Feminism as a settler colonial weapon: Roberto Israel Rodriguez Soriano, ‘The construction of the “indigenous woman” in Mexico: civilizing strategy and hegemonic feminism’, EntreDiversidades, 23, 2026

29Aug26

Abstract: This paper examines the construction of the figure of the “indigenous woman” in Mexico and its instrumentalization in the consolidation of colonialism. Arguments are offered to support the thesis that both colonialism and certain feminist discourses have used the categorical construct of the “indigenous woman” to justify a civilizing process that perpetuates historical power imbalances. It analyzes how Enlightenment feminism, with its universalist premises, has contributed to the perpetuation of colonialism through the systemic neglect of the oppressed experiences of racialized women. The paper highlights the role of feminism in the construction of the figure of the “indigenous woman” as a civilizing alibi to justify forms of domination. The paper also addresses critiques of hegemonic Western feminism from decolonial perspectives, which question the homogenization of racialized women and the imposition of a normative binary. In this sense, concepts such as “intersectionality” and the “matrix of domination” are explored to analyze the simultaneous oppression based on race, class, and gender.


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Indigeneity is misrepresentation: Delaney Johnson, Ainu (mis)representation: A close reading of contemporary Japanese media, MA dissertation, University of Victoria, 2026

29Aug26

Abstract: The concept of the Japanese nation, the “identity” of the Japanese people, and the external and internal political, ethnic, and historical relationships Japan has fostered have often been precariously feeble. These concepts, I argue, are especially prevalent regarding Japan’s relationship with the Ainu, the peoples Indigenous to Japan’s northernmost island, in Hokkaido. From the Tokugawa period (1600 C.E.–1868 C.E.) to the Meiji era (1868 C.E.–1912 C.E.), Japanese governmental bodies deployed significant colonial tactics either to culturally assimilate Ainu peoples into Japanese society or to alienate and ostracise Ainu communities to create an “exoticized” aesthetic and marked spatial “difference” from Japanese culture. It is the latter description which is central to this thesis and is the main method identified by which Ainu peoples are represented in modern Japanese-made media. This project includes a selection of primary works— Osamu Tezuka’s 1962 comic, Yuusha Dan, and Rintaro’s 1985 animated film, Kamui no Ken—as the basis for evaluation. This thesis aims to explore a broader discussion of Japanese creative works within historical contexts by performing a close reading of Yuusha Dan and Dagger of Kamui. Utilising frameworks, such as Tessa Morris Suzuki’s commentary on mass media’s representations of historical narratives, Sidney Xu Lu’s discussion of Malthusian expansionism, and Edward Said’s “Orientalism,” this analysis uncovers that contemporary Japanese media of the later twentieth century represents Ainu peoples and Ainu ancestral lands within mystifying, phantasmal, and exotic pretenses, thus perpetuating Meiji era colonial paradigms of Ainu peoples. In identifying these themes, this research underscores the intersection where Ainu myths become a foundation for the practical necessity of Japanese colonial realities, and how these notions are repeated and reinterpreted into modernity.


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Melancholy against settler colonialism: Rhiannon Cobb, ‘”Melancholy is a utopian feeling”: affect as antidote to the bionecropolitics of settler colonialism in Billy-Ray Belcourt’s poetry’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

28Aug26

Abstract: This article takes up settler colonialism in Canada as operating within a ‘bionecropolitical’ structure, the main aim of which is the possession of land. The structure excludes-yet-retains Indigenous peoples toward that aim, absorbing into state-sanctioned institutional processes what can reify its legitimacy, and rejecting whatever threatens it. One method for achieving this is moralizing discourses, which frame Indigenous resistance as a danger to the nation. These discourses exclude-yet-retain Indigenous claims to sovereignty, epistemologies and ontologies, but also emotional affective responses to a history of colonial violence. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission exemplifies how settler institutions contain and moralize Indigenous trauma within a sanitized framework to absolve the settler state and moralize it against contestations and their affective bases that are inconvenient, unintelligible, and delegitimizing to the state. Within settler colonialism’s fragile imaginary, affects that threaten the national image of reconciliation and chronological progression from the country’s colonial past are actively undermined and characterized as a threat to peace and cohesion. Billy-Ray Belcourt’s poetry disrupts this epistemological order by foregrounding unintelligible affects– such as grief and melancholy—offering the possibility of queer Indigenous futurity. A To conclude, the article offers an epistemological shift toward ‘not-knowing’ from the theoretical coalitions between queer of color theory and Indigenous thought proposed in the work of Belcourt and Jodi Byrd.


