Melancholy against settler colonialism: Rhiannon Cobb, ‘”Melancholy is a utopian feeling”: affect as antidote to the bionecropolitics of settler colonialism in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s poetry’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

28Aug26

Abstract: This article takes up settler colonialism in Canada as operating within a ‘bionecropolitical’ structure, the main aim of which is the possession of land. The structure excludes-yet-retains Indigenous peoples toward that aim, absorbing into state-sanctioned institutional processes what can reify its legitimacy, and rejecting whatever threatens it. One method for achieving this is moralizing discourses, which frame Indigenous resistance as a danger to the nation. These discourses exclude-yet-retain Indigenous claims to sovereignty, epistemologies and ontologies, but also emotional affective responses to a history of colonial violence. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission exemplifies how settler institutions contain and moralize Indigenous trauma within a sanitized framework to absolve the settler state and moralize it against contestations and their affective bases that are inconvenient, unintelligible, and delegitimizing to the state. Within settler colonialism’s fragile imaginary, affects that threaten the national image of reconciliation and chronological progression from the country’s colonial past are actively undermined and characterized as a threat to peace and cohesion. Billy-Ray Belcourt’s poetry disrupts this epistemological order by foregrounding unintelligible affects– such as grief and melancholy—offering the possibility of queer Indigenous futurity. A To conclude, the article offers an epistemological shift toward ‘not-knowing’ from the theoretical coalitions between queer of color theory and Indigenous thought proposed in the work of Belcourt and Jodi Byrd.


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Schooling is a settler colonial institution: Alyssa Lyons, ‘(Im)mutable resources: the settler colonial discourse of school websites’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2026

28Aug26

Abstract: Scholarly discussions on educational inequality in the United States have given much attention to the role resources play in maintaining and (re)producing inequalities between schools. However, little attention has been given to how schools as settler colonial institutions make meaning of resources. Through a critical discourse analysis of thirty-one school websites, this paper uses settler colonialism as a conceptual framework to understand how schools’ positioning of resources reflects and (re)constitutes racialized and classed resource acquisition, control, maintenance, hoarding, and dispossession in New York City public schools.


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Settler colonialism is all devouring: Eden Kinkaid, Noah Schlager, Ellen Platts, ‘Settler colonial space-time and the storying of southern Arizona’s foodscapes’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2026

28Aug26

Abstract: In 2015, The City of Tucson, Arizona became recognized as a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy, a title that has become central to its food tourism efforts and other projects of “gastrodevelopment.” This title recognizes Tucson’s unique and diverse food heritage and agricultural histories, which have been molded into a food story that has been articulated in the application to UNESCO and in local media and branding materials. This food story – a set of narratives about the region that have congealed into a more or less standardized form – is not merely a story, but holds symbolic and economic value for those telling it. In this article, we ask: what stories are told about Tucson’s food histories, and who is telling them? Through an analysis and reflection on local food media, we approach Tucson’s ‘official’ food story as a settler food story: a form of narration that centers and upholds white and settler conceptions of heritage, space, and place. Our analysis demonstrates how Indigenous knowledge and practices are portrayed as part of the past, separate from ‘modernity’; how Indigenous spaces are imagined as empty frontiers awaiting discovery by cunning white artisans and curious consumers; and how white subjectivities, discourses, and practices of consumption occupy the center of Tucson’s ‘official’ food story. In closing, we argue that these story lines – ones which operate under the banner of gastronomic ‘multiculturalism’ – play a role in reproducing forms of historical erasure, symbolic violence, and inequity within Tucson’s mainstream gastrodevelopment project and contemporary food system. In closing, we call for these stories to be pluralized, reimagined, and brought into alignment with food justice and Indigenous food futures.


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Indigenous and Black Resistance against settler colonialism: Crystal McKinnon, ‘Australia and the United States — Racial Violence and Indigenous and Black Resistance’, SPLC, 18/08/26

28Aug26

Excerpt: Understanding settler colonialism and its long and ongoing histories of colonial and racial violence requires us to begin with invasion and first contacts. 


