Mobile settlers: Prue Laidlaw, D. H. R. Spennemann, C. Allan, ‘The Role of Itinerancy in Australian History: Rethinking the Settler Narrative’, Australian Historical Studies, 2026

25Sep26

Abstract: This article introduces ‘mobile settler colonialism’ to challenge historiographical frameworks that equate colonial progress with settlement and permanence. Examining itinerant workers in colonial Australia (1850–1914), it demonstrates that mobile labour – including Chinese hawkers, Afghan camel drivers, Indian merchants, shearers, and railway navvies – was foundational to colonial capitalism. During the 1880s wool boom, 20,000 itinerant shearers processed wool worth over £20 million annually, more than two-thirds of the colony’s total export value. Yet archives documented these workers through regulation, criminalisation, and death records, framing itinerancy as deviant while depending on it economically. This article further argues that mobile settler colonialism operated through a hierarchy of movement in which some itinerancies were celebrated as civilisational and others criminalised according to race, class, and legal status. Circulation and dispossession were mutually constitutive: the erasure of mobile lives reflects the settler colonial logic equating legitimacy with permanence, property, and whiteness.


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Humanitarian settler colonialism: Pietro Stefanini, ‘Populating Colonized Palestine: The Role of Humanitarianism in the Demographic Project of Zionist Settler-Colonial Replacement, 1938-52’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2026

25Sep26

Abstract: This article examines how international humanitarianism facilitated the expansion of Zionist settler colonization in Palestine throughout the mid-twentieth century. By reading historical materials both along and against the archival grain, the author traces a contentious debate between Zionist settlers and Arab nationalists in a range of international arenas over whether the humanitarian plight of the Jews of Europe should justify the dispossession and expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and lands. The author shows that despite initial British resistance to adopting the humanitarian framework to populate Palestine with Jewish settlers, the internationalization of humanitarianism during and after World War II allowed imperial institutions, including the League of Nations and International Refugee Organization, to create a hierarchy of victimhood where the persecuted Jew superseded the unfortunate Palestinian. He concludes that this nascent global humanitarian regime helped constitute the demographic project of Zionist settler-colonial replacement in Palestine.


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Anti-racism mandates that promote racism are a reliable disappointment: Soma Chatterjee, Shirin Shahrokni, ‘Keeping Palestine out of anti-racism: A critique of institutional equity, diversity and inclusion mandate’, Critical Sociology, 2026

25Sep26

Abstract: Drawing from examples across Canadian postsecondary institutions and school boards since October 2023 Hamas military action against Israel, we discuss how institutional Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) mandates not only failed to address anti-Palestinian racism (APR) but were effectively mobilized against Palestine solidarity actions. We focus on, first, the casting of Palestine solidarity actions as “unrelated” and “far-off” from the grounded realities of racism and settler colonialism in Canada, and secondly, the silencing of such actions through affective claims of “safety”, “wellbeing” and “harm reduction” etc. as interconnected “mechanisms of erasure”. We argue these examples of Palestine exception to anti-racism are buttressed by Canada’s long-standing “settler colonial contract” with Israel, and the state’s multicultural variety of anti-racism which normalize racism as local and specific, and remediable through liberal institutional actions. Race and racism, thus, are abstracted from their foundations and investments in global imperialism, raising concerns about the prospects of transnational solidarity, and generally about anti-racist futures.


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The land-for-settlers-education-for-settlers deal: Tamson Pietsch, ‘Ninety Million Acres: Public Education and Land Endowments in Australia and the Anglo-settler World’, History of Education Quarterly, 2026

25Sep26

Abstract: In the United States, Canada, Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, at least ninety million acres were granted or reserved by states as a means of funding the establishment of public schooling in the period up until 1930. Yet, for the most part, Indigenous land is missing as an analytic in our histories of public education. This article charts the prevalence of land endowments as a funding mechanism for schooling in the US, Canada, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. It establishes Australia as part of this picture and shows the influence of Anglo-settler models there. It also provides a case study of the South Australian educational lands and their relationship to Indigenous dispossession. Finally, the article argues that attending to educational land endowments has implications for the ways historians think about the political economy of settler colonial democracy in Australia and the Anglo-settler world.


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Wrapping up: Karl H. Jacoby, Magdalena Naum (eds), New Directions in Settler Colonial Studies: Studying Settler Colonialism in a Time of Crisis, Routledge, 2026

25Sep26

Description: This volume brings together emerging scholars in Settler Colonial Studies to chart new directions for the field in a time of global crisis. Through rich case studies and innovative theoretical perspectives, the contributors examine the historical mechanisms and ensuring impacts of settler colonialism. They explore its ideological and economic foundations to its deep entanglement with ecological transformations, violence, dispossession, and how it ruptures everyday lives. Moving beyond familiar contexts such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Africa, the collection expands the geographical lens to include the Philippines, Kashmir, Paraguay, Argentina, and Sakha (Yakutia). Essays probe how societies— past and present— confront, remember, and contest settler colonial realities. Organised thematically around ecology and environment, overlooked geographies and actors, and memory and representation, this book amplifies fresh voices and approaches. The essays in this volume were originally published in Settler Colonial Studies.


