The village that does not breathe: Isra Sarsour, Ahmad Khalilia, ‘Fragmented landscapes: The impact of Israeli settlements on Palestinian identity — A case study of Deir Nidham village’, Social Sciences & Humanities Open, 2026

28Oct26

Abstract: The article examines the profound and multifaceted consequences of the relationship between Palestinian identity and the expansion of Israeli settlements through a qualitative case study of Deir Nidham Village in the central West Bank. Often described by its residents as “the village that does not breathe,” Deir Nidham has experienced a history of dispossession, particularly with the occupation of its hilltop to establish the Halamish Settlement. The study employs a qualitative case-study approach, combining spatial and historical analyses of land-use change with semi-structured interviews conducted with villagers across different generations to capture personal experiences and collective memories. This is achieved through a comparative study of the landscape before and after settlement expansion, and by examining changes in land access, agricultural practice, and daily spatial use. Interview narratives captured villagers’ traditional livelihoods, their cultural expressions, and their sense of belonging. In doing so, the article underscores the resilience of Palestinian identity while exposing the profound pressures exerted on it by ongoing settlement activities. This transformation has affected not only the village’s physical environment but also its social fabric, cultural continuity, and psychological well-being. By situating the village within the broader framework of settler colonial practices, the research seeks to understand how settlement activity has disrupted Palestinian daily life, reshaped spatial practices, and weakened long-standing connections and attachments to the land. By placing the village within the broader framework of settler colonial practices, the research seeks to move beyond macro-scale analyses to examine the overall impact of settlement in its daily lived experience at the micro-scale, an aspect insufficiently explored in current studies.


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Resurgence: Brandon Montour, ‘Beyond the Indian Act: Restoring Traditional Government in Kahnawà:ke through Haudenosaunee Law’, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 63, 1, 2026

28Oct26

Abstract: The Kanien’kehá:ka of Kahnawà:ke have been subjected to the Indian Act since 1889. Its forceful imposition has eroded ancestral governance systems and severed vital threads of cultural and social life. In 2024, the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke—the Indian Act band council—declared its intent to restore traditional governance and unilaterally end the Indian Act’s reach within the territory. This work is presently underway in Kahnawà:ke. Against this backdrop, and in light of generations of collective experiences of trauma brought on by the forces of settler-colonialism, this article considers what role Haudenosaunee law can play in bringing community members together to build inclusive governance and law-making practices beyond the Indian Act. This article suggests that Haudenosaunee law, and more specifically, Kaienerekowa – the Great Law of Peace, can serve as a constitutive and guiding legal framework for Kahnawà:ke at this critical juncture. More broadly, the article explores how the resurgence and practical application of Indigenous laws can offer a path forward for Indigenous communities seeking to restore traditional governing practices that are grounded in the collective wisdom, knowledge, and legal traditions of our ancestors.


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The portability of frontier religion: Alexandru Lazăr, ‘From New England to Indiana: Religious Mobility and the Expansion of Universalist Christianity Across the American Frontier’, SSRN, 2026

28Oct26

Abstract: The expansion of Universalist Christianity in the United States was closely linked to the broader process of westward migration that transformed the American religious landscape during the nineteenth century. Emerging from the theological developments associated with James Relly, John Murray, and Elhanan Winchester, Universalism evolved from a predominantly New England movement into a frontier denomination that accompanied settlers into the Old Northwest. This study examines the relationship between religious mobility and the spread of Universalist Christianity across the American frontier, focusing on the state of Indiana as a case study. Drawing upon denominational records, contemporary publications, and historical data concerning local congregations, the article reconstructs the development of Universalist communities in Indiana from the early nineteenth century to the first decades of the twentieth century. Particular attention is given to missionary activity, institutional organization, denominational networks, and patterns of community survival. The analysis demonstrates that while Universalism achieved remarkable success in disseminating its message through itinerant preaching and migratory networks, it proved less successful in establishing durable institutional structures. The Indiana case reveals a broader paradox of frontier religion: rapid expansion often coexisted with organizational fragility. As a result, the cultural influence of Universalist ideas ultimately exceeded the institutional longevity of many Universalist congregations.


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Culture wars? Lorenzo Veracini, ‘AIPAC jeremiad: on Adam Kirsch′s settler colonialism’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

26Oct26

Excerpt: Atlantic senior editor, Columbia University faculty member, critic and poet Adam Kirsch’s Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice (2024) is disconnected from morality and not informed by facts. To genuinely engage, I will refrain from offering a moral rejoinder and will respond in accordance with its logic. Should I remind readers that Palestinians are human, and that this carry consequences, including political consequences, or refer to a genocide that was and is broadcast worldwide and in real time? No need: most readers would know about humanity and about genocide, and other reviews of the book have drawn attention to this its fundamental biases. Besides, I assume that Kirsch knows they know, and this is probably why he builds a straw man argument. The straw man in the argument is named ‘settler colonialism’.


