Abstract: This dissertation examines how U.S. nonprofit hospitals, grounded in a history of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and chattel slavery, function as racialized organizations that perpetuate racial health disparities through the racialized allocation of resources. Throughout the chapters, I argue that health systems not only fail to break with legacies of extraction, exploitation, control, and […]

Abstract: “Unmaking Tradition” analyzes three government- and museum-sponsored projects during the 1930s and 1940s that sought to “revitalize” customary Native American arts. Amidst the WPA’s unprecedented federal investments in the arts and the Indian Reorganization Act’s reversal of assimilationist Indian policy, the interwar period marked an era of broad reckoning—both within and outside of Indigenous […]

Abstract: This chapter demonstrates how Zionism, as a structuring ideology of settler colonialism, has come to delimit the contours of dissent, academic freedom, and acceptable speech within American higher education through a gendered politics of “civility.” Taking as its point of departure the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s “un-hiring” of Palestinian American scholar Steven Salaita […]

Abstract: The fields of conservation and environmentalism prioritize ecosystem health, yet both emerged from western frameworks that displaced and criminalized Indigenous land stewardship. The idealization of “pristine wilderness” narratives served to justify the removal of Indigenous peoples from their homelands and erased millennia of sustainable land stewardship that had maintained ecological balance long before western […]

Excerpt: The Israeli genocide in Gaza amplified debates that question the paradigmatic, and sometimes also epistemic, foundations of different fields of scholarship, including Genocide Studies. These discussions are motivated by a need to re-examine key questions when addressing how the political problem of Palestine’s colonization and occupation can be framed in search of emancipatory politics. […]

Abstract: It has long been commented – particularly by feminist scholars – that women are underrepresented in statues in public places. Statues across the Commonwealth and former British Empire overwhelmingly depict prominent white men who engaged in military pursuits, colonising ventures, politics, or industry. In recent years, these statues have become sites of protest because […]

Abstract: Genocide was not a term Kerri Malloy grew up knowing, though its legacy shaped his family’s story. Coming to understand that his Indigenous ancestors survived United States extermination efforts meant confronting genocide not as distant history but as something deeply personal. The realization that his existence was predicated on the loss of other lives […]

Abstract: This study examines how Darcie Little Badger portrays the aftermath of settler colonialism on the Lipan Apache people in Elatsoe, A Snake Falls to Earth, and Sheine Lende: A Prequel to Elatsoe, and how these novels engage in the process of biskaabiiyang. Employing close reading textual analysis using settler colonial studies and Indigenous futurism, the study reveals […]

Excerpt: At the core of discussions of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructures are land and property ownership, the understandings of which are shaped by settler colonialism in the United States and administered by a constellation of global settler state formations. Settler colonialism names an orientation to the world and life; it is a way […]

Abstract: Locke has become a central figure in postcolonial theory in ways that at times overextend the context and content of his writing. This chapter seeks to explain this appeal by examining recurring metaphors, lacunas, and linguistic manoeuvres in Locke’s writing, arguing that they capture essential elements within colonial practices or imaginaries. Through such a […]