Abstract: This paper explores the process of settler colonialism in Washington State’s Yakima Valley in the early twentieth century as an example of a regional power bloc that sought to maximize white access to natural resources while dispossessing Native Americans of their lands and access to water. Through a multiscalar approach, I consider how colonization […]

Abstract: Education both actively excludes (through suspensions and expulsions) and tries to include (through inclusion policies, programs, and pathways). Students who experience both exclusion and attempts at inclusion tend to be racialized Black, Brown, and/or Indigenous; identify as queer or trans; be experiencing poverty; and/or be living with a disability. These are also the young […]

Abstract: This article offers a reading of Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild (2019) that focuses on the novel’s poetics of space, which contests settler colonial extractive geographies. Adopting a strong Métis- and women’s perspective, Dimaline’s narrative explores the contemporary Métis condition, which is marked by dispossession and displacement under settler colonialism, and the precarity connected […]

Abstract: How do settlers organize their discursive relationship with the lands they settle, in order to claim, conceptually and materially, the position of owner and occupant? What must they do to transform themselves, in their eyes and in the eyes of others, from parasite to host? And in what ways have these practices been contested? […]

Excerpt: This article examines serial representations of Indigenous peoples in colonial periodical fiction to explore settler anxieties around colonisation and the fragile nature of settler belonging. It builds upon periodical scholar Elizabeth Sheehan’s articulation of seriality’s “role as a technique of repetition that helps to produce and reproduce subjects and groups” to consider the extent […]

Abstract: My project articulates and examines the notion of a settler-colonial structure of feeling through visual analysis of landscape in Australian film, art and popular culture from post-World War II to the present day. The focus of such an investigation is not the overt intentions of representations of landscape, but rather the unrepresentable tensions they […]

Excerpt: This thesis shall investigate the problematics of settler colonialism through the prism of three key literary fictions of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in particular: Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), Jacques Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s novel Paul et Virginie (Paul and Virginia, 1780) and Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Die Verlobung in St. […]

Excerpt: While the turn towards analyzing ongoing settler-colonialism has finally reached the mainstream of North American political discussions, there is still a lack of popular understanding of the issues involved. Settler-colonialism is, ironically, understood within the framework of the ways of thinking brought by the European ruling classes to the Americas. By extension, the conceptions […]

Abstract: The fields of Border Studies and Critical Indigenous Studies offer much to social scientists seeking to understand the operation of power in the lives of borderlands communities. This article illustrates why critical Indigenous scholarship should be a necessary framework in exploring issues of state and nation-building by examining four possible origin stories for what […]

Abstract: This dissertation examines the child death inquiry as a performative ritual of liberaldemocratic governance in the contexts of ongoing settler colonialism and the implementation of New Public Management in Canadian public policy. I ask: what is the performative work of public inquiries in constituting political relationships in contemporary Canada? I situate the child death […]