Transubstantiation (migrants into settlers): Lisa Ruth Brunner, Antje Ellermann, ‘Making immigrants into settlers: settler colonial common sense in Canadian citizenship guides’, Citizenship Studies, 2026

06Jul26

Abstract: This article examines Canadian citizenship guides as state pedagogies that socialize immigrants into a white settler colonial common sense of land, sovereignty, and belonging. Through a critical content analysis of seven federal guides published since 1947 and the 2020 Canadian Orientation Abroad (COA) guide for refugees, as well as interviews with civil servants and personnel involved in their production, we trace how these texts narrate Indigenous – settler relations across four themes: colonialism, treaties, land, and reconciliation. In the federal guides, settler colonialism is not named, the foundational structure of the Indian Act is omitted, reserves are referenced in decontextualized ways, and residential schools are minimized in ways that individualize harm and preserve settler innocence. Treaties are absent until 1995 and framed as land-for-benefits transactions that naturalize settler title. Land is repeatedly depicted through frontier and extractive imaginaries while Indigenous relations to land are relegated to culture. Reconciliation is largely absent from citizenship pedagogy, appearing mostly in the non-binding COA guide where it is translated into low-stakes actions of respect, learning, and consumption rather than material obligations such as land restitution or Indigenous jurisdiction. These persistent framings reveal the durability of colonial citizenship and the limits of state-led reconciliation within citizenship pedagogy.


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Settlers on the move: Jillian Louise Hahnlen Conroy, The Ober Homestead Site: A Study Investigating the Research Potential of Nineteenth Century Sites Located along the Wagon Roads of Southern California, PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, 2026

06Jul26

Abstract: The American west attracted Euro-American settlers in droves in the late nineteenth century. Settlers packed up their belongings, pets, and family members and traveled west in search of a life free of the financial and social constraints of common society. The Homestead Act urged immigrants and emigrants to claim tracts of indigenous lands, the only apparent cost being that they improve the land they claim. Many homestead settlements grew up around the wagon roads used to make the western journey, settling along these thoroughfares where water was available. Not all stops along these roads served the same function, however. Some might have been residential homes that made space for weary travelers, others might have been public houses or proper stage stops owned by the Army or mail route companies. Many stops likely served multiple purposes, as the needs of travelers and the growing communities became evident over time. How did the surrounding community, the former and current occupations of the settlers, and the landscape shape the function or functions of the homesteads? Through the in-depth analysis of a homestead property settled in nineteenth-century Poway, California, colloquially known as the Ober Homestead Site, the following study seeks to investigate how archaeology can be used to identify the function of mid- to late-nineteenth-century homestead sites located along the wagon roads to aid in painting a clearer picture of a community that might have been lost to the annals of time. By utilizing excavation data from fieldwork completed at the site in 1990 in conjunction with an in-depth artifact analysis of the artifacts recovered from that field effort and a thorough archival research study, the Ober Homestead study identified the location of an undocumented blacksmith shop that likely served the rural community and wagon road travelers. The study demonstrates that contextual analysis of historical archaeological sites, which requires the use of archival and archaeological data, can aid in determining the function of nineteenth century homestead sites beyond domestic, rural occupation. The study shows that an ancillary function of a homestead site will be informed by the needs of passing travelers, the community, the setting, and the occupations of homestead settlers. This is achieved with a thorough historical review of the region and site property, a literature review of three nineteenth century sites (a homestead, a stage station, and a blacksmith shop), the reconstruction and explanation of the work completed in 1990, and the completion of an in-depth analysis of artifacts recovered from the 1990 field effort.


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Settler colonialism’s viral load: Adam Kersch, ‘Inoculating whiteness: Vaccines, racial formation, and settler colonial immunity on Lingít Aaní’, Med Anthropol Q, 2026, #e70087

06Jul26

Abstract: In settler colonial contexts, health interventions are often sites for contesting authority, belonging, and protection. On Lingít Aaní, colonial responses to infectious disease illustrate how vaccination and public health practices produced racial hierarchies and secured white futurity by exposing Tlingit people to biomedical extraction, risk, and surveillance. I conceptualize this dynamic as inoculating whiteness, a situated analytic for understanding how immunological interventions shielded settler bodies from biological and political threat while exposing Indigenous bodies to experimentation, surveillance, and managed vulnerability. Drawing on ethnographic and archival research on colonial public health based in Sheet’ká, this article examines how inoculating whiteness operated during COVID-19 before tracing its genealogy through smallpox vaccination under Russian colonialism and BCG experimentation and tuberculosis sanatoria under U.S. governance. It argues public health has been instrumental to settler colonial governance and racialization and highlights Tlingit practices of collective care that articulate alternative frameworks for health and sovereignty.


