Seeing like a settler state: Ting Hui Lau, ‘Seeing like a surveillance state Settler colonialism on the China-Myanmar border’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 16, 2, 2026

03Aug26

Excerpt: Tracing how states see Indigenous peoples—and to what ends—I argue that state vision is not merely about managing populations but is structured by settler-colonial logics of dispossession and the erasure of Indigenous life (Jacobs 2018). I use the term settler surveillance to highlight these settler logics that undergird contemporary surveillance regimes. By settler colonial, I refer to a system premised on the elimination of the native and the reorganization of land and life to sustain global capitalism (Coulthard 2014; Wolfe 2006). This logic is not confined to Indigenous or borderland contexts but is structural to the modern state itself, and increasingly intensified by advancing surveillance technologies (Kauanui 2016; la paperson 2017; Speed 2019). My ethnographic encounters read Scott through this settler-colonial lens to clarify not only how the state sees but why it sees—to seize, settle, and secure its own reproduction.


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Beware of inclusion: Theresa Rocha Beardall, Laurel R. Davis-Delano, ‘Inclusive Elimination: How White Americans Oppose Native Nation Sovereignty Using “Our Land” and “Our Laws” Narratives’, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 2026

03Aug26

Abstract: Native nations in the United States hold inherent sovereignty. Yet, many White Americans oppose this political authority. Drawing on thematic analysis of open-ended survey responses from 558 White Americans reacting to 10 real-world sovereignty scenarios, we identify the ideological mechanism through which this opposition works, which we call inclusive elimination. Inclusive elimination dissolves Native nations’ separate political authority not by excluding them from the United States but by insisting they belong to it. It operates through three inseparable moves. Respondents speak from a settler standpoint, a civic “we” entitled to judge Native authority. They invoke national belonging, declaring that Native lands and citizens are part of the United States and therefore subject to its laws. And they invoke harm, framing Native sovereignty as a threat to non-Native people’s mobility, food safety, and finances. Each move sounds like fairness, but together they convert a relationship between nations into a problem of internal disorder, to be managed by the settler state rather than negotiated between sovereigns. We situate this mechanism within theories of settler colonialism, group position, and colorblind racism, and argue that inclusive elimination names something those theories together imply but do not specify, namely how the language of inclusion itself performs the work of elimination.


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A false self: Chaim Rochester, ‘The false self of the settler state: antisemitic contradictions of the Zionist imaginary’, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2026

03Aug26

Abstract: This paper employs psychoanalytic theory and autotheoretical methodology to examine how Zionist discourse reproduces the very antisemitic structures it claims to oppose. Drawing on Klein, Winnicott, Bion, and Green, I argue that Zionism functions as a collective false-self formation—a defensive identity structure that emerged from historical trauma but now operates through melancholic incorporation rather than genuine mourning. The analysis reveals how Zionist ideology transforms Jewish multiplicity into nationalist singularity, attacking the capacity for thought through what Bion terms an “attack on linking.” Through personal vignettes and theoretical analysis, I demonstrate how anti-Zionist Jews become targets of the same dehumanizing logic historically deployed against Jews at large, as the apparatus claiming to protect Jewish communities becomes itself a mechanism of persecution. The paper traces how contemporary antisemitism discourse, particularly through organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), weaponizes expanded definitions to silence Palestinian solidarity while ignoring actual white supremacist threats, ultimately arguing that authentic Jewish safety requires rejecting Zionist capture of Jewish identity.


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Latest stage or last one: Joyce Dalsheim, ‘Is this the End of Settler Colonialism? A Response to Veracini’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2026

29Jul26

Abstract: This essay takes issue with Lorenzo Veracini’s argument in this journal that the violence and destruction in Gaza following October 7, 2023 marks the failure of Israeli settler colonialism. More importantly, I suggest that the settler colonial framework is insufficient to understanding the dynamics currently underway. Expanding on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s concept of ‘organized abandonment’ and Saskia Sassen’s theory of ‘expulsion’ helps situate Gaza within broader global processes of abandonment, dispossession, the production of surplus populations, and the destruction of the planet.


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A religion of settlement and its Indigenous appropriations: Thomas W. Murphy, Unsettling Scripture: Iroquois and the Book of Mormon, The University of Utah Press, 2026

29Jul26

Description: A groundbreaking exploration of the unexpected intersections between Haudenosaunee oral tradition and Latter-day Saint scripture. In Unsettling Scripture: Iroquois and the Book of Mormon, anthropologist Thomas W Murphy delves into the visions of Seneca prophet Handsome Lake, the epic narratives of the Iroquois Confederacy, and the origin story of the Book of Mormon, revealing surprising parallels between Indigenous and Mormon traditions. Through ethnohistorical research and decolonizing methodologies, Murphy reexamines how both communities understand their origins, faith, and prophecy. From Handsome Lake’s revelations to Joseph Smith’s seer stone, from ancient sibling rivalries to the Great Peace, this book unsettles traditional narratives while opening new conversations on scripture, identity, and cultural exchange. Drawing from living Indigenous voices, Unsettling Scripture challenges readers to rethink sacred texts and the histories they tell.


