Abstract: During the first century of Australia’s colonization, settler thanatopolitics meant both casual killing of individual Natives and organized massacres of Aboriginal clans. From the mid-nineteenth century, however, Aboriginal Protection Boards sought to disappear their charges by more covert means. Thus, biopolitics of biological absorption, cultural assimilation, and child removal, designed to bring about the […]

Abstract: This response addresses aspects of biopolitical regulations by Canada, El Salvador, Australia, and the United States, as critically analyzed in the special issue. Each piece offers much to illuminate different modalities of regulating Indigenous lifeways and Indigenous peoples’ resistance to them on myriad grounds, and this response engages three particular themes that emerge from […]

Abstract: Drawing on recent Australian historiography, two works of Indigenous fiction, and the latest staggering figures on Indigenous incarceration and child removal, this article develops two main ideas. Firstly, a seamless ideological continuity exists between the biopolitics settler colonial Australia pursued in previous centuries and the striking resurgence today of those earlier biopolitical practices of […]

Abstract: All research is guided by a set of philosophical underpinnings. Indigenous methodologies are in line with an Indigenous paradigm, while critical and liberatory methodologies fit with the transformative paradigm. Yet Indigenous and transformative methodologies share an emancipatory and critical stance and thus are increasingly used in tandem by both Western and Indigenous scholars in an attempt to decolonize […]

Excerpt: the inter-state system as a particular form of organizing authority is especially important for contemporary settler colonial states such as Aotearoa (New Zealand), Australia, Canada and the United States. Indeed, this distribution of authority in the world has allowed these settler states to establish their own legitimacy through the imposition of state borders on top […]

Abstract: Research shows that the institutionalization of legitimacy criteria has created contested meanings of being indigenous to the United States, which leads to an unrelenting debate about authentic indigeneity among indigenous people and between indigenous communities. While instituted through colonizing federal Indian policy, the “real Indian” trope is now a social fact for American Indians. […]

Abstract: The controversy over the lands in the Wyoming Valley of Pennsylvania has been the stuff of legend (in stories of the Battle of Wyoming) and the historical record. Scholars in recent years have presented the history of the region as a contest between empires, between monied classes and common people seeking to eke out […]

Excerpt: In an effort to understand the coupling of Palestinian displacement with Mizrahi settlement, this project examines the theories and practices developed by Israeli sociologists and land settlement planners to facilitate Mizrahi settlement within the nascent nation’s periphery. I address the confluence of sociological theory and Mizrahi settlement practice to examine the significance of social management to the production of Palestine’s […]

Abstract: Many sociologists and food policy activists are preoccupied with the fate of the family farm. In this paper we ask whether tacit normative beliefs among scholars regarding the family farm as an imagined site of resistance to industrialization and its ills holds up to empirical scrutiny? Using a grounded theoretical approach, we build an […]

Abstract: Histories of colonial plunder produced geographies that settler societies take for granted as settled. While some aspects of the conqueror/settler imaginary have been unsettled in specific cases, and through the negotiation of new instruments such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, various national apologies and modern treaties, much unsettling […]