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Conservation is settler pre(re)servation: Khadidja Bouchellia, Uprooting Indigenous Algeria: Green Colonialism and Ecocide under French Colonial Rule, PhD dissertation, University of Arkansas, 2026

06Jul26

Abstract: Colonial conservation did not emerge from a single place or moment in history, but through a convergence of imperial strategies to control and occupy land across colonies. Conservation discourse in the colonies conceals a system of exploitation that co-opts environmentalism in the service of empires. While green colonialism is often discussed in the context of capitalism and neo-colonialism, this study argues that its roots extend to early imperial and colonial conquests. Green colonialism, in this dissertation, refers to the seemingly benevolent environmental institutions and policies imposed by the French administration on colonized lands and populations in Algeria. Chapter one tracks how print and visual media cultivate the affective and epistemic conditions of land myths applied by French colonial discourse to Algeria. These myths include tropes of terra nullius, detachment, translatio imperii, “wastelands,” and “land decline.” Chapter two shows how those myths morph into colonial laws and institutions on Algerian soil, including forestry codes, conservation policing, acclimatization networks, botanic gardens, and agrarian projects. Chapter three turns to Indigenous literature, specifically the works of Algerian Kabyle author Mouloud Feraoun, The Poor Man’s Son (1950) and Land and Blood (1953), to challenge those myths and recenter Indigenous land relations, knowledge, and resistance. This dissertation establishes that green colonialism was integral to the French conquest of Algeria. It also places Algeria’s colonial environmental history within the broader histories of Indigenous dispossession and decolonial struggles. It challenges petromyopia in SWANA/MENA ecocriticism and environmental studies. This work argues that green colonialism developed alongside military occupation and, according to Damien Short’s genocide-ecocide nexus, constitutes ecocide. Because dominant colonial discourses have denied, minimized, or refused to acknowledge ecocide, this research argues the necessity of naming French colonial violence against human and other-than-human life as ecocide.


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Eurogames are actually settler colonial games: J. Rey Lee, Unsettling Catan: Detached Design in Eurogames, University of Michigan Press, 2025

06Jul26

Description: Most revolutions don’t start with nineteen cardboard hexagons, but Klaus Teuber’s game about settling a hexagonal island quietly revolutionized boardgaming. Catan’s commercial success selling over 40 million copies certainly catalyzed a modern boardgaming boom. More importantly, its playful experiments set a new tone for game design. By making its cutthroat gameplay feel peaceful and pastoral, Catan helped a fledgling eurogame tradition forge its distinctive style and was heralded by Wired for “changing the American idea of what a board game can be.” Although peaceful revolutions are usually the best kind, it’s worth questioning how these games cultivate peaceful feelings. Today, peaceful-feeling eurogames often settle into detached design—a mindset of making conflict feel peaceful by dampening conflicted feelings. Unsettling Catan questions how peaceful-feeling eurogames can make implicitly imperialist themes palatable by cultivating a detached mindset that imagines power as peaceful, neutral, and abstract. To ask the hard questions that eurogames often look away from, the book walks through each aspect of Catan’s gameplay (placing hexes, rolling the dice, robbing and trading, collecting resources, building and scoring) to explore how simple design decisions can play out, or play with, cultural ideas and ideals. As the first entry in the Tabletop Games book series, Unsettling Catan introduces key concepts for thinking about board games as a medium and offers accessible game analyses and personal reflections to help players, creators, and scholars reimagine what board games can be and become.


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Police as settler policy: Michael K. Bryden, ‘Police Legitimacy and Indigenous Self-Determination: Towards a Decolonised Dialogue’, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 2026

06Jul26

Abstract: In settler states, police are used to establish and maintain colonial order, suppress Indigenous resistance, and secure state authority. Today, Indigenous people experience disproportionate rates of police contact that emerged during colonisation. Yet, mainstream scholarship on legitimacy has largely ignored Indigenous perspectives on policing, the wider context of settler colonialism, and questions of self-determination. This article focuses on police legitimacy and Indigenous self-determination in Australia, with implications for other settler states. I argue that Indigenous selfdetermination cannot be achieved without legitimate forms of social control. Building on the theorising of Beetham (1991) and Bottoms and Tankebe (2012), this article suggests that decolonised legitimacy dialogues are necessary to understand how Indigenous peoples conceptualise legitimate policing. A decolonised dialogue acknowledges policing’s colonial origins and its ongoing role in settler societies, the Western philosophies underlying legitimacy theory, and the need to centre Indigenous self-determination. I propose that “police” legitimacy can be enhanced via two pathways: (1) through reforms within state structures and/or (2) through Indigenous-generated alternatives (e.g., night patrols). This dual strategy considers the importance of both community-informed and evidence-based practices in policing to reduce harm while striving, ultimately, for as little (state) policing as possible. Here, I argue for epistemological consilience: the integration of Indigenous and Western knowledge systems.


