Settlers see predators: Dominik Ohrem, ‘”Ineradicably ferocious”: settler colonialism and the predatory imagination in nineteenth-century U.S. culture’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

19Jul26

Abstract: This article explores the forms and functions of the ‘predatory imagination’ in nineteenth-century U.S. settler culture, a semiotic nexus where distinctions between ‘civilization’ and ‘savagery’ intertwined with ideas about (specific forms of) animality and human-animal difference in a way that reflected the concerns of an aggressively expanding settler nation attempting to resolve its ‘Indian problem.’ Informed by contemporary attitudes toward predatory animals – wolves in particular – the predatorization of Native Americans as inherently violent, cruel, and cunning turned them into legitimate targets for the settler polity’s own exercise of predatory violence, legitimized as a ‘preventive’ defense not merely against certain groups of Native people but against the malicious alterity of ‘Indianness’ itself. The article further discusses an alternative framing of predatory violence that was tied to social evolutionist thinking and suggested that the predatory propensities of a deep past marked by violent competition survived in remnant form beneath a thin veneer of civilization. Complicating the exclusive association between predatory violence and notions of Indigenous savagery, this perspective nonetheless served the eliminatory purposes of settler colonialism by locating the causes of settler(-Native) violence in an evolutionary longue durée temporality that remained inaccessible to human political and moral agency.


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What underwrites settler ‘hospitality’? Michael Palkowski, ‘The Riviera of the Middle East: Gaza, Donald Trump and hospitality discourses of imperialism’, Hospitality & Society, 2026

19Jul26

Abstract: This conceptual paper seeks to outline how hospitality discourses have been used to rationalize and justify policies of ethnic cleansing and displacement within the occupied and besieged Palestinian Territories, focusing particularly on the comments and social media activity of the president of the United States Donald Trump. Drawing on a post-qualitative inquiry approach, this paper thinks with Foucault by using his concepts as ‘plugs’, to generate new insights into how hospitality discourse, as a form of social control, enacts symbolic violence through the language of care and compassion. The paper establishes links with ongoing scholarship that implicates tourism development and planning within territorial disputes, land grabs and the displacement of Indigenous people, by describing how hospitality can be weaponized as a discourse of development that evokes a sense of respectability alongside the illusion of a politically neutral process. Hospitality articulated in this way enables violent realities to be hidden underneath the language of welcome.


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Settler frontiers are planning opportunities: Rachel Gallagher, ‘Urban planning as a settler colonial tool: land, control and extractive settlement on the Queensland (Australia) frontier’, Space and Polity, 2026

19Jul26

Abstract: Colonial settlement was a spatial strategy through which territory was claimed, governed, and made extractable. Conventional origin stories of planning in the Anglosphere emphasize social reform in nineteenth-century industrial cities, yet frontier town-making was also central to the development of planning instruments. This paper examines Queensland’s colonial frontier as a key site where subdivision layouts, surveying practices, and administrative regulation were tested and standardized. Drawing on morphological and archival analysis of 48 frontier town plans, it shows how town form functioned as a political technology of territorialisation, land commodification, and governance, materially producing settler-colonial power through spatial ordering.


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Settler states out of the borderlands: Patrick Thomas Forde, Forging the Borderlands: Sovereignty, Conflict, and State Formation West of the Great Lakes, 1860s-1870s, MA dissertation, University of Calgary, 2026

