Culture wars? Lorenzo Veracini, ‘AIPAC jeremiad: on Adam Kirsch′s settler colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

26Oct26

Excerpt: Atlantic senior editor, Columbia University faculty member, critic and poet Adam Kirsch’s Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (2024) is disconnected from morality and not informed by facts. To genuinely engage, I will refrain from offering a moral rejoinder and will respond in accordance with its logic. Should I remind readers that Palestinians are human, and that this carry consequences, including political consequences, or refer to a genocide that was and is broadcast worldwide and in real time? No need: most readers would know about humanity and about genocide, and other reviews of the book have drawn attention to this its fundamental biases. Besides, I assume that Kirsch knows they know, and this is probably why he builds a straw man argument. The straw man in the argument is named ‘settler colonialism’.


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A settler neighbourhood: Samuel Jacob, ‘Nearer Neighbors: Settler Sublimation and Human Gardening in the Russian-American Neighborhood of Crèvecoeur’s Letters From an American Farmer’, American Literary History, 38, 4, 2026, pp. 464-489

26Oct26

Abstract: Of the twelve letters comprising J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters From an American Farmer (1782), the penultimate eleventh stands out. It is narrated not by the titular Farmer James but by “Iwan,” a Russian gentleman who declares America and Russia “nearer neighbours” (262). This essay recovers the unacknowledged work Russian-American neighborliness performs within Crèvecoeur’s vision of American futurity. I show how Crèvecoeur borrows an eighteenth-century grammar of the neighborhood to both depict and predict Russian and American settler expansion as parallel, even doubled, projects. I further argue that Iwan is not, as he is often interpreted, a continuation of James’s narrational function, but is Crèvecoeur’s historically inflected amalgam of Fedor Karzhavin, a Russian traveler throughout colonial America. Finally, turning to Iwan’s conversations with the botanist John Bartram, I demonstrate how Crèvecoeur uses botanical language to recast slavery and serfdom as benevolent forms of human gardening, a refiguration that sublimates Russia and America’s systems of enslaved labor and indigenous dispossession into shared fictions of cultivation and care. Against the backdrop of contemporary diagnoses of the “Russification” of US government, I show that tracing early American expressions of Russia and America as “nearer neighbors” promises new trajectories for US literary scholarship.


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Settler maths: Nicholas Pitt, Matthew Birchall, Nancy Cushing, Jarrod Hore, Simon Ville, Alison Bashford, ‘Rethinking settler-colonial populations with sheep and cattle – a conversation around the Australian colonies’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 27, 2, 2026

26Oct26

Excerpt: What happens if we include sheep and cattle in our analysis of British settler-colonial populations during the early to mid-nineteenth century?


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Homemaking projects: Kandice L. Grossman, ‘Home Is at the Heart of Place: Coalition Possibilities at Standing Rock’, in Michelle I. Gawerc, Rachel L. Einwohner (eds), Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change: Coalition-Building and Solidarity Across Difference, Emerald, 2026

26Oct26

Abstract: This research examines the participation of a diverse group of activists in the 2016–2017 Standing Rock movement, led by Oceti Sakowin tribal members, on the borders of the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The movement resisted the pipeline in the name of water protection, Indigenous sovereignty, protection of sacred burial grounds, treaty rights, climate justice, and more. Approximately 10 months into the effort, it was halted by the state, and the pipeline was installed. This paper emerges from a larger qualitative study that examines the politics, possibilities, and risks of coalition surrounding the Standing Rock movement. Data collection involved in-depth interviews with 27 activists, content analysis of 13 activist stories, and participatory research and observation. Findings show that for activists in the camps, placework, or place-based protest, enacted a “call and response” form of politics, based on shared callings to protect and critical responses to settler colonial-capital culture, specifically dispossession of land and property. Relationship to a sense of “home” shaped political motivations, a sense of belonging or lack thereof, and strengthened activists’ willingness to participate. This study suggests the analytical categories of place and home are productive for future sociological research on mobilization and coalition building across difference.


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Bilingual settler colonialsm: E. Haque, ‘Dual white settler coloniality and the genealogy of indigenous language policy’, Language Policy, 2026

26Oct26

Abstract: In order to examine the disjuncture in responses to the Indigenous Languages Act (ILA) between different Indigenous groups, in this paper I will explore the genealogy of Indigenous language policy in Canada by examining various government and community reports, documents, as well as parliamentary and committee debates from the 1960s onwards, which is when Canada’s first official language policy was announced. I argue that the continued state prioritization of official white settler languages means that even for a region like Inuit Nunangat with relatively good linguistic vitality through decades long efforts by the Inuit to prioritize Inuktut, the development of an Indigenous languages act cannot guarantee the future reclamation and ongoing vitality of Indigenous languages in Canada.


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Protection, assimilation, settler colonialism: Andrew Woolford, ‘Protective legislation and paternalism: assimilative indigenous education in the US and Canada, 1928-1953’, Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, 2026

26Oct26

Abstract: In both the US and Canada third pillar protective legislation was largely oriented towards the promoting assimilation and solving the ‘Indian problem’. It provided a context and frame of reference for the establishment and shaping of a key component of second pillar Indigenous policy – the promotion of church-run, state-funded boarding schools (US) and residential schools (Canada) expressly created to eradicate Indigenous Peoples by erasing their languages, religions, cultures, and identities. However, while the trends were largely similar in the US and Canada, differing constellations of individual and institutional actors – reformers, activists, bureaucrats, churches, and states – at times allowed for some notable distinctions in the two nations. I explore the character and role of third pillar protective legislation and how it shaped second pillar education policy and schools in US and Canadian history, highlighting where and how it diverged, as well as how these trends have influenced contemporary Indigenous politics in each country.