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Schooling is a settler colonial institution: Alyssa Lyons, ‘(Im)mutable resources: the settler colonial discourse of school websites’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 2026

28Aug26

Abstract: Scholarly discussions on educational inequality in the United States have given much attention to the role resources play in maintaining and (re)producing inequalities between schools. However, little attention has been given to how schools as settler colonial institutions make meaning of resources. Through a critical discourse analysis of thirty-one school websites, this paper uses settler colonialism as a conceptual framework to understand how schools’ positioning of resources reflects and (re)constitutes racialized and classed resource acquisition, control, maintenance, hoarding, and dispossession in New York City public schools.


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Settler colonialism is all devouring: Eden Kinkaid, Noah Schlager, Ellen Platts, ‘Settler colonial space-time and the storying of southern Arizona’s foodscapes’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2026

28Aug26

Abstract: In 2015, The City of Tucson, Arizona became recognized as a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy, a title that has become central to its food tourism efforts and other projects of “gastrodevelopment.” This title recognizes Tucson’s unique and diverse food heritage and agricultural histories, which have been molded into a food story that has been articulated in the application to UNESCO and in local media and branding materials. This food story – a set of narratives about the region that have congealed into a more or less standardized form – is not merely a story, but holds symbolic and economic value for those telling it. In this article, we ask: what stories are told about Tucson’s food histories, and who is telling them? Through an analysis and reflection on local food media, we approach Tucson’s ‘official’ food story as a settler food story: a form of narration that centers and upholds white and settler conceptions of heritage, space, and place. Our analysis demonstrates how Indigenous knowledge and practices are portrayed as part of the past, separate from ‘modernity’; how Indigenous spaces are imagined as empty frontiers awaiting discovery by cunning white artisans and curious consumers; and how white subjectivities, discourses, and practices of consumption occupy the center of Tucson’s ‘official’ food story. In closing, we argue that these story lines – ones which operate under the banner of gastronomic ‘multiculturalism’ – play a role in reproducing forms of historical erasure, symbolic violence, and inequity within Tucson’s mainstream gastrodevelopment project and contemporary food system. In closing, we call for these stories to be pluralized, reimagined, and brought into alignment with food justice and Indigenous food futures.


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Indigenous and Black Resistance against settler colonialism: Crystal McKinnon, ‘Australia and the United States — Racial Violence and Indigenous and Black Resistance’, SPLC, 18/08/26

28Aug26

Excerpt: Understanding settler colonialism and its long and ongoing histories of colonial and racial violence requires us to begin with invasion and first contacts. 


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Countermapping against settler colonialism: Sakina Ali, Grey Areas: Mapping Settler Colonialism in the West Bank, MA dissertation, University of Auckland, 2026

27Aug26

Abstract: In the ongoing occupation of Palestine by the State of Israel, the built environment is weaponised as a tool of expansion, control, and systemic oppression. This is visible in the West Bank, where illegal Israeli settlements encroach on Palestinian lands, with architecture operating as an instrument of colonial occupation. These settlements, initially temporal in nature, evolve into fully fledged towns and neighbourhoods, with their growth enabled by the Israeli government, despite being classed as illegal under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. As of 2025, the Israeli government has escalated both the construction of illegal settlements and the demolition of Palestinian properties. In the same year, the Israeli Knesset (parliament) symbolically voted to annex the West Bank. This development marks a new stage of the occupation since 1948, with the constant threat on Palestinians’ ability to remain on their land. However, the expansion of these settlements remains largely undocumented in conventional architectural and urban discourse. Traditional methods of site investigation and their subsequent representations, such as GIS systems, aerial maps, or statepublished surveys, are either inaccessible or deliberately censored by the Israeli security apparatus. This thesis addresses this issue by utilising a research methodology inspired by the practices of London-based research organisation Forensic Architecture. In the absence of conventional data, alternative sources are collected — publicly available images, videos, social media content and historical records. This data then allows for the spatial violence of the occupation to be traced, recorded and visualised in a way that conventional mapping does not capture. Through this methodology, the thesis documents the occupation within three specific sites (Avnei Hefetz, Hebron and Khallet ad Dabaa) in the West Bank. Alongside this, embroidery emerges as a tool for design-thinking, by processing complex concepts engaged with in this research, This thesis makes the proposition that the countermapping of sites of illegal settlement in the West Bank can be achieved through an interwoven practice of contemporary embroidery and digital video-making to understand the role of architecture in the occupation of Palestine.