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Countermapping against settler colonialism: Sakina Ali, Grey Areas: Mapping Settler Colonialism in the West Bank, MA dissertation, University of Auckland, 2026

27Aug26

Abstract: In the ongoing occupation of Palestine by the State of Israel, the built environment is weaponised as a tool of expansion, control, and systemic oppression. This is visible in the West Bank, where illegal Israeli settlements encroach on Palestinian lands, with architecture operating as an instrument of colonial occupation. These settlements, initially temporal in nature, evolve into fully fledged towns and neighbourhoods, with their growth enabled by the Israeli government, despite being classed as illegal under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. As of 2025, the Israeli government has escalated both the construction of illegal settlements and the demolition of Palestinian properties. In the same year, the Israeli Knesset (parliament) symbolically voted to annex the West Bank. This development marks a new stage of the occupation since 1948, with the constant threat on Palestinians’ ability to remain on their land. However, the expansion of these settlements remains largely undocumented in conventional architectural and urban discourse. Traditional methods of site investigation and their subsequent representations, such as GIS systems, aerial maps, or statepublished surveys, are either inaccessible or deliberately censored by the Israeli security apparatus. This thesis addresses this issue by utilising a research methodology inspired by the practices of London-based research organisation Forensic Architecture. In the absence of conventional data, alternative sources are collected — publicly available images, videos, social media content and historical records. This data then allows for the spatial violence of the occupation to be traced, recorded and visualised in a way that conventional mapping does not capture. Through this methodology, the thesis documents the occupation within three specific sites (Avnei Hefetz, Hebron and Khallet ad Dabaa) in the West Bank. Alongside this, embroidery emerges as a tool for design-thinking, by processing complex concepts engaged with in this research, This thesis makes the proposition that the countermapping of sites of illegal settlement in the West Bank can be achieved through an interwoven practice of contemporary embroidery and digital video-making to understand the role of architecture in the occupation of Palestine.


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Indigenous jurisdiction against settler colonialism: Andrew Ambers, Charlotte Weston, ‘All Roads Lead to the Crown: Aboriginal Title, Private Property, and Indigenous Legal Orders’, Yellowhead Brief, 194, 2026

26Aug26

Excerpt: Aboriginal title has recently become the subject of intense national attention—and has attracted widespread misconceptions. Following the decisions in Cowichan Tribes v Canada and Wolastoqey Nation v New Brunswick, public commentary has frequently portrayed Aboriginal title as an immediate threat to private homeowners. In British Columbia, this misconception has included misinformation that has bordered on the absurd, including fake letters purporting to be sent by Indigenous peoples ordering homeowners from their properties, municipal councillors claiming some residents can no longer get home-related insurance, and even the Wall Street Journal arguing the Cowichan Tribes case “threatens billions in real-estate investment.” This public debate often presents Indigenous peoples and private landowners as opposing parties competing for the same land. That framing obscures the role of the Crown, which is responsible for any conflict because it grants private property on lands subject to Aboriginal title.


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Diaspora or settler? Ty Bryant, Crossing the Asian-Indigenous Impasse: (Im)possibilities of Taiwanese (Im)migrant Diasporic Settlerhood, MA dissertation, Simon Fraser University, 2026

26Aug26

Abstract: In this thesis, I position the life histories and narratives of the Taiwanese (im)migrant diaspora in relationship to K’emk’emeláy, on unceded xʷməθkʷəy ̓əm, Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh and səlilwətaɬ Lands. I draw on critical inter-disciplinary literature to position Taiwaneseness as a diasporic settler subjectivity which is produced and enacted upon as the urgent need to root oneself. Such urgency animates and upholds the AsianIndigenous impasse (Jafri, 2025), where relationships to Land remain incommensurable and Taiwaneseness remains cathected to the settler state. Through an Indigenized artsbased experimental ethnographic approach, I identify and conceptualize the (im)possibilities of Taiwanese (im)migrant diasporic settlerhood as relational dialectics. Relationships to Indigenous Lands and life, while identified as imperative, become reweighed differently when narrated alongside the need to square Taiwanese identity. Nonetheless, these Taiwanese (im)migrant diasporic narratives are rehearsals of ways of knowing Taiwaneseness otherwise which bring the very forms of settler colonial belonging and relationality that define it into question.


