« Spying settlers: Merve Gönlühoş Elmas, ‘Espionage as a Settler-Colonial Practice: The Case of the Palestine–Syrian Front During World War I’, Middle East Critique, 2026
The women of settler colonialism: Carla Joubert, Barberton Daisies: Women and Settler Colonialism in the Zuid Afrikaansche Republiek and Alberta in the Nineteenth Century, PhD dissertation, Western University, 2026 »

Introducing Barriers to Truth and Justice in Settler-Colonial Australia: Dan Tout, Emma-Jaye Gavin, Julia Hurst, ‘Omtroduction’, in Dan Tout, Emma-Jaye Gavin, Julia Hurst (eds), Barriers to Truth and Justice in Settler-Colonial Australia: Why Won’t Settlers Listen? Springer, 2026, pp. 1-21

04May26

Abstract: In this critical introduction, co-editors Dan Tout, Emma-Jaye Gavin, and Julia Hurst set out the provocation and framing for Barriers to Truth and Justice in Settler-Colonial Australia: Why Won’t Settlers Listen? The collection emerges in the aftermath of the defeat of the October 2023 referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament and the constitutional recognition of Australia’s First Peoples as Australia’s First Peoples, situating this defeat in the broader context of persistent patterns of settler refusal to hear and act upon truths long articulated by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Rather than a deficit of knowledge, let alone information, the editors identify a pervasive infrastructure of refusal—denial, ignorance, and antipathy—that sustains settler legitimacy while constraining the possibilities of justice. Situating Australian experience within comparative and transnational contexts, the volume interrogates how refusal operates institutionally and affectively, and how it is reproduced through pedagogy, culture, and politics. At the same time, contributors foreground Indigenous-led truth-telling and sovereignty, affirming their independent power as practices of healing, resurgence, and mobilisation. Rejecting reconciliationist closures, the introduction advances a historiographical agonism that retains tension and contestation as necessary to resisting settler moves to innocence. In mapping both impediments and points of vulnerability, this collection reframes the burden of response: truth-telling is not a project First Nations must render more palatable to a settler polity structured by refusal, but rather a challenge settlers and their institutions must confront if just relations are to be realised.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed