settler colonial studies blog

Settlers against settler colonialism? Dani Pickering, Settlers against colonialism? Education, organising and the Tiriti workers’ movement, PhD dissertation, Te Herenga Waka / Victoria University of Wellington, 2024

22Dec24

Abstract: Behind every hypervisible collective action organised by a social movement is an enormous amount of labour cultivating everyday people’s ability and willingness to mobilise—a political education which takes place both inside and outside the classroom. Despite the close relationship this implies between organising and education, however, distinct bodies of research have emerged around them which struggle to engage with each other. Social movement theory concerns itself more with the phenomenon of social movements themselves, with less consideration for the labours which enable them to emerge; critical pedagogy, meanwhile, focuses on developing individuals’ capacity for transformative social action, but often without forging meaningful links to those actions taken by social movements. My research seeks to address this fissure by exploring how it informs decolonial struggle in the case study of the Tiriti workers’ movement in Aotearoa New Zealand. Since the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi) in 1840, Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa, have struggled against European colonisation. These efforts went largely unsupported in any organised capacity by the settler population until the gradual emergence of the Tiriti workers’ movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Following Māori calls for non-Māori to conscientise our own people about the realities of colonisation and the need to support Māori aspirations for self-determination, this movement within the settler population is now known for its educational interventions in settler communities and institutions across the country. Drawing on a scholar-activist praxis which involved working within and through my existing relationships as a participant in the Tiriti workers’ movement, I conducted and analysed a series of interviews with 25 of my Tiriti worker peers for this research. Together, we sought to better understand how and why our knowledge-practices were established; how and why they have changed over time; and how those changes open and/or foreclose new opportunities to advance the movement’s (and by extension Māori) interests. Through analysis of these discussions, I argue that this case study demonstrates the key tensions and overlaps between educating and organising practices that emerge when pursuing transformative social change in settler-colonial contexts. This claim is supported by the data in three ways. First, many participants found that the movement’s primarily educational strategies are now experiencing diminishing returns, as more of the population becomes “Tiriti-educated” but remains unsure as to what happens next. Second, constraints on Pākehā (white European New Zealander) Tiriti education in particular have pushed out a critical analysis of the centrality of race in local settler-colonial structures and systems. This has prevented meaningful Tiriti-based coalition-building from taking place between Pākehā and other settlers, highlighting a continued need for education even amongst the otherwise “Tiriti-educated”. Third, the movement has an unusual positioning within the dominant settler group as part of the object of transformation. This position requires both a careful reconstruction of self-interest and a structural analysis of state and capital, tasks for which critical pedagogy and social movement theoretical traditions, respectively, are better equipped. These findings show that rather than being a linear process within which education results in action, in practice education is deeply intertwined with other forms of collective action, contradicting the divisions evident in the literature. This thesis therefore makes important contributions to the bridging of social movement theory and critical pedagogy by showing how the social change processes they emphasise are in fact mutually dependent in their efforts to establish and sustain effective challenges to the colonial-capitalist status quo.

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Educated settler ignorance: Ella Mattila, Jyri Lindén, Johanna Annala, ‘Reviewing educational conceptualisations of transnational settler ignorance’, Educational Review, 2024

19Dec24

Abstract: This paper investigates how majority societies’ common ignorance about Indigenous peoples and ongoing settler-colonial reality (“settler ignorance”) has been negotiated in the educational sciences literature. Understanding settler ignorance not as a simple “lack of knowledge” but a powerful issue undermining Indigenous rights and decolonial aspirations, this review sets out to gain new understanding of its dimensions in educational settings. The reviewed literature covers 51 peer-reviewed qualitative records from six settler-colonial contexts – Finland, Sweden, Norway, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. The emerging conceptualisations of the phenomenon of settler ignorance and ways of addressing it were explored through thematic synthesis. The findings suggest that settler ignorance has many faces: it is conceptualised as emotionally and ideologically contested knowledge-making, as wilful avoidance and resistance, and as a structural mechanism that transcends the question of individual cognition. Similarly, the proposed approaches to dismantling ignorance are diverse, emphasising the potential of educational content, building relationality, and critical reflection. Discussing the findings’ implications, the article suggests how harnessing both context-based and transnational understandings about settler ignorance and its many dimensions could benefit reconciliatory processes between settler and Indigenous populations and signpost one approach to decolonising education.