19Jul26

Abstract: This thesis examines the transformation of the Great Lakes borderlands in the 1860s and 1870s, a period in which overlapping claims to sovereignty gave way to the consolidation of centralized settler states in the North American West. In the western Great Lakes Borderlands–encompassing present-day Minnesota and Manitoba–Indigenous nations, the United States, and the British Empire contested authority, and irreconcilable understandings of sovereignty produced sustained conflict and instability. Focusing on the American Civil War, the Dakota War of 1862, and the Red River Rebellion as interconnected crises, the thesis argues that these conflicts accelerated the consolidation of federal and imperial authority by pushing the United States and the British Empire (later Canada) toward centralized control over contested western territories and Indigenous populations. U.S. suppression of Dakota resistance eradicated Indigenous sovereignty claims in Minnesota, while the Dakota flight across the 49th parallel exposed the fragility of imperial authority. In Rupert’s Land, the inability of the Hudson’s Bay Company to enforce order revealed the limits of company rule and contributed to the transfer of political authority in the Northwest from a commercial monopoly to the expanding Canadian state. The resulting resistance in Red River emerged after the transfer of Rupert’s Land to Canada threatened the political autonomy and landholding practices of the Métis, a distinct Indigenous and mixed-ancestry community that had long dominated the region’s fur trade economy. Although the resistance was contained through a negotiated incorporation into the new Canadian dominion, many of the promised protections quickly eroded as settlement expanded westward. In the years that followed, Canadian officials increasingly used treaties as instruments of settler colonialism expansion, facilitating settlement while gradually subordinating Indigenous and Métis autonomy across the Northwest. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the Great Lakes borderlands served as a crucible for continental change, where Indigenous resistance, settler-state expansion, and racial hierarchies reshaped political and spatial orders. By linking regional conflicts to transnational processes, it demonstrates that the consolidation of the United States and Canada emerged not as isolated national projects, but as interconnected responses to shared challenges of sovereignty, migration, and control.


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Indigenous phoenix rising: Maya Mikdashi, ‘Archives, Prophecy, and Return: The Phoenix of Gaza’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2026

19Jul26

Abstract: This review essay of The Phoenix of Gaza virtual reality project and exhibit puts Indigenous studies and Palestine studies, as well as scholars of these fields, into citational and historical conversation around the themes of archives, futurity, history, and colonial epistemology. The author describes how experiencing The Phoenix of Gaza took her to three different historical and contemporary locations: Lebanon, the Great Lakes region, and a previous conference on Indigenous studies and settler colonialism at Princeton University.


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Settlers crying wolf: Tandeep Sidhu, McKenzie Duguay, Amy Graham, Merissa Daborn, ‘Ghosts on the “Frontier”: Interrogating the Possessive Logic of Wolf Killing’, Sociology Compass, 20, 7, 2026, #e70221

19Jul26

Abstract: Wolf killing is a social problem that animates the link between settler colonialism, masculinity, and animal harms. While the existing literature primarily understands wolf killing through the logic of elimination, based on the historical extirpation of wolves, we contend that its contemporary iteration may also be understood through an application of Moreton-Robinson’s (2015) white possessive logics. This paper engages in a descriptive and semiotic analysis of 468 contemporary images depicting wolf killing in Canada and the United States. We examine how the manifest elements of these images reproduce the colonial and masculinist dimensions of wolf killing. We demonstrate that (a) the wolf’s subjectivity is transformed into property as evidenced by them becoming trophies, (b) the securitization of private settler property is intricately linked with the militaristic nature of wolf killing, and (c) this violence disrupts Indigenous ontological connections to land and more-than-human relations. We discuss the implications of this argument and contend that settler models of wildlife management and conservation, in addition to trophy hunting, be understood through the lens of the white possessive logic. This work further extends the contributions of Indigenous studies and critical criminological scholarship to wildlife management and conservation.


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Anne’s settler colonialism: Donny Syofyan, ‘From “Street Arab” to Scholar: Negotiating the Status of the Orphan in Late Victorian Canadian Literature’, Krinok, 10, 1, 2026, pp. 26-35

19Jul26

Abstract: This article examines the status negotiation of the orphan in late Victorian Canadian literaturethrough a postcolonial and settler-colonial lens. The primary objective is to analyzethetransformation of the protagonist, Anne Shirley, from a marginalized Street Arabtoanenfranchised Scholar, illustrating how this trajectory mirrors the consolidation of the British-Canadian settler state. The methodology employs a qualitative literary analysis of LucyMaud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), utilizing close-reading techniques andcoding for themes such as linguistic re-colonization, domestic discipline, and academicmeritocracy. The study specifically maps the racialized and classed anxieties of the erabytracing the shift from Anne’s initial classification as a manual labor unit to her recognitionasan intellectual vanguard. Main outcomes and results reveal that settler belonging is achievedthrough the systematic erasure of the original inhabitants of Prince Edward Island. Anne’simagination serves as a colonial tool to rename the landscape and impose Eurocentricromantic ideals, while education functions as a primary mechanismfor individual andprofessional recolonization. The conclusions indicate that the orphan heroine’s success isanaffirmation of the settler’s radical underlying title to the land. Ultimately, the studydemonstrates that achieving domestic and social belonging in Avonlea is contingent uponmastering the imperial canon and adopting a specific British-Protestant social sensibility.


