Abstract: Media coverage of the rural Rust Belt has featured mainly white perspectives. Since the 1970s manufacturing decline, the Rust Belt has been characterized as home to the “white working class.” The “white working-class” trope, ubiquitous in political, social, and academic commentary, upholds settler colonial narratives and colonial ideas of race that erase the experiences and histories […]

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Abstract: In May 1862, sixty-five adults and seventy children under twelve years of age left their homes on Fair Isle bound for Canada. Following a carefully orchestrated journey via Westray, Kirkwall, Granton and Glasgow, they boarded the Olympia to cross the Atlantic to St John, New Brunswick, where they were to embark upon building new lives. This […]

Excerpt: C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020) begins with a simple epigraph: “This land is not your land.” More than just a contestation of the Woody Guthrie classic folk song “This Land Is Your Land” recorded in 1944, the novel comes at a time of increasing national conversation about land ownership and […]

Abstract: My dissertation examines relations between Iñupiat in the village of Utqiaġvik on Alaska’s North Slope and a number of non-Iñupiat transient workers who, enticed by generous salaries, have temporarily relocated there. A focus of my study is the North Slope Borough, founded by Iñupiat to preserve their political autonomy and funded by taxes collected […]

Excerpt: On February 2, 2020, the Kansas City Chiefs played the San Francisco 49ers in the 54th Super Bowl, the annual apex event of American football. Thousands of fans entered the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, Florida, in support of their respective teams. America’s devoted football aficionados wear a wide variety of adornments to identify […]

Abstract: Processes of naming the landscape are inherently political as how, why, and what names are used can create conflict between competing groups, beliefs or ideas. This chapter examines place names in New Zealand and how they are implemented and changed. In doing so, we detail the work of the New Zealand Geographic Board Ngā Pou Taunaha […]

Description: How the rhetoric of terrorism has been used against high-profile movements to justify the oppression and suppression of Indigenous activists. New Indigenous movements are gaining traction in North America: the Missing and Murdered Women and Idle No More movements in Canada, and the Native Lives Matter and NoDAPL movements in the United States. These […]

Abstract: Very little scholarship has specifically considered the phenomenon of eviction as a colonial process, or examined the role of the eviction legal system in reproducing colonial structures and relations. Our aim in this article is to address this gap andthereby extend to the eviction legal system context the work of scholars who have theorized […]

Abstract: This essay zooms in on the story of the Palestinian body condemned to suffer unspeakable injustices so that a system based on inequity keeps working for the few. It relies on poetic texts written or performed by those whose bodies are controlled by the interrelated forces of settler colonialism, authoritarianism, and imperialism. The storms […]