Settler colonialism on display: Emma Catherine Nagler, Settling the Past: Affect, Display, and the Colonial Uncanny, PhD dissertation, Georgetown University, 2026

10Jun26

Abstract: Settler colonial ideology persists not only through official narratives and explicit beliefs but through perception, affect, and the organization of public space. Using case studies of heritage tourism sites in St. Augustine, Florida, I develop the concept of the colonial uncanny: a historically specific, managed affective disturbance that arises when colonial representations reactivate inherited perceptual and affective orientations. I argue that these environments are structured to afford a particular kind of affective encounter with colonial violence for settler visitors. In settler colonial societies, heritage spaces tend to depict the past in ways that do not disrupt settler legitimacy. This often occurs through erasure and silencing, but not always. Settler societies can also manage the past by making violent histories partially visible in representational modes that both disturb and stabilize settler subjects. I call this structure the colonial uncanny. It emerges when historically sedimented ideological residues and surmounted developmental dispositions are reactivated together, so that colonial ways of seeing momentarily reappear as both unsettling and familiar before being restabilized through modes of containment that convert discomfort into education and thrill. Through comparisons of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum, the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, and the Old Jail Museum, I show that the colonial uncanny is not an intrinsic property of sites but a relational encounter produced between representational environments and historically positioned spectators. I further argue that this encounter operates through an iterative process of construction and containment, through which unsettling colonial histories are made perceptible, managed, and folded back into everyday forms of settler common sense.


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Resisting for sport: Jordan Koch, Robert Henry, Sam McKegney, ‘From locker rooms to change rooms: The Beardy’s Blackhawks and transformative hockey spaces’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 2026

10Jun26

Abstract: Ice hockey occupies a central place in Canadian popular culture and national mythology, routinely invoked as “Canada’s game” and as a formative site for producing disciplined and socially valued citizens. At the same time, the sport has been widely critiqued for reproducing racialized exclusion, settler colonial power relations, and other forms of social harm. This article examines the intersections of sport, settler colonialism, and reconciliation through diverse engagements with ice hockey, focusing on the Beardy’s Blackhawks, a U18 AAA boys’ team based in the Beardy’s and Okemasis Willow Cree First Nation in central Saskatchewan. For more than 25 years, the Blackhawks provided Indigenous and settler youth access to elite-level hockey within a culturally grounded First Nations context. Drawing on a year-long ethnographic study, including interviews with Indigenous (First Nations and Métis) and settler players, the article traces how a sport historically used as a tool of cultural assimilation in residential schools has been reworked as a site of cultural affirmation, relationship-building, and intercultural exchange. We demonstrate that participation in the Blackhawks fostered community rooted in First Nation values while also prompting settler players to confront and unlearn racialized assumptions. While highlighting hockey’s potential to support reconciliatory relationships, the article also underscores the fragility of such spaces, evidenced by the program’s eventual dissolution and the loss of a rare high-performance pathway for Indigenous youth living on reserve.


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The settler revolution’s global retreat: Aziz Rana, ‘The American Revolution in Global Retreat’, Dissent, 73, 2, 2026, pp. 7-17

09Jun26

Excerpt: In 1899, against the backdrop of the Second Boer War, F.W. Reitz, the Afrikaner State Secretary of the South African Republic, issued A Century of Wrong. Primarily authored by Jan Smuts, who would later become the founding father of apartheid South Africa, the book laid out a long-running list of grievances against Britain, above all defending the right of Afrikaner settlers to independence and self-government: “The hour has struck which will decide whether South Africa, in jealously guarding its liberty, will enter upon a new phase of its history, or whether our existence as a people will come to an end, whether we shall be exterminated in the deadly struggle for that liberty which we have prized above all earthly treasures”.


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Settler bots: Bronwyn Carlson, Tamika Worrell, ‘Robots Behaving Badly: Algorithmic Colonialism and the Consequences of AI’, Journal of Sociology, 2026

09Jun26

Abstract: This article examines the political, social, and relational consequences of artificial intelligence through an anti-colonial and Indigenous lens. Challenging claims that AI is neutral or inevitable, we show that it is embedded in settler-colonial, racialised, and gendered power structures. Across predictive policing, facial recognition, automated welfare, deepfake sexual violence, and embodied robotics, AI does not malfunction; it performs exactly as designed, reproducing historical domination. Drawing on Indigenous methodologies and critiques of technological progress, we show how AI amplifies epistemic and material inequalities, particularly for Indigenous women and communities. We unsettle Western techno-futurist imaginaries and instead position Indigenous relationality as a pathway to ethical, accountable, and sovereign AI futures. AI harm is not accidental but systemic and extractive. We call for rejecting AI inevitability and advancing community-led responses that disrupt algorithmic settler colonialism and reimagine intelligence beyond domination.