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Internal and settler colonialisms: Upasana Bibha, Agustin Laó-Montes, ‘The Multiple Lives of Internal Colonialism’, Sociological Forum, 2026

14Jul26

Abstract: This paper takes as its centerpoint the critical category of “internal colonialism,” an important concept in both social movements and in sociology across different contexts. We trace a world-historical genealogy of the concept, focusing on North America (the United States), Latin America (Mexico and Bolivia), and South Asia (India), evaluating its epistemic-political values for critical theory, social research, and a politics of liberation today. While many scholars consider the concept passé, we argue, following scholars such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, that internal colonialism is a key analytical framework that continues to be relevant. We emphasize three points. First, against internal colonialism formulations that characterize it as a US theory of race grounded upon debates of the 1960s–70s, we note its internationalist and transnational dimensions, and locate its significance in both framing struggles for self-determination and in critiques of the modern territorial state (national and/or imperial) and uneven development. Second, we locate internal colonialism as a category that can be brought into conversation with settler-colonial studies, the “decolonial turn,” and racial capitalism—an encouraging trend we already observe in recent literature. Third, we recenter internal colonialism’s significance in formulating a historically grounded, anti-capitalist, antiauthoritarian framework that eschews a liberal politics of multiculturalism and a neat Global North/South divide, calling instead for a transcalar methodology.


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Settler environmentalism is childish: Anastasia Murney, ‘Australian property is theft: environmentalism and settler- colonialism in children’s television’, Continuum, 2026

14Jul26

Abstract: This article revisits the environmentalism of children’s television of the 1990s and early 2000s. I focus on two examples representative of this era: Round the Twist and The Genie from Down Under and read them through the lens of Nicole Seymour’s ‘bad environmentalism’ (2018), which deploys humour, absurdity, excess, irreverence, and perversity to challenge the whiteness and heteronormativity of the mainstream environmentalist movement. Both programs demonstrate a productive eschewing of ‘good’ environmentalisms predicated on sentimental engagements with nature, instead offering strange, queer, messy and disturbing environmentalisms. This is valuable in expanding our understandings of what environmentalism should look and feel like. However, I question the extent to which these programs are able to undermine whiteness in the settler-colonial context of Australia. I do this through exposing an ambivalent politics of property. On the one hand, the bad environmentalists formulate resistance to large-scale developments that pose an environmental threat. On the other, the characters assert their right to a native ‘home’ and fabricate a deeper imprint of whiteness on the land. This means the bad environmentalism of these programs, while bold, promising, and worth reactivating in the present, is contained within a limiting structure of settler environmentalism.


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The settler’s hill: Maya Charlton, “On This Very Hill”: Narratives of Conquest in Willa Cather’s A Lost Lady, PhD dissertation, Leigh University, 2026

14Jul26

Abstract: A Lost Lady by Willa Cather reproduces a dominant cultural narrative that glorifies the aesthetic of the upper-class early settlers of the Western United States who accumulated wealth and property in the process of constructing a new colonial society. Cather does not entirely erase the losses experienced by Indigenous people as a direct result of colonization, but histories of land theft and colonial violence remain marginal to the venerable origin story of settlement in her novel. While Cather occasionally references both settler violence and an Indigenous presence, she works to separate these two traces of settler knowledge about conquest: settler characters generally enact or think of violence while erasing its racialized and colonized victims, and allusions to Indigenous people appear in recollections of seemingly peaceful conquest. I build on settler colonial theory to examine the mechanisms by which Cather occludes the harm of colonization, including through the transferal of the settler violence against Indigenous people onto non-human life, the privileging of upper-class settler narratives, and the implementation of a colonial temporal order. I examine how Cather’s faultless characterization of Captain Forrester, whose life story comes to stand for the experiences of early settlers, works to preserve a palatable narrative of Westward expansion and facilitates the cross-generational transmission of a glorified origin story within dominant collective memory.


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