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Food for Indigenous thought: Colleen Hammelman, Charles Z. Levkoe, Kristin Reynolds (eds), Radical Food Geographies: Power, Knowledge and Resistance, Bristol Univesity Press, 2024

06Jul26

Description: This collection presents critical and action-oriented approaches to addressing food systems inequities across places, spaces, and scales. With case studies from around the globe, Radical Food Geographies explores interconnections between power structures and the social and ecological dynamics that bring food from the land and water to our plates. Through themes of scale, spatial imaginaries, and human and more-than-human relationships, the authors explore ongoing efforts to co-construct more equitable and sustainable food systems for all. Advancing a radical food geographies praxis, the book reveals multiple forms of resistance and resurgence, and offers examples of co-creating food systems transformation through scholarship, action, and geography.


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Sacralised resistance against settler colonialism: Dadang Ismatullah, Sri Rijati Wardiani, Titin Nurhayati Ma’mun, Sangidu, ‘Ethical Witnessing, Home, and Return in Ghassan Kanfani’s Returning to Haifa: A Decolonial and Religious Humanities Reading’, Jurnal Lektur Keagamaan, 24, 1, 2026, pp. 419-451

06Jul26

Abstract: Palestinian exile in Ghassan Kanafani’s fiction deeply reshapes the relationships connecting individuals to home, memory, and historical existence. While existing scholarship has largely emphasized political nationalism, trauma, and structural settler-colonial violence, the ethical dimensions and processes of cultural sacralization sustained within disrupted domestic spaces remain underexplored, particularly in relation to how secular resistance narratives resonate within religious readerships. This article examines how home, memory, and return are represented in Returning to Haifa through an integrated framework of settler-colonial studies and the religious humanities. Employing qualitative textual analysis and close reading of both the Arabic original and its English translation, the study focuses on narrative structure, spatial description, and intergenerational dialogue. The analysis shows that home functions not merely as a domestic setting but as a culturally sacralized space where moral attachments endure against colonial erasure. Memory emerges as a form of ethical witnessing, while the transformation of Khaldun into Dov exposes the intimate violence of intergenerational rupture. This study contributes to religious literary studies by demonstrating how Kanafani’s secular narrative undergoes religious re-signification within contemporary Muslim horizons of expectation, demonstrating how such a moral reframing is enacted by specific communities of reading through shared ethical imaginaries of dignity (al-karamah) and historical continuity.


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Electoral participation? Sabrina Bourgeois, Joanie Bouchard, Marjorie Prince, ‘Settler Ballots and Indigenous Voices: Exploring Electoral Behavior, Partisanship, and Political Attitudes among Indigenous Peoples in Canada’, The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, 2026

04Jul26

Abstract: We possess a limited understanding of Indigenous electoral behavior, partisanship, and political attitudes. Previous research has mainly focused on explaining Indigenous electoral abstention and has faced constraints, mainly because of small sample sizes. Drawing on data from both the 2019 and 2021 Canadian Election Studies, which encompass an unprecedented number of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis respondents, we explore Indigenous electoral behavior, partisanship, and attitudes toward public spending at the federal level in Canada. We show that while Indigenous respondents remain more likely to consider abstention, they can also be more supportive of third parties than their nonIndigenous counterparts and adopt views spanning the traditional left–right ideological spectrum. These findings encourage a redefinition of the expectations regarding the political behaviors and attitudes of Indigenous Peoples in order to fully engage with diverse political cultures.


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Digital indigeneity against settler colonialism? Maurice Ebileeni, ‘Digital Palestine and the National Imagination’, Critical Inquiry, 52, 4, 2026

02Jul26

Abstract: It seems that Palestine has found a convenient spot in the cloud, as a complex, yet seemingly cohesive, digital nation comes into being. The growing possibilities of online connectivity through social media, search engines, and streaming services, along with the newly designed features of online articulation (posting, sharing, commenting, reacting, and so forth), are intensifying the idea of a single people, a single heritage, and a single national destiny. This article presents the concept of digital Palestinian nationalism as a critical prism for examining how online political activism in support of Palestine reveals the multiple, somewhat conflicting, layers of present Palestinian temporality. My contention is that digital Palestinian nationalism operates in an algorithmic present that significantly intensifies the historical temporality of national imagination but is simultaneously in conflict with various ongoing temporalities of Palestinian displacement. Deeply entangled in the sociometer of user engagement, algorithmic processes amplify deep national sentiments among Palestinians everywhere in reaction to footage of Israeli violence in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip (since 7 October 2023) within a constant frame of “real-time” and “right-time.” However, in buttressing national sentiments, this algorithmic presentness hinders attempts to imagine differently so that the Palestinian story might branch out to comprehend the multiple ongoing political and cultural developments of Palestinian experience in the various contexts of displacement in Israel-Palestine and the world at large.


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