Engineering settler colonialism: A. M. K. Peters, ‘Negotiating Methodological Tensions: Resisting Settler Colonialism in Engineering Education Research with Communities’, ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, 2026

18Aug26

Abstract: This critical theory paper reflects on my personal experience conducting my dissertation research in the discipline of engineering education with my Native Hawaiian community. There are inherent tensions that I constantly negotiate in my research practices to find ways to operate within our settler colonial discipline as someone who wants to make visible, resist, and deconstruct settler colonialism. This paper is a chance to describe these tensions, frustrations, and realizations of growth that I go through occupying a space that disvalues portions of my work. I start by reframing settler colonialism as an oppression of the natural world compared to more common framings of settler colonialism as the oppression of Natives through erasing their connection with the natural world. This reframing allows me to demonstrate how engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research are examples of physical, social, and academic processes of Western settling, respectively, based in capitalist relationships to possess the natural world inclusive of marginalized peoples. Positioning engineering, engineering education, and engineering education research as inherently settler colonial and capitalistic explains furthers how by occupying these fields, I inherently am in tension with being Native Hawaiian that opposes both settling through capitalism and possessing the natural world through colonialism. Then, I explain what these tensions are and how I negotiation these tensions through explaining my methodological commitments and what these commitments look like in my research. I outline three commitments: 1) prioritizing mutual causal relationships through cultural understandings, 2) prioritizing the natural world through genealogy, and 3) prioritizing long-term continuity through Unlearning and Taking Space. I hope my explanation of these commitments as my negotiating of the tension of being both Native Hawaiian and an engineering education research provides an example of how we can begin to challenging settler colonialism and its capitalistic relationships through our work beyond Western standards of research.


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Repair! Pauline Wakeham, Indigenous Reparations and Settler Colonial Reckoning: Re-Braiding Rights and Redress in Canada, University of Minnesota Press, 2026

18Aug26

Description: How Indigenous communities are transforming the idea and practice of reparations through their laws and leadership. In recent decades, a growing number of Indigenous groups across Canada have initiated movements for colonial reparations. Too often, the settler state has responded by attempting to enfold their work into a narrative of reconciliation that consigns colonialism to “sad chapters” of history. In this book, Pauline Wakeham calls attention to the ways that Indigenous reparations movements exceed state reconciliatory frameworks and prompt a deeper reckoning with the enduring structures of settler colonialism. To expose and redress colonial injustices, Indigenous reparations movements draw upon long local traditions of political organizing as well as transformations on the global stage since World War II. As international law formulated new instruments regarding gross human rights violations, atrocity crimes, and the reparative obligations of states, colonized peoples across the world have sought to mobilize these mechanisms in their struggles for decolonization and reparations. While international law has provided strategic tools for this work, the colonial foundations of the field continue to limit how it conceptualizes and shapes access to justice. Indigenous Reparations and Settler Colonial Reckoning traces the specific implications for Indigenous nations whose land is occupied by settler states—nations whose legal orders remain subordinated to both settler “domestic” and international legal systems. Amid this complex multijurisdictional terrain, how are Indigenous peoples carving out space to articulate their own visions of justice? To answer this question, Wakeham learns from the Inuit-led Qikiqtani Truth Commission as well as reparations movements for residential schools and the High Arctic Relocations of 1953 and 1955. These movements offer powerful lessons about the importance of centering Indigenous leadership and laws in redress processes, thereby connecting reparations to the living enactment of Indigenous rights.


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Portugueseness and settlerness: Márcia Gonçalves, ‘Ideals of Portugueseness in the Colonies: Imperial Nationalism and European Settlement in Africa’, in Márcia Gonçalves, Empire and Nation in Portugal, c.1930-1951, Palgrave, 2026, pp. 131-182

18Aug26

Abstract: In 1933, the first prize at the colonial literature competition promoted by the Portuguese colonial propaganda agency was awarded to Henrique Galvão’s novel O Velo d’Oiro (The Golden Fleece). The book, which can be read as an invitation to European settlement in the African colonies, immediately became a bestseller.


