The key words: Clare Corbould, Hilary Emmett, ‘Settler Colonial Keywords for New Area Studies: Land, Labour, and Language in Mark Twain’s Following the Equator (1897)’, in Clare Corbould, Hilary Emmett, Sarah Garland, Malcolm McLaughlin, Thomas Ruys Smith, John Wills (eds), American Studies in the Age of New Area Studies: Infinite Space, Routledge, 2026

01May26

Abstract: This chapter examines the role/place of cross-cultural translation in New Area Studies by reading Mark Twain’s Following the Equator (1897) as a mode of area studies avant la lettre. Drawing on Raymond Williams’ Keywords (1976) and later developments of this concept, we examine Twain’s use of three terms: recruit, squatter, and native. Our close reading of Twain’s comparative account of settler colonies reveals: first, his scorn for euphemisms that mask coercive Pacific labour regimes; second, his unsettling of Australian celebrations of squatters by recalling American associations with land theft and slavery; and third, Twain’s reproduction of settler-colonists’ claims in Australia to nativeness and of myths about Aboriginal people’s “extinction.” As a methodology for New Area Studies, keywording thus enables a nuanced interrogation of cross-cultural translation. In de-exceptionalising US histories of land, labour, and racialisation by situating them within shared settler colonial formations, the method is useful across multiple disciplines, including literary studies, cultural studies, history, and New Area Studies.


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Indigenous and at home: Jacek Anderst , Keziah Bennett-Brooka, Tamara Mackean, ‘Flipping the script on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and housing: a call for strengths based discourse in Australian housing research’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 2026

01May26

Abstract: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are deeply connected to the lands, seas and skies across the settler-colonial state of Australia. They take strength from ongoing connection to culture, spirituality and community. Colonisation impacts these life-giving connections through the dispossession of peoples from Country and disconnection from community and culture. These ongoing colonial processes negatively impact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s access to quality housing and are the source of housing precarity. Housing research often portrays Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s housing experiences within deficit discourse. Deficit discourse causes harm in its problematisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are reduced to characterisations such as ‘the Indigenous housing problem’. Strengths-based discourse, now regularly applied in health, can address this harm by centring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s cultures, knowledges and priorities, and appropriately contextualising experiences within settler colonialism. Aboriginal health researchers have for two decades pushed for strengths-based discourse, leading to shifts in health policy, such as the call to eradicate systemic racism. There is an opportunity to similarly flip the script in housing research to centre Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s existing strengths, capabilities and community-led housing solutions and positively influence housing policy.


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Settlers and their pests: Jodie Evans, Abbi Virens, ‘Nuisance Over Nuance: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Common Brushtail Possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) in Aotearoa New Zealand’s Online Media’, New Zealand Geographer, 2026

01May26

Abstract: In Aotearoa New Zealand, the Australian brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) is widely reviled as an icon of environmental destruction. This paper employs critical discourse analysis to examine how the possum is constructed as a pest within online media. Depicted as non-native, overconsuming, and proliferative, the possum emerges as a villain in antithesis to the natural world. This paper argues that such discourse reflects not only the possum’s threat to biosecurity but also deeper tensions within capitalist and settler-colonial ways of relating to nature.


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Dance! Miguel Martínez, ‘Danza Azteca as a form of resistance to White Settler colonialism’, International Journal of Human Rights Education, 10, 2026, pp. 1-17

28Apr26

Abstract: White settler colonialism is a systematic process by which Europeans and their descendants migrate to and settle in a new land with the explicit expectation of taking over the land, regardless of any Indigenous peoples that may live on the land (Speed, 2017; Wolfe, 2006). The Indigenous people who reside there can be exploited for labor, removed, exterminated or some combination of the three. In the process of settling the land, the settlers rename places, transform land use, create a new sense of cultural identity, and work to eliminate any remnants of what had existed prior to their arrival. Indigenous ways of living, epistemologies and religious practices and beliefs are replaced by White political, religious, social, cultural and economic systems and structures. While the impact of White settler colonialism is felt across essentially all Indigenous people in the United States, there has been a significant amount of resistance against it. In this paper, I aim to describe the impact of White settler colonialism on Indigenous peoples of the United States, with an emphasis on the ways that Indigenous people lost access to their cultural practices, and how traditional Danza Azteca, as practiced in California, is a way of resisting against White settler colonialism. As someone who has practiced Danza since 1987, I will discuss some of the history of Danza in the U.S. and how it is a search for Indigeneity and a form of resistance against White settler colonialism.


