha Das Gupta, ‘Carcerality and Abolition: Settler Politics and Migrant Organizing’, American Quarterly, 78, 3, 2026, pp. 801-825

15Sep26

Abstract: This essay corrects the tendency in critical transnational migration studies to evacuate the significance of land and its relationship to Indigenous sovereignty. Using Gloria Anzaldúa’s attention to the agency of land in her conceptualization of borderlands as a starting point, I apply the theoretical orientations offered by settler colonial and critical Indigenous studies to reexamine central analytics in migration studies. I frame deportation as a form of settler carcerality. The combination of crime and immigration controls naturalizes the United States’ territorial power to obscure Indigenous landcentered presence and politics. I argue that the abolitionist segment of the antideportation movement, by refusing to abandon im/migrants with criminal records, confronts settler carcerality. The organizers provide new frameworks to instigate decarceral and decolonial action amid a massive expansion of the carceral state, which threatens Indigenous land and self-determination.


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Alien frontiers: Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Neda Atanasoski, ‘Unsettling Alien Land’, American Quarterly, 78, 3, 2026, pp. 677-703

15Sep26

Excerpt: On February 18, 2021, NASA released the first high-resolution color images of the Martian surface captured by the Perseverance rover—rust-red plains, wind-carved rock, and a landscape long imagined as holding clues about whether life ever existed on an otherwise lifeless planet.1 That same week, on February 23, 2021, US Customs and Border Protection circulated infrared surveillance footage looking down the Sonoran Desert, depicting migrants’ heat signatures as glowing figures moving across a terrain likewise described as barren, empty, and hostile to life.2 In both cases, distant cameras pictured desert landscapes as frontiers without life. On this alien world of Mars, and “alien land” in the US Southwest, the only visible signs of life were cast as anomalies, disruptions, or threats requiring containment. These parallel images illuminate how an optics of alienness underpins both outer-space exploration and border enforcement. They reveal a shared territorial imaginary in which seemingly uninhabitable arid deserts and jagged mountaintops, whether celestial or terrestrial, are rendered available for scientific infrastructural occupation and US imperial sovereignty precisely because they are imagined as devoid of life, except for the forms of life marked as alien. The relationship between the category of the alien and frameworks for apprehending the boundary between life and no-life (or what elsewhere we term vita nullius) has long undergirded US claims to territorial control, shaping both the legal category of the migrant “alien” and the production of Indigenous homelands as alien land.


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Indigenous borderlands against settler borderlands (introducing a special issue): Amrah Salomón J., Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Susy J. Zepeda, ‘Indigenous Borderlands: Indian Again, the Return of Land and People’, American Quarterly, 78, 3, 2026, pp. 467-491

15Sep26

Excerpt: This special issue brings an Indigenous critique to borderland studies and a borderland framework to Indigenous studies as part of articulating an emerging field called the “Indigenous Borderlands.” We aim to bring the “land back” to migration and border studies by considering borders from Indigenous perspectives and acknowledging Indigenous movements alongside other mobilities. Putting these conversations together is a call to imagine and reach toward coalitional frameworks, shared strategies, and potential solidarities across Native and Indigenous studies, Xicanx/Latine studies, and border and migration studies. We draw on the ways these fields have critiqued multiple colonial and settler frameworks across time and space to contend with borders and false oppositional binaries in ways that challenge what it means to coexist, form solidarities, and reside, however impermanently, on partitioned Indigenous lands.


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