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The wage of settlerness: Zahi Zalloua, ‘Black Reconstruction in Palestine/Israel: On the Wages of Jewishness’, in Yousuf Al-Bulushi, Geo Maher, Damien M. Sojoyner (eds), Reading Black Reconstruction Today, University of California Press, 2026, pp. 119-140

18Aug26

Except: This essay turns to Black Reconstruction to elucidate the ways in which the economic and libidinal force of such a wage is equally at work in Palestine/ Israel, where, I argue, the Zionist project of settler colonialism (with its blatant anti-Palestinianness) relies on the wage of Jewishness in a way analogous to the dynamics Du Bois analyzed.


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Knowledge about settler colonialism: Joshua Myers, ‘Settler Colonial State’, in Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Sean Jacobs (eds), The Palgrave Handbook on Decolonizing International Affairs, Palgrave, 2026, pp. 107-120

17Aug26

Abstract: When John Henrik Clarke argued that Europe had not only colonized the world, it had colonized information about the world, he had seized upon a reality critical to any real understanding of the function of Western social science. In order for settler colonialism to proceed, it had to interrupt and reimagine knowledge and impose a regime of reality on those it sought to occupy. Therefore, a decolonial practice would need to take seriously other ways of producing and creating knowledge. And a truly decolonial practice would presuppose a liberationist logic in the ways we struggle to live in other ways. Thus, there are lessons in the paths pursued by anti-settler decolonization political projects that have sought to decolonize information about the world. But this is an unfinished project. Settler colonialism continues apace. We will need better models of thinking if we want to live beyond it.


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Solar settler colonialism: Myles Lennon, ‘Solar Pioneers: The Frontier Entrepreneurialism of a Sluggish Energy Transition’, Cultural Anthropology, 41, 3, 2026, pp. 692-717

17Aug26

Excerpt: Drawing from three years of ethnographic research on solar projects in NYC, I will show how this mode of market-based self-making is informed by settler imaginaries of societal progress vis-à-vis spatialized transformations when what is known as “the narrative structure of the frontier myth” organizes “entrepreneurial affects”.


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Dinosaurs in the settler imaginaries: Henrik Jaron Schneider, The Truth in These Rocks: Fossil Extraction, Settler Colonialism, and the Dinosaur in the American Imaginary, PhD dissertation, The University of Texas at Austin, 2026

17Aug26

Abstract: From the Bone Wars of the late nineteenth century to the Jurassic Park franchise, dinosaurs have maintained a persistent place in the American cultural imaginary. Historians of science and culture have developed an extensive body of scholarship on the extraction of dinosaur fossils during the long Gilded Age. Cultural historians have examined the allure of these prehistoric creatures in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America. This dissertation synthesizes these historical perspectives, asserting that settler colonialism functions as a systemic, infrastructural, and epistemic logic that connects the cultural representation of dinosaurs to the material contexts of fossil excavation. In doing so, this intersection yields an ideological and material project that perpetuates settlercolonial land use policies into the twenty-first century. Accordingly, my dissertation posits that the cultural significance of dinosaurs and the excavation of their fossils are rooted in their capacity to bolster temporalities of deep time, thereby naturalizing the extraction, management, and ownership of mineral resources as settler-colonial doctrines. In this context, deep time is made intimate within settler-colonial frameworks, fostering affective bonds with prehistory that legitimize fossil extraction, territorial sovereignty, and resource management as self-evident truths. The integration of the cultural history of dinosaurs, science and technology studies, and the environmental history of fossil resource extraction constitutes the primary historiographical intervention of this project. Employing close reading, discourse analysis, critical historical inquiry, and media analysis, I analyze archival sources—including paleontological field notes, legislative documents, correspondence between industry actors and scientists, scholarly articles, visual culture, and museum exhibits—to uncover the persistent extractive logic underlying vertebrate paleontology and the dinosaur in the American imaginary. This project draws on new materialist perspectives to conceptualize the fossil record as a contested domain of competing knowledge regimes. Across four chapters—focusing on Dinosaur National Monument, Sinclair Oil’s promotion of dinosaurs, Young Earth Creationism, and paleontology in Antarctica—I identify the scientist-observer as the agent who collapses situated knowledge into authoritative truth claims, thereby rendering the fossil record legible for settler-colonial extraction through the dispossession of Indigenous lands.