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Suburban settler colonialism: Sean Tyler, ‘The Settler-Suburban Imaginary: Improvement, John Claudius Loudon, and Colonial Dispossession in the Swan River Colony’, Fabrications, 2026

25Oct26

Abstract: This article examines how a settler-suburban imaginary organised land, labour, and legitimate possession in the Swan River Colony on Whadjuk Noongar Country, where relationships to Country precede and continue beyond colonial occupation. It traces the emergence of an ideology of landscape improvement and follows its legal and aesthetic translation through British colonial property regimes. Situating John Claudius Loudon’s writings within this process, the article shows how his suburban ideals provided settlers with a vocabulary that bound moral and intellectual cultivation to domestic landscape improvement. Loudon’s texts circulated alongside seeds as well as reports between Britain and the Swan River colony, demonstrating a bi-directional exchange of knowledge concerning the ideal landscaping of the suburban garden. I argue that the suburban condition in Swan River was not simply a by-product of urban growth, but a foundational mode of dispossession through which landscape improvement was reorganised at the scale of the individual allotment, garden, and dwelling.


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Settler colonial panopticons: Emily Lanman, ‘Panopticons in the antipodes: why Bentham’s reforms found success in Western Australia’, Journal of Bentham Studies 24, 1, 2026

25Oct26

Abstract: Significant work conducted by Bentham scholars indicates that Benthamite ideas on penal reform were present in the Australian colonies. This has been demonstrated in part through discussions of a number of panoptic-inspired institutions across Australia. Despite this, there have been fewer debates on why the panopticon became a favoured tool for punishment in colonial settings rather than in Britain. This is significant as the first Australian colonies were established for the reception of imperial convicts, which Bentham argued against. Drawing on an analysis of the writings set out in A Picture of the Treasury, this article explores Bentham’s explanation of why the British government thwarted attempts to establish a panopticon penitentiary and his comments on what spurred its popularity in the colonies. It will do this by using as a case study Western Australia, where the panopticon was implemented in key penal institutions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such use of Western Australia is also significant. It was the first Australian colony to be established as a settler colony, which also signified a turning point in the invasion of Australia, as penal colonies were no longer the default method of colonisation. However, poor economic growth and limited labour led to the introduction of imperial convict labour from 1850 to 1868 in order to increase colonial development. The panoptic-inspired institutions that will underpin this case study are Fremantle Gaol (1831–56), which was the colony’s first purpose-built gaol, the prison for Aboriginal resistance prisoners, known as the Quod (1863–1904); and the radial yard built in New Division within Fremantle Prison (c. 1908–12). Through this analysis, this article seeks to uncover the circumstances that led to the deployment of the panopticon model, the people the institutions sought to reform and the events that resulted in their closure.


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Travellers as the antisettlement: TraVision, ‘To Be Settled or to Be Unsettled? The Historical Formation of the Settled Population in Ireland’, Zenodo, 22/10/26

23Oct26

Abstract: This Traveller-led paper examines how settlement became the dominant institutional and cultural standard in Ireland. It distinguishes Gaelic habitation from colonial settlement and the later administrative division between Travellers and a settled majority. Drawing on historical documents, legislation, government reports and Traveller testimony, I examine changes in landholding, livelihood, schooling and public authority. Native incorporation and settler descendants’ changing Irish belonging are followed through conquest, plantation, famine, land purchase and independence. The Commission on Itinerancy (1963) and the Programme for the Settlement of Travellers—Ireland (1975) show how the state prescribed the surrounding population as the destination of assimilation. Population genetics informs the demographic comparison; stress and microbiome research illuminate relationships between bodies, environments and imposed change. I argue that the authority of settledness was made through institutions acting across a population divided by ancestry, class, religion and region. Understanding that formation places the settled standard itself under examination and requires those institutions to account for its continued enforcement.


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The Indigenous response: Yann Allard-Tremblay, Disjunctures: Indigenous Redirections in Political Theory, Oxford University Press, 2025

22Oct26

Description: Disjunctures: Indigenous Redirections in Political Theory offers a critical, comparative engagement with North American Indigenous and dominant Euro-modern political traditions, and explores the irreconcilable differences between them. These differences disclose political options that cannot be pursued simultaneously or, in a word, disjunctures. For contemporary political societies committed to reconciliation, choices will have to be made. While these disjunctures are explored in the context of Canada, they are nevertheless disclosive of an edifying political otherwise to currently dominant dispensations. Disjunctures argues that dominant Euro-modern traditions model political societies according to notions of justice, and following the determinations of an independent, autonomous people. The associated practices of governance express an ethos of mastery that is fundamentally unreciprocal and unresponsive to other humans, other-than-humans, and ecological contexts. In contrast, Disjunctures argues that Indigenous traditions model political societies as part of a broader ecological context of understanding, and thus give priority to the search for, and maintenance of, harmony. These traditions provide a political model that is nonhierarchical, noncoercive, and primarily focused on the need to sustain and preserve relationships with others, other-than-humans, and the land itself. As such, they require a deep reciprocal responsiveness in governance. Disjunctures explores the consequences that recognizing these irreconcilable political options will have for the political project of reconciliation, arguing that reconciliation must be transformative, of both political structures and subjectivities. Ultimately, Disjunctures argues that Indigenous political traditions disclose an attractive, decolonial path toward which political theory and conduct should be redirected.


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