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The seeds of future settler colonialism (i.e., for those who are too distracted to look at apocalyptic thinking, if the apocalypse comes, what comes after will be settler colonial): Annukka Paajanen, ‘Reconciliation or re-colonization? Critical perspectives on seed banking and colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

28Apr26

Abstract: Major actors within the United Nations and academia have suggested that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), a ‘backup’ facility for the world’s crop diversity, could facilitate reconciliation between Indigenous and ex situ conservation approaches. This paper examines the collaboration between the SGSV and their Indigenous depositor, Parque de la Papa (Parque), to assess this proposition. Although the SGSV promises to ‘secure’ crop diversity ‘for the benefit of everyone’, work in decolonial and Indigenous studies has shown that neoliberal capitalist and colonial structures underpin and hinder reconciliation and conservation efforts. By critically analyzing literature from various fields and content from institutional websites, I demonstrate how the SGSV’s methods, while intended to safeguard crop diversity, may inadvertently perpetuate colonial dynamics by integrating Indigenous seeds into a system that prioritizes Western/settler colonial, neoliberal capitalist values. Reading the two conservation approaches vis-à-vis, I highlight the asymmetrical exchange that the Parque must navigate to preserve Indigenous knowledge and resources amid climate change challenges in the Andean highlands. Based on the analysis, I assert that despite the collaboration’s benefits, it risks transforming Indigenous communities along Western lines, potentially undermining biodiversity. Understanding these challenges is crucial for improving biodiversity protection and supporting the communities involved.


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Inception is a structure, not an event: Haifa Mahabir, The Holy Waste Land: A theoretical discourse on Palestine and the settler-colonial state of inceptional exception, PhD dissertation, University of Kent, 2026

28Apr26

Abstract: This doctoral thesis interrogates the colonial and juridical foundations of Israel through a new conceptual framework: the inceptional state of exception-a condition of permanent emergency inscribed at the very origin of Zionist settler-colonial sovereignty. Rather than viewing Israel as a democracy in decay or degeneration, the study reframes it as a state constituted through the routinisation of legalised violence, racialised exclusion, and bureaucratic domination. In this account, the state of emergency is not an aberration but the baseline structure of legal and political order-embedded from the outset and sustained through the colonial logic of exception. The analysis proceeds through critical engagements with Hannah Arendt, Edward Said, and Giorgio Agamben, reread through the prism of Palestine. From Arendt’s account of imperialism and bureaucracy, the thesis develops the concept of subaltarianism: a mode of domination that governs silently through legal-administrative routine, embedding violence in ordinary governance. From Said’s confrontation with Orientalism and exile, it advances the claim of dehumanisation as the founding logic of empire, tracing how Palestinians are produced as illegible, expendable, and structurally unknowable-and how narration emerges as a form of resistance against erasure. At its conceptual keystone, the thesis builds on and extends Agamben’s framework, elaborating Israel as a paradigmatic state of inceptional exception: a wholly unprecedented formation where emergency is foundational to sovereignty. In its culminating gesture, the study turns to Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy, neither peripherally nor incidentally, but as the poetic horizon in which these conceptual trajectories converge. Dante’s poetics of exile and redemption provide the necessary counterpoint to juridical foreclosure, reframing the waste land as a site of resistance and renewal. By bridging settler-colonial studies, Palestine studies, political theory, socio-legal analysis, and the historiography of empire, this dissertation forges an integrated frame that makes visible what each field alone cannot: how juridical suspension, bureaucratic domination, and erasure form the structural core of colonial sovereignty. This interdisciplinary intervention reframes sovereignty, law, personhood, and hope through the colonial crucible-pressing beyond description toward conceptual innovation, confronting the evasions of canonical theory, and generating the conceptual resources necessary to name Israel’s singular condition.


