Abstract: In settler-colonies such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States, the historical impacts of colonisation on the health, social, economic and cultural experiences of Indigenous peoples are well documented. However, despite being a commonly deployed trope, there has been scant attention paid to precisely how colonial processes contribute to contemporary disparities in […]

Abstract: Grounded in a historical, socio-cultural consideration of Indigenous women’s theatrical production, this dissertation examines representations of gendered violence in Canadian Indigenous women’s drama. The female playwrights who are the focus of my thesis – Monique Mojica, Marie Clements, and Yvette Nolan – counter colonial and occasionally postcolonial renditions of gendered and racialized violence by […]

Abstract: The theory of urban bias was a major contribution to the evolution of contemporary theories of political economy that remains highly relevant today. Yet theorists of urban bias have still not produced a general explanation that accounts for anomalous cases of what we call “rural incorporation,” or coalition strategies based on modest rural producers. […]

Excerpt: Queer organizing against Israel’s deployment of gay rights discourses to mask the occupation of Palestine—referred to as “pinkwashing” within academic and activist circles—has raised pertinent questions about the relations between settler colonialism, sexuality, gender, race, and (gay) imperialism. Such campaigns have directed attention to the realities of occupation in Palestine/Israel while simultaneously obscuring the […]

Abstract: Economic incentives affect demographic outcomes. That is to say, fertility, mortality, migration and mobility are a result of economic performance, growth and inequality. While demographic changes may be slow, the long-run effects can be significant. The Western demographic transition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has had a profound effect on the […]

Abstract: This paper addresses the role of music and music education in the perpetuation of settler colonialism (a particular colonial configuration predicated on the expulsion of indigenous people and occupation of indigenous land) within the United States. Using Baudrillard’s notion of simulacra, or “false truths,” to look at racialized depictions in John Philip Sousa’s 1910 […]

Abstract: In early 2015, the prime minister of Australia delivered the seventh annual Closing the Gap Prime Minister’s report (Australian Government, 2015). In it he reported that the government’s goal to halve the gap in employment outcomes between Indigenous and other Australians by 2018 was not on track, a euphemism for failing, and that there […]

Description: In contemporary settler societies, reconciliation has emerged as a potent and alluring form of utopian politics. This book examines the performative life of reconciliation and its discontents in settler societies. It explores the affective refoundings of the settler state and reimaginings of its alternatives and, in particular, the way the past is mobilized in […]

Abstract: Here is an object of research, found in the archives: a piece of ‘data’, an ink-on-paper mark. It exists on the bottom right-hand side of a sturdy square of parchment. The intriguing drawing (Figure 5.1) represents the unique tā moko or facial tattoo of a Maori leader, Hongi Hika. The central whorls are the lines […]

Abstract: In South Park’s “Going Native,” the white character Butters becomes inexplicably angry only to uncover that his family contends the anger is “biologically” caused by their “ancestral” belonging to Hawai‘i. He then travels to Kaua‘i to resolve this anger by connecting with his “native” home. To parody the materiality of white settlers playing and […]