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Indigenous horror against settler colonialism: M.I. Angenent, Weaponizing the Non-Human How Buffalo Kinship and Vampirism Shape Counternarratives to American Settler Discourses in Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, graduate dissertation, Radboud University, 2026

26Aug26

Abstract: Indigenous horror studies have highlighted the genre’s potential to foreground counternarratives to settler discourses. Close readings of Indigenous literary narratives may establish new imaginings of Indigenous cultures in our past, present, and future. They may therefore dismantle colonial hierarchies, and counter dominant settler-colonial narratives that continue to permeate contemporary American society. This thesis investigates representations of the non-human, specifically buffalo kinship and vampirism, in relation to the nineteenth-century buffalo genocide and North American colonialism in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by American Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones. It foregrounds Indigenous horror frameworks and Indigenous (Blackfeet) ways of knowing, specifically kinship and the Four R’s. I argue that the non-anthropocentric Blackfeet values are weaponised to oppose buffalo hunters and antagonistic settlers on the American frontier. Additionally, the narrative’s nuanced representation of a Blackfeet protagonist defies settler-dominated discourses, which challenges the marginalised positions of Indigenous peoples in current conversations concerning colonial and environmental conflicts.


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Settler colonialism rising from the dead: Jae Page, The Dead and Property: Legal Geographies of the SettlerColonial Cemetery, PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2026

24Aug26

Abstract: The marked burial of the dead functions as a proprietary claim to land, and the law has legitimized this relationship since ancient times. Contributing to the literature in death studies and legal geography, this research provides a much-needed examination of this property relationship in a settler-colonial context and aims to understand how the law creates and maintains the ongoing presence of the dead settler. Looking at the jurisdiction now known as Ontario, the study begins with a genealogical analysis of cemetery law and highlights the many practices and materialities that gave rise to the continuous and glorified presence of the dead settler. Next, the research examines the legal classification “cemetery” and showcases how legal spatio-temporalities protect deathscapes of white heritage value, and concurrently, facilitate the desecration of places that do not fit the closed vision of the cemetery. Finally, the analysis discusses the contemporary issue of cemetery spatial shortages and reveals how historical decisions perpetuate legacies of spatial inequity. Telling narratives of continuity and erasure, and dignity and dehumanization, the white supremacy of memorialization is revealed, and the grievable life reflects the image of power.


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Settlers from migrants: Rosalinda Furlan, Second Generation Euro-Canadians: Resisting or Embracing a White Settler Identity?, PhD dissertation, University of Toronto, 2026

24Aug26

Abstract: Migration has played a key role in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the founding, consolidation, and maintenance of the settler nation state of Canada. Immigrant acculturation and a history of the forced assimilation of Indigenous peoples continue to shape Canadian society, yet researchers only rarely consider these processes together (Bohaker & Iacovetta, 2009; Chatterjee, 2019; Perzyna & Bauer, 2022). To investigate the complexity of second-generation immigrant acculturation and how individuals might consider histories of immigration in connection with Indigeneity, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 11 second-generation Canadians of European descent. Would acculturation reproduce White settler identities or would their culturally hybridized identities contest categorization as White settlers? A theoretical framework drawing from settler colonialism (Snelgrove et al., 2014; Veracini, 2010, 2024; Wolfe, 2006), a robust model of acculturation (Berry, 2005, 2006), whiteness as structure (Ignatiev, 2005; Owen, 2007; Nayak, 2007; Satzewich, 2000) and theories of temporality (Blackstock et al., 2020; Povinelli, 2010; Ricœur 1980; 2004) addressed the complexity implied by these questions. Using comparative data analysis of constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz 2007, 2014), my findings reveal how temporality, difference, and place produce complex identities of integrated multidimensionality. Temporality and associated communicative memories were significant factors in identity formation. Participants, raised in the diasporic past/present and the settler present, navigated lifeworlds that existed in different temporal frames. Social mobility was attainable through education, but deficient social capital in professional settings challenged meritocratic beliefs (Aslam & Lehmann, 2021). Educated in colonial time, participants perceived Indigenous peoples as distant in time and place. They subordinated their racialized identities to their ethnic origins, contested their blame for Canadian history, and disputed notions of privilege because culture, language, social capital, and proximate histories determined their social locations, relations to others, and perceptions of themselves as White. I identify this social location as settler colonial subordinate whiteness. These findings imply a distinction between a settler and an immigrant identity determined by history, collective memory, and sovereign entitlement. These distinctions indicate how political identities might be reconfigured (Mamdani, 2020), a necessary step toward transforming Canadian society.


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