Settler colonialism is an infrastructure not an event: Sarah Montoya, ‘Networking the Nation: Settler Colonialism as an Analytic in Critical Infrastructure Studies’, in Alan Liu, Urszula Pawlicka-Deger, James Smithies (eds), Critical Infrastructure Studies and Digital Humanities’, University of Minnesota Press, 2026

22Jul26

Excerpt: At the core of discussions of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructures are land and property ownership, the understandings of which are shaped by settler colonialism in the United States and administered by a constellation of global settler state formations. Settler colonialism names an orientation to the world and life; it is a way of being and relating to land, peoples, objects, and knowledge that prioritize the liberal humanist citizen-subject and the creation and acquisition of property and possession, and it is deeply characterized by white supremacy and enforced through various forms of targeted violence (Estes et al., 59, 107). When utilized as an analytical approach, settler colonial studies insists on making legible the relationship between land, infrastructure, private property, and the project of settler statecraft. This framework extends research in electronic and digital colonialism and makes explicit the spatial and racial violence required to maintain settler society. Bringing forth the connections between the settler state, surveillance projects realized through the military-industrial complex, and the impact of commercial interests in the shaping of the use of internet technology, this chapter argues that a web of networked settler logics emerges through a critical reading of ICT infrastructure that links the development of the telegraph, telegraphone, and the internet to settler colonial property regimes in the United States. While this chapter applies settler colonial studies as a lens through which to analyze ICTs in the United States, it is important to approach other geopolitical sites with attention to their specific imperial and colonial histories and understand that occupation is quotidian, ongoing, and altered by local conditions. The goal of this chapter is to confront and dismantle narratives of settler technological supremacy and consider anticolonial and decolonial approaches in critical infrastructure studies (CIS).


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Locke him up! David Armitage, Teresa M. Bejan, Felix Waldmann, ‘Locke and Settler Colonialism’, in David Armitage, Teresa M. Bejan, Felix Waldmann (eds), The Political Thought of John Locke: New Perspectives, Oxford University Press, 2026

22Jul26

Abstract: Locke has become a central figure in postcolonial theory in ways that at times overextend the context and content of his writing. This chapter seeks to explain this appeal by examining recurring metaphors, lacunas, and linguistic manoeuvres in Locke’s writing, arguing that they capture essential elements within colonial practices or imaginaries. Through such a mode of literary reading, the chapter traces structures of self, sovereignty, and relations )to land and to others), and shows how Locke has identified, perhaps inadvertently, elements that would become key to colonial domination. Since many of these elements emerge from ambivalences and inconsistencies—ones we find both in Locke and in the logic of settler states’ operation—what is often seen as the weakness of Locke’s argument emerges here as part of what made it, sometimes despite itself, so relevant to understanding settler colonialism.


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It is matter of SETTLER taste: J. Zoe Malot, ‘Curating settler aesthetics: settler colonial erasures, urban artscapes, and artistic interventions in settler cities’, Journal of Cultural Geography, 2026

22Jul26

Abstract: This paper examines the governance of urban aesthetics by studying the curatorial and regulatory bodies behind public art productions in settler colonial cities. I demonstrate how public art regulations – through mural ordinances and city permits – (re)produce settler colonial agendas and perpetuate Indigenous invisibility. Drawing from in-depth interviews with artists, urban planners, city councilors, and community members throughout Aotearoa (New Zealand), I demonstrate how settler cities promote specific forms of (in)visibility through the public art that is created, contested, and censored. By paying close attention to the artists and aesthetics selected (and rejected) through arts-led development projects, we can see how public art in cities – despite varying geographic contexts – contributes to the (re)production of exclusionary conditions through settler aesthetics. Drawing from literary scholars, settler colonial scholarship and decolonial art theory, I use the term settler aesthetics to highlight how aesthetics function within evolving sociospatial practices where state and non-state actors exercise power, formulate settler representations of the city, and influence belonging. While this paper points to the visual logics of exclusion embedded in settler aesthetics, it also highlight artists who unsettle these logics through decolonial public art practices to offer a more engaged and just form of creative placemaking.


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Settler mush: Edith Snook, ‘”The Surest Plan”: Recipes, Joel Barlow’s “The Hasty-Pudding” (1796), and Settler Memory in the British Atlantic World’, Early American Literature, 61, 2, 2026, pp. 323-350

21Jul26

Abstract: This essay explores how recipes for hasty pudding circulating in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world are part of the settler history of colonial extraction. Hasty pudding recipes informed not just Joel Barlow’s republican mock heroic poem “The Hasty-Pudding” (New York, 1796) but also the recipe culture of those who remained loyal to Britain. Recipes in the Almon Scrapbook (Almon Family Fonds, MG1 vol. 14, Nova Scotia Archives) belonging to the family of Nova Scotia physician Dr. William James Almon were copied from Essays, Political, Economical, and Philosophical(London and Dublin, 1796) by Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford (1753–1814), a Massachusetts-born Loyalist. These recipes make corn, an Indigenous food, available for settler and colonial use and establish the domestic as a space of colonial power.


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The imprinting of a settler domination: Shelby Johnson, ‘Decolonial Methods and Early Indigenous Archives’, Early American Literature, 61, 2, 2026, pp. 389-406

21Jul26

Excerpt: Conversations across early American and early Indigenous studies—fields historically preoccupied with different questions, canons, and frameworks—have recently engaged in difficult methodological questions: How might we continue to reconceptualize the “archive” (or the “text”) to move beyond the codex, what Choctaw scholar Megan Peiser calls a “colonizing institution . . . predicated on written and pictorial knowledge transference and a dominance over any and all other forms of information sharing” (523; italics original)? How might Indigenous forms of “information sharing” exist beyond colonial technologies, such as print? Is it possible to recover Indigenous traditions that may exist in these forms, but without fetishizing the recovery of “originary” or “authentic” Indigenous knowledge-ways within communities or the interiority of individual Native people? And finally, how might Indigenous communicative practices support ongoing language revitalization projects and resurgent tribal sovereignty?


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Settlers see predators: Dominik Ohrem, ‘”Ineradicably ferocious”: settler colonialism and the predatory imagination in nineteenth-century U.S. culture’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

19Jul26

Abstract: This article explores the forms and functions of the ‘predatory imagination’ in nineteenth-century U.S. settler culture, a semiotic nexus where distinctions between ‘civilization’ and ‘savagery’ intertwined with ideas about (specific forms of) animality and human-animal difference in a way that reflected the concerns of an aggressively expanding settler nation attempting to resolve its ‘Indian problem.’ Informed by contemporary attitudes toward predatory animals – wolves in particular – the predatorization of Native Americans as inherently violent, cruel, and cunning turned them into legitimate targets for the settler polity’s own exercise of predatory violence, legitimized as a ‘preventive’ defense not merely against certain groups of Native people but against the malicious alterity of ‘Indianness’ itself. The article further discusses an alternative framing of predatory violence that was tied to social evolutionist thinking and suggested that the predatory propensities of a deep past marked by violent competition survived in remnant form beneath a thin veneer of civilization. Complicating the exclusive association between predatory violence and notions of Indigenous savagery, this perspective nonetheless served the eliminatory purposes of settler colonialism by locating the causes of settler(-Native) violence in an evolutionary longue durée temporality that remained inaccessible to human political and moral agency.


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What underwrites settler ‘hospitality’? Michael Palkowski, ‘The Riviera of the Middle East: Gaza, Donald Trump and hospitality discourses of imperialism’, Hospitality & Society, 2026

19Jul26

Abstract: This conceptual paper seeks to outline how hospitality discourses have been used to rationalize and justify policies of ethnic cleansing and displacement within the occupied and besieged Palestinian Territories, focusing particularly on the comments and social media activity of the president of the United States Donald Trump. Drawing on a post-qualitative inquiry approach, this paper thinks with Foucault by using his concepts as ‘plugs’, to generate new insights into how hospitality discourse, as a form of social control, enacts symbolic violence through the language of care and compassion. The paper establishes links with ongoing scholarship that implicates tourism development and planning within territorial disputes, land grabs and the displacement of Indigenous people, by describing how hospitality can be weaponized as a discourse of development that evokes a sense of respectability alongside the illusion of a politically neutral process. Hospitality articulated in this way enables violent realities to be hidden underneath the language of welcome.