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Beyond the frontier is still settler colonialism: Hisham Bustan, Elia El-Khazen, ‘Between a rock and Israel: how Jordan’s water and energy arrangements advance settler colonialism’, Territory, Politics, Governance, 2026

08Jun26

Abstract: This article seeks to reconcile two often-fractured understandings of Israeli settler colonialism: its intrinsic drive for elimination and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and its ongoing expansionist strategy, which fosters dependency and ultimately ensures its gradual integration within the broader region. Using the water-energy infrastructural nexus in Jordan as a focal point, the article introduces a new analytical framework centred on three pillars – settler-colonial power, Washington-led international interventionism, and regional diplomacy. It argues that taken together these enable Israel to extend its colonial project beyond territorial borders, and to capture more far-flung territories and populations through energy and water infrastructure deals, thereby reshaping regional power dynamics in ways that have been underexplored in prior scholarship. The study is based on an examination of three intertwined infrastructural projects: the water arrangements established under the 1994 Wadi Araba Peace Agreement, the 2014–2016 Israeli-Jordanian gas deals, and the 2021 Prosperity Project.


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Turquoise settler colonialism: Kristen Barbara Dorsey, From Mines to Native Jewelry Markets: Unravelling the Settler Political Economy of Turquoise, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2026

08Jun26

Abstract: This thesis is an inquiry into turquoise, a mineral primarily used as a gemstone in jewelry, and one of many different significant materials used in Southwestern Native American cultures and traditions. Despite the diversity of Native jewelry form and materials, jewelry set with turquoise generally overshadows other types of Native-made jewelry as a coveted and collected object for non-Native consumers. This thesis examines settler desires for turquoise mined from Native homelands through time, starting with the territorial New Mexico colonial political economy of turquoise mining in the 19th century in which settler men attempted to construct a narrative that Native turquoise mines had been abandoned. The mineral is also collected for Victorian curio cabinets and displayed on the bodies of white settler women for whom the gem becomes their connection to dead Native sisters of the female settler imaginary. ii The mineral discussed in this thesis has saturated the Southwest Native American jewelry market for over a century. Today, Native jewelers navigate the enduring settler capitalist structure of the turquoise economy, where white mine owners control access to the uncut gem, and where commodified gems as jewelry function as they have since the 19th century as markers of a culture deemed to be of the past. The story of turquoise is the continuing story of Native dispossession: the theft of Native land and resources and the confinement of Natives to anachronistic space and time. It is also the story of refusal and Native contestation of the story of their disappearance and confinement to prehistory. Gender is central to this quintessential story of dispossession and settler capitalism. From the masculine settler subjects who claim the mines, to the white male ethnographers, to the white settler women who narrate and lend content to the imaginary story of the vanishing Indian and her fantasy of dead turquoise-wearing Native sisters, turquoise proves essential to the making of colonial subjectivities. When Native jewelers sell their turquoise creations in the Santa Fe jewelry market, they must navigate a colonial field of white mine owners and the trading post histories that mark Native labor, creativity, and jewelry as colonial commodities. Gender is central to how these colonial fields can be traversed. If the story of turquoise is the quintessential colonial story of theft and extraction in the Americas and elsewhere, in the Southwestern United States, the story reveals how a single mineral is extracted and commodified into an innocent gem that masks the story of conquest and dispossession. Transformed from a sacred object into an aesthetic object, turquoise tells the story of settler colonialism, revealing the specific gendered procedures and mythologies of settler property regimes in the Southwest.


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Settler role playing (pretendsettling): Albert R. Spencer, Justin Bell, Allyson A. Duarte Vela, Tracie Hoops, Cody Spjut, ‘Dog Eat Dog: A Philosophical Exploration of Settler-Colonialism in Role-Playing Game’, The Pluralist, 21, 2, 2026, pp. 6-22

08Jun26

Excerpt: […] we propose that games are elemental. They embody the interplay of community, engagement, place, and relationality, serving as microcosms of the broader human experience. Games and storytelling are meaning-making processes that define our existence within natural and cultural environments. Role-playing games, like Dog Eat Dog, exemplify the elemental by immersing players in an existential narrative. Dog Eat Dogis not merely a game but an exploration of what it means to be human in an impossible situation. It invites players to reflect on their own responsibilities and roles within our intricate shared web of relationships. These reports present Dog Eat Dogas an example of how games and storytelling can serve as tools for understanding and transforming, through a medium that bridges philosophy, art, and social critique. The game’s structure is simple yet impactful. One player assumes the role of the Occupation, while all other players portray individual Natives of the island. The gameplay unfolds in a series of scenes, framed by a central dynamic: the Occupation enforces a growing list of rules, and the Natives must navigate these constraints to survive, resist, or assimilate. 