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Rebuilding the colony: Elizabeth Geiser, Return to the Métropole: Spatial Trauma Responses in Pied-Noir Built Environments, MA dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, 2026

23Sep26

Abstract: Focusing on the built environment of France, this thesis seeks to analyze how the architecture of an empire at home perpetuates colonial ideals throughout a postcolonial landscape. This paper argues that the trauma of decolonization and the resulting response created a contested historical record, leading to the contemporary landscape of the postimperial French Métropole. The analysis of a particular set of French sites demonstrates that the built environment acts as a narrative device with both subconscious and overt effects on the generational transmission and production of collective memories. These physical locations perpetuate colonial amnesia and nostalgia. The Pied-Noir are people of European descent who were born or lived in Algeria during its French colonial rule. Most departed for mainland France around Algerian independence in 1962 due to violence, but also because many couldn’t imagine their place in an independent Algeria. The repatriation of the Pieds-Noirs brought the settler colonial dynamic back to Métropole France, causing clashes of identity with the mainland French. Just as the Pied-Noir feared for their personal safety, they also feared for the physical environment they built within Algeria. The Pieds-Noirs’ actions in response to the violence they experienced, carried out on their built environment, can be characterized into four spatial trauma responses: repatriation, revision, replication, and ritualization. These spatial trauma responses— reactive, self-protective alterations of an environment—helped give them control over their narrative and are the lenses through which this thesis examines the built environment that the Pied-Noir created in France. An analysis of the Sanctuaire Notre Dame de Santa-Cruz Mas de Mingue explores these responses in situ.


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The adoption of settler colonialism: Alyssa Maureen Yukang Hemler, Battered and Beloved: An Analysis of Legal Violence Specific to International, Interracial Chinese American Adoptees, MA dissertation, UCLA, 2026

23Sep26

Abstract: “Battered and Beloved” analyzes how the Law inflicts, facilitates, and justifies legal violence towards international, interracial Chinese American adoptees through its categorization of adoptees as sources of labor, commodities, and possessions. To better understand how the Law inflicts legal violence against international, interracial Chinese American adoptees, “Battered and Beloved” traces the origins and progression of adoption laws, interrogates the underlying logics of modern adoption laws, and explores the lived experiences of international, interracial Chinese American adoptee women through oral histories. Through these methodologies, it is revealed that the United States settler colonial project imagines international, interracial Chinese American adoptees as an evergreen and replaceable labor force that can fulfil the myth of the nuclear family, carry out the logics of the settler colonial state, offer extractable labor for the settler colonial state, and produce the next generation of laborers. Legal violence against international, interracial Chinese American adoptees is pervasive and affects adoptee’s access to basic needs and their ability to exist within the settler colonial project. Laws concerning international, interracial Chinese American adoptees operate on settler colonial logics, labor extraction, and disposability rather than creating conditions in which children’s basic needs are met and material conditions are to a high standard of care.


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Anxious, mate? Felicity Castagna, ‘How Australia’s ‘invasion novels’ have reflected our cultural anxieties around race’, The Conversation, 18/09/26

22Sep26

Excerpt: The “invasion novel” has always been a persistent and popular sub-genre of Australian fiction. In fact, one of our earliest novels was William Lane’s alarmist, didactic White or Yellow (1888). In this novel, white Australians are enslaved by Asians, after contemporary governments allow a large number of migrant workers into the country.


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Nakba Settler Colonialism: Samir Abed-Rabbo, ‘The Nakba as Settler Colonial Catastrophe: Displacement, Erasure, and Historical Denial’, Arab Studies Quarterly, 2026

22Sep26

Abstract: This essay examines the Nakba through the analytical framework of settler colonialism, arguing that the mass displacement and fragmentation of Palestinian society in 1948 constituted not merely a humanitarian consequence of war, but also a structural process of demographic transformation and territorial consolidation. The Nakba may be discussed within broader theories of settler colonialism by analyzing expulsions, village destruction, refugee production, and the systematic erasure of Palestinian presence through spatial, legal, and symbolic mechanisms. Further, the essay explores how the political structures established through the Nakba became institutionalized rather than reversed, producing an enduring condition of statelessness, exile, and unequal authority that continues to shape Palestinian life today. It also examines the persistence of Palestinian claims to return, restitution, and historical recognition, arguing that the passage of time does not erase the legal, moral, or historical dimensions of dispossession. In comparing Zionist narratives of national restoration with Palestinian anticolonial critiques, the study highlights the tension between competing claims of self-determination and historical justice. Finally, the essay argues that denial of the Nakba functions not only as a rejection of historical facts, but also as an attempt to delegitimize Palestinian historical experience and political claims. Recognition of the Nakba remains essential to any meaningful framework for justice, equality, and reconciliation in Palestine.


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Self-determination yeah-nah: Caroline Elizabeth Dunton, Liam Midzain-Gobin, ‘Self-determination and Settler Colonial Incoherence in the Liberal International Era’, International Journal, 2026

22Sep26

Abstract: Throughout the history of the United Nations, there has always been tension between its liberal ideas of self-determination and sovereignty, especially during the process of decolonization and changes in its membership, as well as in its response to protracted conflicts and ongoing colonial occupations. As a middle power, Canada has been consistently engaged with the UN and has been a vocal proponent of the political ideology at its heart: liberal internationalism. As a settler colonial power, Canada, too, has a variety of tensions in its policies around self-determination and sovereignty, both domestically and internationally. This paper traces the ideational history of how Canada has operationalized the concept of self-determination by examining Canada’s voting patterns on Palestinian self-determination. We read the pattern in the context of broader concepts and logics of empire and settler colonialism, drawing on the concept of incoherence to make sense of both the continuity and change in Canada’s treatment of selfdetermination, both in relation to Palestinian statehood and as a viable liberal principle in the current moment of uncertainty in international order.


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