Excerpt: the inter-state system as a particular form of organizing authority is especially important for contemporary settler colonial states such as Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Canada and the United States. Indeed, this distribution of authority in the world has allowed these settler states to establish their own legitimacy through the imposition of state borders on top […]

Abstract: Research shows that the institutionalization of legitimacy criteria has created contested meanings of being indigenous to the United States, which leads to an unrelenting debate about authentic indigeneity among indigenous people and between indigenous communities. While instituted through colonizing federal Indian policy, the “real Indian” trope is now a social fact for American Indians. […]

Abstract: The controversy over the lands in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania has been the stuff of legend (in stories of the Battle of Wyoming) and the historical record. Scholars in recent years have presented the history of the region as a contest between empires, between monied classes and common people seeking to eke out […]

Excerpt: In an effort to understand the coupling of Palestinian displacement with Mizrahi settlement, this project examines the theories and practices developed by Israeli sociologists and land settlement planners to facilitate Mizrahi settlement within the nascent nation’s periphery. I address the confluence of sociological theory and Mizrahi settlement practice to examine the significance of social management to the production of Palestine’s […]

Abstract: Many sociologists and food policy activists are preoccupied with the fate of the family farm. In this paper we ask whether tacit normative beliefs among scholars regarding the family farm as an imagined site of resistance to industrialization and its ills holds up to empirical scrutiny? Using a grounded theoretical approach, we build an […]

Abstract: Histories of colonial plunder produced geographies that settler societies take for granted as settled. While some aspects of the conqueror/settler imaginary have been unsettled in specific cases, and through the negotiation of new instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, various national apologies and modern treaties, much unsettling […]

Abstract: This essay reviews four books in Indigenous studies: María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo’s Indian Given (2016), Elizabeth Hoover’s The River Is in Us (2017), Dana E. Powell’s Landscapes of Power (2018), and Nancy Postero’s The Indigenous State (2018). The books address the colonial and national space-making projects that have militarized the US-Mexico Border, the Mohawk community’s […]

Abstract: Tension between Anglophone and Francophone Canadians is well documented, and these disparate parts have been infamously dubbed the “two solitudes.” However, there is another, often ignored solitude – the Indigenous population of Canada. When construction began on the James Bay Hydroelectric facility in the early 70s, the Inuit and Cree of Northern Québec allied […]

Description: Imagined Homelands chronicles the emerging cultures of nineteenth-century British settler colonialism, focusing on poetry as a genre especially equipped to reflect colonial experience. Jason Rudy argues that the poetry of Victorian-era Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada—often disparaged as derivative and uncouth—should instead be seen as vitally engaged in the social and political work […]

Excerpt: British rule in the nineteenth century was marked by forays into new lands and territories and inevitable questions about how new citizens should behave as settlers and colonists of these new territories. While Victorians may have viewed their civilization as one of order and progress, many of these interactions were marked instead by violence, […]