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Indigenous jurisdiction against settler colonialism: Andrew Ambers, Charlotte Weston, ‘All Roads Lead to the Crown: Aboriginal Title, Private Property, and Indigenous Legal Orders’, Yellowhead Brief, 194, 2026

26Aug26

Excerpt: Aboriginal title has recently become the subject of intense national attention—and has attracted widespread misconceptions. Following the decisions in Cowichan Tribes v Canada and Wolastoqey Nation v New Brunswick, public commentary has frequently portrayed Aboriginal title as an immediate threat to private homeowners. In British Columbia, this misconception has included misinformation that has bordered on the absurd, including fake letters purporting to be sent by Indigenous peoples ordering homeowners from their properties, municipal councillors claiming some residents can no longer get home-related insurance, and even the Wall Street Journal arguing the Cowichan Tribes case “threatens billions in real-estate investment.” This public debate often presents Indigenous peoples and private landowners as opposing parties competing for the same land. That framing obscures the role of the Crown, which is responsible for any conflict because it grants private property on lands subject to Aboriginal title.


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Diaspora or settler? Ty Bryant, Crossing the Asian-Indigenous Impasse: (Im)possibilities of Taiwanese (Im)migrant Diasporic Settlerhood, MA dissertation, Simon Fraser University, 2026

26Aug26

Abstract: In this thesis, I position the life histories and narratives of the Taiwanese (im)migrant diaspora in relationship to K’emk’emeláy, on unceded xʷməθkʷəy ̓əm, Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh and səlilwətaɬ Lands. I draw on critical inter-disciplinary literature to position Taiwaneseness as a diasporic settler subjectivity which is produced and enacted upon as the urgent need to root oneself. Such urgency animates and upholds the AsianIndigenous impasse (Jafri, 2025), where relationships to Land remain incommensurable and Taiwaneseness remains cathected to the settler state. Through an Indigenized artsbased experimental ethnographic approach, I identify and conceptualize the (im)possibilities of Taiwanese (im)migrant diasporic settlerhood as relational dialectics. Relationships to Indigenous Lands and life, while identified as imperative, become reweighed differently when narrated alongside the need to square Taiwanese identity. Nonetheless, these Taiwanese (im)migrant diasporic narratives are rehearsals of ways of knowing Taiwaneseness otherwise which bring the very forms of settler colonial belonging and relationality that define it into question.


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Indigenous horror against settler colonialism: M.I. Angenent, Weaponizing the Non-Human How Buffalo Kinship and Vampirism Shape Counternarratives to American Settler Discourses in Stephen Graham Jones’ The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, graduate dissertation, Radboud University, 2026

26Aug26

Abstract: Indigenous horror studies have highlighted the genre’s potential to foreground counternarratives to settler discourses. Close readings of Indigenous literary narratives may establish new imaginings of Indigenous cultures in our past, present, and future. They may therefore dismantle colonial hierarchies, and counter dominant settler-colonial narratives that continue to permeate contemporary American society. This thesis investigates representations of the non-human, specifically buffalo kinship and vampirism, in relation to the nineteenth-century buffalo genocide and North American colonialism in The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by American Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones. It foregrounds Indigenous horror frameworks and Indigenous (Blackfeet) ways of knowing, specifically kinship and the Four R’s. I argue that the non-anthropocentric Blackfeet values are weaponised to oppose buffalo hunters and antagonistic settlers on the American frontier. Additionally, the narrative’s nuanced representation of a Blackfeet protagonist defies settler-dominated discourses, which challenges the marginalised positions of Indigenous peoples in current conversations concerning colonial and environmental conflicts.


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