Settler colonial unchilding: Nadera Shahloub-Kevorkian, ‘Children’s cartographies of refusal and life-making: wilfulness and decoloniality amid spaces of death in Gaza’, Children’s Geographies, 2026

18Oct26

Abstract: This article examines Palestinian children at the nexus of settler-colonial control and genocidal violence, foregrounding their capacities to resist, reconstitute life, and sustain childhood under extreme dispossession. Building on the concept of unchilding, it shows how children are targeted by colonial and genocidal violence while also interrupting these processes through their bodies, spatial practices, and communal relations. Conceptualizing children as producers of knowledge, politics, and relational practices of liveability and futurity, the article challenges representations of children as passive victims. Drawing on a child-guided epistemic methodology and childist philosophical framework, it centres children’s affects, voices, bodies, spaces, and relationalities as generative sites of knowledge. The analysis examines fifty media and social media posts from publicly accessible accounts collected over two years of genocidal violence, attending to children’s everyday routines, spatial practices, and cartographic renderings of violence. It identifies wilfulness as a spatial, affective, and cartographic practice: an embodied insistence on occupying space, sustaining relational life, and mapping violence in ways that refuse erasure and fragmentation. Childhood wilfulness thus becomes a political and epistemic intervention through which children affirm life, continuity, and childhood liveability, sustaining childhood as a horizon of decolonial possibility amid genocidal unchilding.


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Absent settler colonialism: Emma Brennan Chapman, Disappearing Connections: War, Absence, and Kin in New France and New England, 1680-1740, PhD dissertation, UC Davis, 2026

17Oct26

Abstract: Cycles of violence and displacement engulfed Indigenous, French, and English groups in the area around what is now the border between Canada and northern New England as European settlers and trade pushed into Indigenous homelands throughout the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. These violent cycles led to long absences of family and kin members who were captured, injured or fleeing from violence. These absences had spiritual, economic, political, and emotional dimensions for European and Indigenous families who made up the societies and governments of northeastern North America in the colonial period. This dissertation argues that the concept of absence and absent people themselves were key elements of how Indigenous and invading European societies conceived of themselves, connected with each other, and built larger economic and political systems. The informal networks, altered relationships, and spiritual conceptions that families and kin relations built up to negotiate the problems of absence became the major ways that the competing polities in the area related to each other and claimed and resisted authority. As both Indigenous and European families innovated existing cultural traditions and legal or economic frameworks, they also incorporated the living absent into their societies, illustrating the strong influence that absent people had on the formations of culture and societies they were not physically present with. This dissertation examines those conceptions and the ways these individual navigations of absence from below formed culture and authority from below.


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Triangular settler relations: Li-Chun Fang, Yushen Fang, ‘Colonial Encounters and Identity Formation: Dutch Colonizers, Hoklo Immigrants, and Indigenous Peoples in Seventeenth-Century Formosa’, Dutch Crossing, 2026

17Oct26

Abstract: This study combines Anderson’s concepts of spatial boundaries and administrative classification with Gellner’s theories of state and nationalism to analyse identity reconstruction in seventeenth-century Formosa under the tripartite interaction of colonial powers, Hokkien immigrants, and indigenous peoples. Multiple toponyms – Ilha Formosa, Takasago – reveal external powers’ construction of Formosa as a ‘strategic frontier’ in their geopolitical imagination; naming and cartography abstracted scattered spaces into governable units. Under Dutch and Spanish colonial rule, indigenous societies were systematically restructured. Colonizers, driven by resource extraction, governed through military repression, religious assimilation, and economic control. Nevertheless, indigenous peoples demonstrated agency through resistance and strategic cooperation – e.g. the Matta Incident and exile of inibs (indigenous priestesses). Driven by maritime prohibition policy and the Ming-Qing transition’s push-pull dynamics, Hokkien immigrants developed an instrumental, situationally adaptable ‘maritime Hokkien Chinese’ identity; under certain conditions, they formed cross-ethnic anti-colonial alliances with indigenous groups. Although seventeenth-century colonial governance did not immediately give rise to modern nationalism, the ‘territorialized’ imagination it established laid the historical and epistemological foundation for the subsequent formation of Taiwanese identity.