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A settler neighbourhood: Samuel Jacob, ‘Nearer Neighbors: Settler Sublimation and Human Gardening in the Russian-American Neighborhood of Crèvecoeur’s Letters From an American Farmer’, American Literary History, 38, 4, 2026, pp. 464-489

26Oct26

Abstract: Of the twelve letters comprising J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters From an American Farmer (1782), the penultimate eleventh stands out. It is narrated not by the titular Farmer James but by “Iwan,” a Russian gentleman who declares America and Russia “nearer neighbours” (262). This essay recovers the unacknowledged work Russian-American neighborliness performs within Crèvecoeur’s vision of American futurity. I show how Crèvecoeur borrows an eighteenth-century grammar of the neighborhood to both depict and predict Russian and American settler expansion as parallel, even doubled, projects. I further argue that Iwan is not, as he is often interpreted, a continuation of James’s narrational function, but is Crèvecoeur’s historically inflected amalgam of Fedor Karzhavin, a Russian traveler throughout colonial America. Finally, turning to Iwan’s conversations with the botanist John Bartram, I demonstrate how Crèvecoeur uses botanical language to recast slavery and serfdom as benevolent forms of human gardening, a refiguration that sublimates Russia and America’s systems of enslaved labor and indigenous dispossession into shared fictions of cultivation and care. Against the backdrop of contemporary diagnoses of the “Russification” of US government, I show that tracing early American expressions of Russia and America as “nearer neighbors” promises new trajectories for US literary scholarship.


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Settler maths: Nicholas Pitt, Matthew Birchall, Nancy Cushing, Jarrod Hore, Simon Ville, Alison Bashford, ‘Rethinking settler-colonial populations with sheep and cattle – a conversation around the Australian colonies’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 27, 2, 2026

26Oct26

Excerpt: What happens if we include sheep and cattle in our analysis of British settler-colonial populations during the early to mid-nineteenth century?


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Homemaking projects: Kandice L. Grossman, ‘Home Is at the Heart of Place: Coalition Possibilities at Standing Rock’, in Michelle I. Gawerc, Rachel L. Einwohner (eds), Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change: Coalition-Building and Solidarity Across Difference, Emerald, 2026

26Oct26

Abstract: This research examines the participation of a diverse group of activists in the 2016–2017 Standing Rock movement, led by Oceti Sakowin tribal members, on the borders of the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota to stop the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). The movement resisted the pipeline in the name of water protection, Indigenous sovereignty, protection of sacred burial grounds, treaty rights, climate justice, and more. Approximately 10 months into the effort, it was halted by the state, and the pipeline was installed. This paper emerges from a larger qualitative study that examines the politics, possibilities, and risks of coalition surrounding the Standing Rock movement. Data collection involved in-depth interviews with 27 activists, content analysis of 13 activist stories, and participatory research and observation. Findings show that for activists in the camps, placework, or place-based protest, enacted a “call and response” form of politics, based on shared callings to protect and critical responses to settler colonial-capital culture, specifically dispossession of land and property. Relationship to a sense of “home” shaped political motivations, a sense of belonging or lack thereof, and strengthened activists’ willingness to participate. This study suggests the analytical categories of place and home are productive for future sociological research on mobilization and coalition building across difference.


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Bilingual settler colonialsm: E. Haque, ‘Dual white settler coloniality and the genealogy of indigenous language policy’, Language Policy, 2026

26Oct26

Abstract: In order to examine the disjuncture in responses to the Indigenous Languages Act (ILA) between different Indigenous groups, in this paper I will explore the genealogy of Indigenous language policy in Canada by examining various government and community reports, documents, as well as parliamentary and committee debates from the 1960s onwards, which is when Canada’s first official language policy was announced. I argue that the continued state prioritization of official white settler languages means that even for a region like Inuit Nunangat with relatively good linguistic vitality through decades long efforts by the Inuit to prioritize Inuktut, the development of an Indigenous languages act cannot guarantee the future reclamation and ongoing vitality of Indigenous languages in Canada.


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Protection, assimilation, settler colonialism: Andrew Woolford, ‘Protective legislation and paternalism: assimilative indigenous education in the US and Canada, 1928-1953’, Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law, 2026

26Oct26

Abstract: In both the US and Canada third pillar protective legislation was largely oriented towards the promoting assimilation and solving the ‘Indian problem’. It provided a context and frame of reference for the establishment and shaping of a key component of second pillar Indigenous policy – the promotion of church-run, state-funded boarding schools (US) and residential schools (Canada) expressly created to eradicate Indigenous Peoples by erasing their languages, religions, cultures, and identities. However, while the trends were largely similar in the US and Canada, differing constellations of individual and institutional actors – reformers, activists, bureaucrats, churches, and states – at times allowed for some notable distinctions in the two nations. I explore the character and role of third pillar protective legislation and how it shaped second pillar education policy and schools in US and Canadian history, highlighting where and how it diverged, as well as how these trends have influenced contemporary Indigenous politics in each country.


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Suburban settler colonialism: Sean Tyler, ‘The Settler-Suburban Imaginary: Improvement, John Claudius Loudon, and Colonial Dispossession in the Swan River Colony’, Fabrications, 2026

25Oct26

Abstract: This article examines how a settler-suburban imaginary organised land, labour, and legitimate possession in the Swan River Colony on Whadjuk Noongar Country, where relationships to Country precede and continue beyond colonial occupation. It traces the emergence of an ideology of landscape improvement and follows its legal and aesthetic translation through British colonial property regimes. Situating John Claudius Loudon’s writings within this process, the article shows how his suburban ideals provided settlers with a vocabulary that bound moral and intellectual cultivation to domestic landscape improvement. Loudon’s texts circulated alongside seeds as well as reports between Britain and the Swan River colony, demonstrating a bi-directional exchange of knowledge concerning the ideal landscaping of the suburban garden. I argue that the suburban condition in Swan River was not simply a by-product of urban growth, but a foundational mode of dispossession through which landscape improvement was reorganised at the scale of the individual allotment, garden, and dwelling.


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