Abstract: With the increasing prevalence of Indigenous discourses in the public consciousness, it becomes clear that the role of immigrants in the Indigenous-Settler dynamic has yet to be understood, and is particularly understudied in its Canadian context. However, given that nearly half of the population in the City of Toronto is composed of immigrants, it […]

Abstract: Many constitutional questions in Israel are dealt with through the lens of the nation-state paradigm where the state is constitutionally associated with an ethnically and religiously defined majority group. Thus, many of the challenges that face Israeli society and the legal system are often presented as a result of an exceptionally antagonistic majority-minority relationship […]

Abstract: Canadian processes such as the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, and Comprehensive Land Claims as well as flashpoint events (Simpson & Ladner, 2010) such as the Kanien’kehaka resistance at Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke (the “Oka Crisis”) and more recently, the Idle No More movement, signal to Canadians that […]

Abstract: How do ongoing histories of physical mobility in economic and political life affect rival state authorities’ claims over a disputed territory? In the conflict over Western Sahara, wide-ranging strategies of mobility challenge familiar tropes of migration scholarship, in which states constrain people’s movements while subjects seek to escape such control. Both the Moroccan state […]

Abstract: Debt is widely conceived as temporal – present consumption bought with future labour. This paper advances conceptualisations of debt by incorporating the active role space plays in creating, maintaining and undermining debt relations. Debts are topological binds – a particular kind of spatial connection, which are entangled with topographic spaces to produce debt ecologies. […]

Excerpt: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone to court to gain ownership of isolated pockets of land tucked away within his sprawling estate in Hawaii, many of which are less than an acre and could be split between hundreds of owners in a situation unique to the islands. The 14 parcels on the north shore […]

Excerpt: Settler colonialism is not one historical event.  It is a structure, and the process of settling continues today. That process is not more evident in North America than at Standing Rock. The Dakota Access Pipeline is a 1,172 mile long oil pipeline, constructed to carry hydraulically fractured crude oil from the Bakken fields of […]

Abstract: Why did the lands east of the Urals–long associated by Russians with the hard labor of convicts, fearsome nomads, and an unbearable climate–attract so many Russian peasant settlers at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Historians usually cite a combination of push-pull factors. They represent migration as a consequence of stagnation […]

Abstract: Over the last ten years, there has been extensive scholarly debate about the nature of settler colonialism and the category ‘settler’. The central problem animating this dissertation is the question of how we understand the position of a settler group like the Doukhobors in Canadian settler colonialism. In 1899 approximately 7,500 members of the […]

Abstract: In this third progress report I consider the politics of settler colonialism in relation to nonnative people of color. Settler colonialism has become an increasingly important concept over the past decade, and while geographers typically think about it from a white/native perspective, I explore how ethnic studies, specifically, Chicana/o studies, has responded to it. […]