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Revolutionary Reconciliation (nothing the current settlers would dread more): Basel Mansour, ‘Reconciliation, Decolonization of Relationships, and Egalitarian Bi-nationalism: A Praxis for the IsraeliPalestinian Impasse?’ Perspectives on Politics, 2026

14Aug26

Abstract: In this article, I interrogate the theoretical architecture that underpins three increasingly influential normative prescriptions for a just political configuration in Israel–Palestine: reconciliation, decolonization of relationships, and egalitarian bi-nationalism (RDB-N). Although recent scholarship has attempted to integrate them into a shared framework, they remain insufficiently articulated, delaying the emergence of a transformative praxis. Here, I argue that the core impasse lies in the dominant “topdown” conception of reconciliation, which, by presuming that a postconflict political order is a prerequisite for implementation, produces a dependency that obstructs the normative potential of RDB-N as a coherent framework for structural transformation. In response, I advance a “bottom-up” conception of reconciliation that is both theoretically plausible and normatively desirable. This reimagines reconciliation as an implementation-driven and grassroots dynamic capable of initiating decolonial transformation and prefiguring an egalitarian binationalfuture,ratherthanapostconflictprocess led by thestate and its institutions. In proposing this theoretical rearticulation, I set the groundwork for a new praxis of RDB-N grounded in localized political agency. The analysis culminates in the Palestinian Community of Israel (PCI), whose liminal position and situated political condition potentially make it a particularly fertile site for developing such a praxis. Although largely theoretical, this contribution has practical implications for conflict resolution, settler-colonial critique, and political transformation in asymmetric contexts. It also opens avenues for future empirical and normative research into both justice in non-ideal conditions and collective action.


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Treaty is not a contract: Morgan Brigg, Deirdre Howard-Wagner, Natasha McCormack, Sarah Maddison, Kaely Woods, ‘Entangled political institutions and forms: From corporatisation to treaty’, Australian Journal of Public Administration, 2026

13Aug26

Abstract: The lands and waters now called Australia have been home to diverse political ordering and institutions for thousands of generations. The comparatively very recent arrival of settlers and the violent imposition of their political structures and institutions have forced First Nations to respond to, adapt to, resist, and refuse colonial authority. While the settler state generally operates in ignorance of or indifference to Indigenous laws and culture, First Nations are burdened with a far more difficult task: to navigate the settler order while also honouring their obligations to Country and people. At this interface, First Nations organisations and institutions operate around and through a complex entanglement of cultural ideas, norms, and values, where the reality of contested jurisdiction and authority is made visible. This article foregrounds these entangled relations to explore the possibilities and limitations presented by Indigenous political formations of diverse kinds—from Aboriginal community-controlled organisations to Indigenous corporations to new representative bodies such as the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria. Rather than ‘failing’, as mainstream political discourse often suggests, these Indigenous governance institutions have adapted, responded, innovated, and evolved, pushing towards greater autonomy and self-determination. This article focuses on the experience, challenges, and innovations of Indigenous communities as they seek to navigate complex relationships with the state using a variety of organisational vehicles.


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Thoreau was a settler (I know, right?) John J. Kucich, Unsettling Thoreau: Native Americans, Settler Colonialism, and the Power of Place, University of Massachusetts Press, 2024

12Aug26

Description: Henry David Thoreau’s life-long fascination with Native Americans is widely known and a recurring topic of interest, and it is also a source of modern debate. This is a figure who both had a deep interest in Native American history and culture and was seen by many of his contemporaries, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, as “more like an Indian” than his white neighbors. At the same time, Thoreau did little to protest the systematic dispossession of Indigenous people across the country in his lifetime. John J. Kucich charges into this contradiction, considering how Thoreau could demonstrate deep respect for Native American beliefs on one hand and remain largely silent about their genocide, actively happening throughout his life, on the other. Thoreau’s long study of Native peoples, as reflected in so much of his writing, allowed him to glimpse an Indigenous worldview, but it never fully freed him from the blind spots of settler colonialism. Drawing on Indigenous studies and critiques of settler colonialism, as well as new materialist approaches that illustrate Thoreau’s radical reimagining of the relationship between humans and the natural world, Unsettling Thoreau explores the stakes of Thoreau’s effort to live mindfully and ethically in place when living alongside, or replacing marginalized peoples. By examining the whole scope of his writings, including the unpublished Indian Notebooks, and placing them alongside Native writers and communities in and beyond New England, this book gauges Thoreau’s effort to use Indigenous knowledge to reimagine a settler colonial world, without removing him from its trappings.


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