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Settler-defined education is not nourishing: Kemeyawi Wahpepah, Schooling Stories: Native and Indigenous Narratives of Settler Colonialism and Dislodgement, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2026

27Jul26

Abstract: Settler colonialism is a system of domination which has received little attention in educational research. This study explores how settler colonialism is reproduced and resisted in United States schools from the perspective of Native and Indigenous students. Guided by theories of reproduction and resistance, settler memory, and Indigenous refusal, this study draws on 133 in-depth interviews conducted with 45 Native and Indigenous students to explore how they make meaning out of their experiences in school from kindergarten through college. Part I: Curriculum finds that they regularly encounter Indigenous erasure, misrepresentation, disavowal and dysagency at school, and that they resist these reproductive mechanisms of settler colonialism through a strategy of ‘shifting’ the curriculum. Part II: Commemoration finds that students regularly encounter hegemonic forms of commemorative pedagogy at school, and that they resist these reproductive mechanisms of settler colonialism through calls for a counter-commemorative pedagogy. It argues that ‘shifting’ the curriculum and counter-commemorative pedagogy are both examples of dislodgement, a flexible set of practices designed to disrupt settler colonialism in United States schools. It calls educators to develop their own contextually specific practices of dislodgement in order to bring more just and equitable systems of schooling into being.


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Settler-defined healthcare is not healthy: Artair Rogers, Logics of Extraction, Exploitation, and Control in Healthcare: Applying a Racial Capitalist Settler Colonial Frame, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2026

27Jul26

Abstract: This dissertation examines how U.S. nonprofit hospitals, grounded in a history of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and chattel slavery, function as racialized organizations that perpetuate racial health disparities through the racialized allocation of resources. Throughout the chapters, I argue that health systems not only fail to break with legacies of extraction, exploitation, control, and conquest but often benefit from historically accumulated power and property, even while claiming commitments to community investment and health equity. Chapter 1 traces the historical development and role of medical institutions, especially hospitals, in promoting racial health inequalities. Then, I demonstrate how modern health systems are built to benefit from earlier regimes of extraction, exploitation, dispossession, control, and conquest, and how health sciences knowledge production often hides these structural causes of inequality. Chapter 2 explores the federal community benefit framework through the lens of structural racism, focusing on private, nonprofit hospitals. I examine nationwide trends in community benefit spending, the value of tax exemptions, and “fair share spending”—a measure developed by the Lown Institute that compares community investments to the estimated tax-exempt value. Using the Structural Racism Effect Index (SREI) and county-level racial demographics, I assess how hospitals exhibit racialized patterns in their investment or disinvestment in communities. I contend that community benefit policies, rather than addressing structural harms, function as tools to legitimize institutional power and secure tax advantages, with the costs ultimately passed on to taxpayers and communities most in need—demonstrating how nonprofit hospitals participate in racial capitalism. Chapter 3 uses a Settler-Colonial Racial Capitalism (SCRC) framework to analyze property tax exemptions, hospital siting, and wealth building through property assets. Based on historical and modern measures of neighborhood disadvantage, racial/ethnic makeup, and inequality, I assess the predicted property values of nonprofit hospitals that benefit from property tax exemptions over 10- and 20-year periods. I show how property tax exemptions, granted to nonprofit hospitals via community benefit regulations, have enabled hospitals to amass wealth and land in historically redlined and racially segregated neighborhoods. This reveals that community benefit can serve as a tool for extraction, displacement, gentrification, and institutional wealth growth, rather than genuine community investment. Chapter 4 links these organizational and policy dynamics to population health outcomes by combining Fundamental Cause Theory with Ray’s theory of racialized organizations. Viewing hospitals as meso-level institutions that mediate state power and resource distribution, I analyze the relationship between county-level fair-share spending (community investment minus tax-exempt value) and premature mortality rates, as well as differences across racial and ethnic groups. This analysis shows how nonprofit hospitals’ community investment efforts can either help reduce or reinforce resource-based health disparities. It demonstrates that although fair-share spending may offer a marginal protective benefit for some racial groups, fair-share spending itself is rooted in sociopolitical structures that uphold racial capitalism and settler colonialism, making its effects limited and emphasizing the need for solutions centered on collective action and reimagination. Thus, Chapter 5 shifts focus to application and praxis. Drawing on critical race and decolonial theories, I first explain the need for critical theories like SCRC to assess and interrogate healthcare institutions. Additionally, this chapter highlights the importance of connecting SCRC to theories of disease distribution. Finally, I present recommendations organized around four main pillars: reclaimed narrative and remembrance, resistance and reclaimed power, redress and repair, and radical reimagination. I emphasize how memorializing institutional harms, community-governed and community-accountable health models, Land Back and reparations initiatives, and institutional redress efforts can collectively shift hospitals away from racialized extraction and toward meaningful accountability, redistribution, and community self-determination in health.