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Resident(ial) evil: Kayla Boileau, Karine Vanthuyne, ‘Legacies of Mass Violence: Indian Residential Schools in Canada’, in Nerina Weiss, Maria Six-Hohenbalken, Linda Green (eds), The Routledge International Handbook of Mass Violence, 2026

17Oct26

Abstract: Indian Residential Schools were created by the Government of Canada and Christian Churches to assimilate Indigenous children into settler colonial culture. This method was developed at the end of the 1880s, when the settler government formalized agreements with the Churches to establish and manage boarding schools aimed at evangelizing and assimilating Indigenous children. From 1920 to 1960, this policy of assimilation through forced schooling was in full force. Education, specifically, was an insidious weapon for the removal of any sense of Indigeneity in the Survivors, but not the only weapon utilized by the settler state.


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The body of settler women: Jess Libow, Vigorous Reforms: Women Writers and the Politics of Health in the Nineteenth-Century United States, University of North Carolina Press, 2025

17Oct26

Description: Nineteenth-century America saw profound changes in the ways people viewed their bodies, their health, and their corporeal connection to their environments. Though much of the writing about bodies was produced by men, Vigorous Reforms focuses on the understudied literary history of how women came to understand physicality and its connection to their everyday lives. The introduction of physical education allowed women to conceive their own and others’ bodies not as static entities, but as adaptable to their own needs, goals, and labor. Jess Libow also shows the limits of the science of the era—since bodily differences were often understood as biologically determined, theories of health defined womanhood in terms of racialized bodily abilities. For example, settler colonial ideology coded Native women as deteriorating due to their “uncivilized” ways of life, and proponents of slavery insisted that Black women’s inherent strength made them suitable for enslavement. Drawing on a wide-ranging archive of ideas about exercise, hygiene, and nutrition, Libow argues that women’s writing about health was fundamental to the development of what we now think of as American feminism.


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‘What if it was post-traumatic settler disorder?’ A Zoom event with Lorenzo Veracini, University of Sydney, 28/10/26 at 17:00

15Oct26

Abstract: Settlers are weird. They are supposed to be ‘natural men’, and ‘all the world was once America’, but they are. It is unsurprising, and the job of all ideological representations is to turn specific modes of domination into ‘natural’ occurrences. Settlers are inherently unbalanced and easily ‘unsettled’. It is not a coincidence that the ‘settler’ is a settler and not a ‘settled’ …


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Acknowledging that Land Acknowledgements are kind of useless? Lachlan McNamee, Kyle Peyton, ‘Effects of land acknowledgements on non-Indigenous audiences in Australia and the USA’, Nature Human Behaviour’, 2026

15Oct26

Abstract: Land acknowledgements—formal statements recognizing Indigenous custodianship of land—are widespread in Australia, where they originated, and have been gaining traction in the USA. Proponents argue they raise awareness of Indigenous histories and build support for reparations, but causal evidence is limited. Here randomized experiments on non-Indigenous populations in Australia (N = 1,724) and the USA (N = 1,773) find that exposure to land acknowledgements increases awareness of local Indigenous groups but can reduce interest in Indigenous culture and heritage. We find no significant effects on a range of political attitudes, including collective guilt and support for reparations. Additional experiments (N = 3,638) suggest that the adoption of land acknowledgements provides small reputational benefits to institutions facing public scrutiny. Costlier practices—such as financial compensation and Indigenous participation in decision-making—have significantly larger effects. These findings suggest that land acknowledgements primarily improve organizational reputation rather than generate sociopolitical change.

Response: Settler states increasingly offer Indigenous peoples symbolic recognition, such as land acknowledgements, instead of political power or resources, yet the effects of these gestures are untested. Peyton and McNamee’s experiments in the USA and Australia find that land acknowledgements raise awareness of Indigenous peoples but reduce interest in learning more.

Note: all this is published in Nature (the journal, not the actual thing)!


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Digital settler colonialism: Arees Bishara, ‘From Settler Colonialism and the Remote-Control Occupation: Tech-Innovation, Neoliberal Zionism, and Digital Sumūd in Times of Genocide’, 7amleh, The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, 2026

15Oct26

Abstract: This article theorizes how the convergence of technological innovation and military strategy has reconfigured the Israeli occupation into digital settler colonialism, intensified after October 7, 2023. Extending digital colonialism debates, the study shows Israel’s innovation economy operates as both national project and global business model, embedding the tech sector in genocidal violence. Grounded in settler-colonial studies, digital colonialism theory, Foucauldian biopolitics, and Bauman’s analysis of institutional violence, it conceptualizes a remote-control occupation produced through the military–academic–tech nexus under neoliberal Zionism. Drawing on thematic content analysis and interviews with Palestinian technologists (2020–2024), the article identifies three modalities of digital elimination: physical (AI-assisted targeting), economic (military R&D in global markets), and epistemic (digital censorship). Consequently, Palestinians cultivate digital sumūd—networked practices of endurance and resistance.