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Ecological settler colonialism: Irus Braverman, ‘Settler Legal Ecologies: The Colonial Governance of Nature’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2026

08Jun26

Abstract: Settler ecologies are the processes by which settler administrations imagine, construct, govern, discipline, and police nature, nonhuman animals, and Indigenous or otherwise marginalized communities. This article focuses on the role of law in constituting and advancing settler ecologies. It examines how legal regimes animate the colonial administration of nature across multiple geopolitical settings, including Palestine-Israel, the United States, Australia, South Africa, and Kenya. Drawing on these diverse observations, the article identifies three central legal technologies of settler ecologies: juxtaposition, which refers to law’s capacity to generate and stabilize oppositional categories; frontier ecologies, which detail how doctrines such as terra nullius and legal instruments like protected areas expand and cement law’s reach into new materialities; and hyperlegality and criminalization, which transform the violence of conquest into a routinized apparatus of environmental governance. Together, these three legal technologies of settler ecologies trace a continuum—from law’s work of ordering and differentiation, through its territorial projection, and finally to the bureaucratic governance of life. The article concludes with just legal ecologies, exploring how Indigenous, local, plural, and more-than-human legalities might unsettle the premises and start to heal the traumas of settler ecologies, while affirmatively offering other ways of living with the earth. Throughout, the article illustrates that settler ecologies are not peripheral to law but foundational to law’s material conditions and conceptual underpinnings.


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More settler colonial reprocide: Hala Shoman, ‘Reprocide: examining the silenced gendered dimension of Israeli genocide in Gaza’, Journal of Gender Studies, 2026

08Jun26

Abstract: Palestinians have endured decades of Israeli settler-colonial violence and, since October 2023, genocidal violence in Gaza. This article develops reprocide as a broader analytic framework for understanding the full range of reproductive violence and reproductive destruction enacted within settler-colonial and genocidal projects of elimination. Reprocide encompasses direct and indirect attacks on reproductive capacities, reproductive infrastructures, kinship relations, and the material and spatial conditions necessary for sustaining life, intimacy and collective continuity. I do not use reprocide to replace genocide; rather, I use it to clarify a gendered modality of elimination that is often obscured when immediate killing alone is privileged or when legal attention is limited to the prevention of births. Situated within feminist geography, geopolitics, and reproductive justice scholarship, the article shows how the destruction of hospitals, homes and conditions for intimacy links bodily harm to spatial strategies of elimination. Methodologically, the article draws on autoethnographic reflection and testimonies relayed to me by Palestinians in Gaza, triangulated with peer- reviewed scholarship. This article contributes to feminist geography and genocide studies by clarifying the relationship between space, embodiment, reproductive infrastructure, and futurity, and by arguing that reproductive and sexual violence against both women and men should be understood as part of reprocide.


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Settler colonial carceral reprocide: Sarah A. Whitt, ‘Continuity of Spirit and the Carceral Continuum: Indigenous Women’s Experiences of Incarceration Across Settler Time and Space’, American Quarterly, 78, 2, 2026, pp. 263-288

08Jun26

Abstract: The modern history of incarceration in the United States has often been told as a story about the state exercising carceral control over populations—often, male—deemed “criminal” and confined in brick-and-mortar penal institutions. Yet Indigenous women’s divergent experiences of incarceration expand dominant historiographical renderings of “human caging” and illustrate the longevity of this settler structure, today. Reading across the grain of materials relating to a Menominee girl sentenced to the Leavenworth penitentiary in 1906 alongside letters written by incarcerated Indigenous women, published in a 1983 special issue of Sinister Wisdom, this essay illustrates the contours of a carceral continuum that has had an impact on Indigenous women across lifetimes and generations. The intimate stories examined here expand traditional definitions of the carceral and illustrate how those confined found ways to deepen the cracks of the carceral continuum, challenging the settler order.


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