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Settler-defined indigeneity is an invented tradition: Julia Silverman, Unmaking Tradition: Indigenous Artistic Revitalization and Craft Knowledge During the ‘Indian New Deal’, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2026

27Jul26

Abstract: “Unmaking Tradition” analyzes three government- and museum-sponsored projects during the 1930s and 1940s that sought to “revitalize” customary Native American arts. Amidst the WPA’s unprecedented federal investments in the arts and the Indian Reorganization Act’s reversal of assimilationist Indian policy, the interwar period marked an era of broad reckoning—both within and outside of Indigenous communities—regarding what “tradition” meant and the place of tradition(s) within modern artistic practice. This dissertation argues that craft became a central medium for Native artists and intellectuals to reframe colonial tropes of tradition, authenticity, and historical study that dominated the study and sale of their artwork. Craft revitalization, for these projects’ participants, did not denote an unproblematic return to a presumed period of “cultural purity”; rather, it was a modern impetus to redefine ancestral images and craft practices to resist ongoing intellectual and political settler-colonialism. This argument unfolds over three case studies. Chapter 1 discusses the WPA-funded Seneca Arts Project, an attempt to create a modern Seneca ethnographic collection. This chapter illustrates how copying and historical replication became modes for Seneca artists to test the plasticity of Seneca notions of tradition. Chapter 2 turns to the Hopi Silver Project, a museum’s attempt to invent an “authentic” Hopi style of jewelry, thereby sending ancestral Hopi images into economic circulation in defiance of Hopi cultural protocols. Analyzing two Hopi artists’ reinterpretation of the project after World War II, I illustrate how these artists developed aesthetic strategies to harness image circulation reparative ways. Chapter 3 addresses the Nome Skin Sewers Cooperative Association, an Iñupiaq collective commissioned by the US Army to create fur parkas and mukluks for soldiers during World War II. Fur sewing, I argue, represented a place-based form of knowledge that resisted incorporation into extractivist systems of western science and capitalism, thereby providing a basis for Iñupiaq political advocacy. Together, these chapters highlight how Indigenous participants contested these projects’ top-down directives, articulating “craft knowledge” as a living practice that defied outsiders’ desires to codify, taxonomize, and define it.


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The incivility patrol: Debojoy Chanda, ‘Gendering “Incivility”: Dissent in American Academia in the Era of Zionism’, in Purna Banerjee, Priya Singh (eds), Fractured Spaces: Intersectional Approaches to Migration and Displacement, Springer 2026, pp. 179-194

27Jul26

Abstract: This chapter demonstrates how Zionism, as a structuring ideology of settler colonialism, has come to delimit the contours of dissent, academic freedom, and acceptable speech within American higher education through a gendered politics of “civility.” Taking as its point of departure the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s “un-hiring” of Palestinian American scholar Steven Salaita in 2014, it situates this incident within a longer genealogy of American academia’s complicity in the occupation of indigenous and Palestinian lands. It argues that Zionist discourse operates through a masculinist grammar which renders Palestinian dissent ‘uncivil,’ excessive, and disposable, while simultaneously feminizing and precarizing dissenting academic labor. By reading Salaita’s case alongside contemporary crackdowns on pro-Palestinian campus protests following Israel’s war on Gaza since October 2023, the chapter illustrates how the First Amendment of the United States Constitution functions at cross purposes with settler colonial amnesia embedded within land-grant universities. The analysis further connects the gendering of Palestinian voices to the adjunctification and disposability of contingent academic labor, showing how dissenting scholars are cast as surplus, waste, or reserve labor by neoliberal American universities. The chapter contends that the policing of ‘incivility’ in American academia reproduces settler colonial power by regulating speech, gender, and belonging under contemporary geopolitical pressures.


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Land impact and environmental seizure: Lydia Moorman, ‘Indigenous Land Seizure & Environmental Injustice: Impacts of Settler Colonialism’, Journal of Earth and Life Science, 2026

27Jul26

Abstract: The fields of conservation and environmentalism prioritize ecosystem health, yet both emerged from western frameworks that displaced and criminalized Indigenous land stewardship. The idealization of “pristine wilderness” narratives served to justify the removal of Indigenous peoples from their homelands and erased millennia of sustainable land stewardship that had maintained ecological balance long before western conservation existed. These narratives not only misrepresented Indigenous relationship with land but also constructed a false dichotomy between humans and nature that positioned Indigenous presence as a threat rather than a source of ecological knowledge. Simultaneously, anthropogenic expansion; such as pipelines, mining, railroads, and other extractive infrastructures, violated Indigenous sovereignty and intensified ecological disruption. These processes are not isolated historical events but ongoing forms of environmental racism that produce disproportionate harm to Indigenous communities through land dispossession, cultural erasure, and the degradation of ecosystems central to cultural health and identity. Current political rollbacks on environmental protections further exacerbate these injustices by weakening tribal consultation, expanding extractive development, and undermining Indigenous governance. Effective conservation and sustainability require Indigenous leadership, recognition of sovereignty, and the restoration of land-based governance systems that have supported ecosystems for generations. Repairing these fields demands centering Indigenous authority rather than erasing or appropriating Indigenous knowledge. Without Indigenous-led decision-making, conservation and environmental sustainability efforts risk reproducing the same colonial structures that created ecological and social harm in the first place.


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