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Settlers draining the swamp! Anthony E. Carlson, Perilous Waters: Settlers, Swamps, and the State, 1775-1920, University of North Carolina Press, 2026

15Oct26

Description: What swamps can tell us about race and power in the United States. Wetlands—particularly swamps—have evoked contradictory responses from different groups in the United States, from the early republic to the end of World War I. White, enslaved, and Indigenous peoples alternately envisioned swamps as future agricultural paradises, uninhabitable wastelands, portals to freedom, spaces to gather vital resources, eugenic sanctuaries, and future homes for settlers. This contested, evolving thinking shaped how Americans interacted with swamps, and Perilous Waters addresses how those interactions influenced their management. Anthony E. Carlson shows how settlers demonized swamps as one of the gravest environmental impediments to agricultural expansion and the establishment of secure and stable communities. In doing so, they enlisted the knowledge, resources, and authority of the state to organize institutions that enabled drainage and erased any vestiges of prior occupation and usage. By the mid-nineteenth century, drainage had become a paramount public policy objective, giving rise to new social institutions and the mobilization of state resources to assist settlers in fashioning dry, healthy, and domesticated landscapes. After 1900, all levels of government worked to implement cooperative social institutions and systemize environmental and technological knowledge to facilitate drainage and accelerate the transformation of the nation’s wet spaces into farms and crop fields.


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A literal ungrounding: Eyal Weizman, Mark LeVine, A. Dirk Moses, Melanie S. Tanielian, ‘The Earth Is Turned into a Weapon of War: Discussing Eyal Weizman’s Ungrounding’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2026

15Oct26

Excerpt from the interview: Dirk Moses: ‘The foundation for the book, Ungrounding, is the work you’ve been doing with your team at Forensic Architecture. Can you tell us about Forensic Architecture and the work that you and your team do there?’ Eyal Weizman: ‘Forensic Architecture started as a university-based research agency around 2010, but it rests upon a longer experience of documenting the spatial realities of settler colonialism in Palestine. Through publications such as, Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture and Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, a method of reading architecture (in an expanded sense: buildings, roads, bridges, the kind of physical terrain, the transformation and design of the physical terrain) started to evolve. And so did techniques of mapping its destruction: the transformation of the built environment as a means of colonization, occupation, control, etc. The work is typified by following very minute details, such as specific lines in the drawings of Israeli planners and architects as they design roads and settlements, showing how you can commit a war crime by drawing a line on a drafting table. So Forensic Architecture avant la lettre, began to document realities – both settler colonial and manifestations of state power in other places …’

Description of the book being discussed: A devastating, meticulous account of the history of Israel’s destruction of Gaza from an acclaimed architect and investigator Eyal Weizman is one of the world’s leading experts on the relationship between violence, conflict and the environment, both built and natural. As director of the organisation Forensic Architecture, he and his team of interdisciplinary researchers document acts of state crimes and human rights violations around the world. Since 2023, the group has worked to produce evidence for the International Court of Justice’s genocide case against Israel. In this revelatory new project, Weizman draws on that research to bring us on an eye-opening journey across time and into the ‘deep cartography’ of the area extending from Gaza’s subterranean tunnels through to its militarised topography, its unique soil, settlements and barriers. He catalogues, in unflinching and forensic detail, the Israeli campaigns of violence and displacement that have reshaped the region in an effort to make Gaza and its surrounding areas unliveable. Taking us through the broader geographic and historical context, from the Nakba in 1948 to the present day, Ungrounding establishes that architectural and territorial analysis is key to understanding the relationship between coloniser and colonised – and how Israel’s actions after 7 October escalated into violence so extreme and so far-reaching as to, Weizman argues, meet the definition of genocide. Deeply informative and profoundly affecting in its scope and precision, and illustrated with dozens of original images, maps and diagrams, Ungrounding is an essential document of atrocity in our time.


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