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Deterritorialise to reterritorialise: Argha Bhattacharyya, ‘Transforming the settler narrative: reading Kim Scott’s Taboo as becoming minor’, Culture, Theory and Critique, 2026

28Apr26

Abstract: This paper critically analyses Kim Scott’s Taboo in reference to the Deleuzean notion of ‘becoming minor’. The novel discusses Noongar characters dealing with historical trauma and land dispossession against the persistent impacts of forced assimilation, reflecting on their positioning as the ‘other’ in their ancestral land. Through the use of omniscient and communal storytelling, the tale subverts the settler colonial worldview and asserts Aboriginal sovereignty. This paper purports that the revival of the Noongar language together with cultural practices can be viewed as an act of deterritorialisation, reconstructing new forms and narratives to express Aboriginal knowledge, memory, and agency. The analysis of the novel as an act of ‘becoming minor’ demonstrates how Scott’s novel can be read as a testament to new ways of Aboriginal sense of belonging and sovereignty within the field of Australian literature.


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Drinking settler colonialism: Linda Myrsiades, Backcountry Democracy and the Whiskey Insurrection: The Legal Culture and Trials, 1794-1795, University of Georgia Press, 2024

28Apr26

Description: Backcountry Democracy and the Whiskey Insurrection treats the legal culture that informed the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 and its trials. Linda Myrsiades examines conflicts between state and federal courts and the judicial philosophy of Federalist judges, as well as grand jury charges, law reports, judges’ bench notes, and defense notes for the trials, to develop a portrait of the hegemony of official interpretations of the law. At the same time, the book illuminates popular attitudes about the courts and the law and explores the nature of extralegal courts operated by the people. Myrsiades captures the agitation-propaganda efforts mounted by rebel communities and groups together with petitions and speeches in the rebel assemblies in demonstrating that popular culture offered a clear politico-legal justification within the rebel movement on the unofficial side of legal culture. Myrsiades thus presents a holistic picture of the legal culture of the rebellion. Her examination denies the common perception that the rebel movement was incoherent and chaotic and presents an alternative view that its perceptions are a necessary correlative to understanding how treason law functioned and what its critical elements were in the late-eighteenth century, serving as a lesson for democracy in the present era.


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But where is that settler colonialism? Emilie Cameron, ‘Where is Settler Colonialism?’ ACME, 2026

28Apr26

Abstract: This essay considers both the limits and necessity of mobilizing settler colonial frameworks in the contemporary moment. It traces the rise of Settler Colonial Studies as the dominant framework for making sense of colonial relations in Canada and considers the limits of this framework for understanding colonization in Inuit Nunangat, where the settler state’s interest in dispossession, extraction, and proletarianization have played out differently than in southern Canada. Guided by Aimé Césaire’s directive to ask, again and again, what colonization is, I consider why Settler Colonial Studies frameworks are so readily mobilized in the study of northern Canada but are hyperpoliticized when they are applied to Israel/Palestine, why Inuit theories of colonization barely figure in Qallunaaq research about the North, and what this means for theorizing colonialism in the current conjuncture.


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Recovering from settler colonialism use disorder: Sara Cannon, Braiding More Than Sweetgrass: A Proposed Support Group Model for (Non)Tribal Native Americans in Recovery’, PhD dissertation, Eastern Kentucky University, 2026

27Apr26

Abstract: Native Americans (also referred to as American Indian/Alaska Natives or Indigenous persons) have too often been neglected in mental health interventions. This is a disservice, as they are disproportionately affected by challenges such as alcohol use disorder (AUD) and substance use disorder (SUD). Interventions directly speaking to AI/AN culture are rare to non-existent (at least in a published form), with the exception of White Bison’s Wellbriety (White Bison, 2002, 2024). It is not all together uncommon for individuals with Native roots to seek to (re)learn these traditions while in recovery from alcoholism and addiction. The aim of this project is three-fold: to deepen understanding of how expressing one’s Native American cultural identity may affect one’s quality of AUD/SUD recovery; to provide a culturally informed, outpatient treatment proposed support group model that addresses this disparity in intervention options for AI/AN individuals and communities; and to seek input, approval, and guidance from (non)tribal AI/AN community members to ensure cultural sensitivity. To achieve this aim, a community-based participatory research (CBPR) design was implemented.


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