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Settler frontiers are planning opportunities: Rachel Gallagher, ‘Urban planning as a settler colonial tool: land, control and extractive settlement on the Queensland (Australia) frontier’, Space and Polity, 2026

19Jul26

Abstract: Colonial settlement was a spatial strategy through which territory was claimed, governed, and made extractable. Conventional origin stories of planning in the Anglosphere emphasize social reform in nineteenth-century industrial cities, yet frontier town-making was also central to the development of planning instruments. This paper examines Queensland’s colonial frontier as a key site where subdivision layouts, surveying practices, and administrative regulation were tested and standardized. Drawing on morphological and archival analysis of 48 frontier town plans, it shows how town form functioned as a political technology of territorialisation, land commodification, and governance, materially producing settler-colonial power through spatial ordering.


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Settler states out of the borderlands: Patrick Thomas Forde, Forging the Borderlands: Sovereignty, Conflict, and State Formation West of the Great Lakes, 1860s-1870s, MA dissertation, University of Calgary, 2026

19Jul26

Abstract: This thesis examines the transformation of the Great Lakes borderlands in the 1860s and 1870s, a period in which overlapping claims to sovereignty gave way to the consolidation of centralized settler states in the North American West. In the western Great Lakes Borderlands–encompassing present-day Minnesota and Manitoba–Indigenous nations, the United States, and the British Empire contested authority, and irreconcilable understandings of sovereignty produced sustained conflict and instability. Focusing on the American Civil War, the Dakota War of 1862, and the Red River Rebellion as interconnected crises, the thesis argues that these conflicts accelerated the consolidation of federal and imperial authority by pushing the United States and the British Empire (later Canada) toward centralized control over contested western territories and Indigenous populations. U.S. suppression of Dakota resistance eradicated Indigenous sovereignty claims in Minnesota, while the Dakota flight across the 49th parallel exposed the fragility of imperial authority. In Rupert’s Land, the inability of the Hudson’s Bay Company to enforce order revealed the limits of company rule and contributed to the transfer of political authority in the Northwest from a commercial monopoly to the expanding Canadian state. The resulting resistance in Red River emerged after the transfer of Rupert’s Land to Canada threatened the political autonomy and landholding practices of the Métis, a distinct Indigenous and mixed-ancestry community that had long dominated the region’s fur trade economy. Although the resistance was contained through a negotiated incorporation into the new Canadian dominion, many of the promised protections quickly eroded as settlement expanded westward. In the years that followed, Canadian officials increasingly used treaties as instruments of settler colonialism expansion, facilitating settlement while gradually subordinating Indigenous and Métis autonomy across the Northwest. Ultimately, this thesis argues that the Great Lakes borderlands served as a crucible for continental change, where Indigenous resistance, settler-state expansion, and racial hierarchies reshaped political and spatial orders. By linking regional conflicts to transnational processes, it demonstrates that the consolidation of the United States and Canada emerged not as isolated national projects, but as interconnected responses to shared challenges of sovereignty, migration, and control.


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Indigenous phoenix rising: Maya Mikdashi, ‘Archives, Prophecy, and Return: The Phoenix of Gaza’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2026

19Jul26

Abstract: This review essay of The Phoenix of Gaza virtual reality project and exhibit puts Indigenous studies and Palestine studies, as well as scholars of these fields, into citational and historical conversation around the themes of archives, futurity, history, and colonial epistemology. The author describes how experiencing The Phoenix of Gaza took her to three different historical and contemporary locations: Lebanon, the Great Lakes region, and a previous conference on Indigenous studies and settler colonialism at Princeton University.


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