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A sociology of settler colonialism: Johan Heilbron, ‘Algerian Inquiries and Colonial Sociology: A Joint Interview with Amín Pérez and George Steinmetz’, Practical Sense, 1, 2024, pp. 15-27

19Dec24

Excerpt: Two recently published and thoroughly researched books shed new light on the significance of Pierre Bourdieu’s Algerian studies. In Bourdieu and Sayad Against Empire: Forging Sociology in Anticolonial Struggle (2024), Amín Pérez presents an in-depth account of the collaboration between Bourdieu and Sayad. Drawing on unpublished correspondence and other archival material, he vividly details their collaborative efforts, showing how their unlikely encounter produced a new way of practicing sociology. The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Theory. French Sociology and the Overseas Empire (2023) by George Steinmetz offers a broadly conceived historical sociology of “colonial sociology” in France.

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A specter is haunting the settler polity: Brett Nicholls, ‘The communist empty signifier: the Australian League of Rights and the Voice to Parliament referendum, Continuum, 2025

19Dec24

Abstract: In 2023, voters across Australia resoundingly rejected the Constitutional institution of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Among several claims made by vote no campaigners against this institution, a text published in the 1980s by the notorious extreme right organization, The Australian League of Rights, surfaced. The central claim of this text, titled Red Over Black, is that Aboriginal claims for justice and land rights are a communist conspiracy. In the lead-up to the referendum, the campaign to vote no echoed this claim. Drawing upon the Laclauian Discourse Analysis, this paper considers how this signifier, ‘communist,’ continues to resonate in political campaigns in Australia. My claim is that the foundations for this continued resonance emerge in enduring reactionary organizations such as the Australian League of Rights, which was founded in the 1940s. The paper thus outlines how the League imagines the communist conspiracy and explains how this conspiracy remains embedded in political discourse today.

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Revering the settler past, disallowing Indigenous futures: Sarah LaVoy-Brunette, Dusti C. Bridges, ‘Anglo-Saxonism and Indigenous Dispossession: Land-Grab Universities and the Emergence of Medieval Studies’, Speculum, 100, 1, 2025, pp. 46-78

19Dec24

Abstract: Robert Lee and Tristan Ahtone’s 2020 report on the Morrill Act of 1862 tied the founding and funding of “land-grab” universities, including several institutions key to the development of medieval studies in the United States, to the forceful dispossession of Indigenous peoples. When this history of active policies of Indigenous displacement, genocidal campaigns, and corrupt negotiations is considered in light of the growth of medieval studies in American institutions, this context brings forth the uncomfortable settler colonial association of the active erasure of Indigenous histories and their replacement with a Western medieval past. Motivated by the development of American Anglo-Saxonism and further bolstered by an academic focus on American medieval lineages, medieval studies profited from and contributed to Indigenous erasure both tangibly and intellectually, as its intellectual contributions to the American state and the academy became a tool of settler colonialism. We argue that the connections between medieval studies and Indigenous studies need to be recognized alongside and beyond the Indigenous turn, postcolonial studies, and medievalism to include the field’s historical implications and ongoing benefit from systemic Indigenous dispossession in the United States.

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And settlers too: H. L. Hennessey, ‘J. L. (2024). ‘Preacher, Trader, Soldier, Spy: Studying Transimperial Individuals through their Occupational Roles’, in B. Schär, M. Toivanen (eds), Integration and Collaborative Imperialism in Modern Europe: At the Margins of Empire, 1800-1950, Bloomsbury Academic, 2024, pp. 17-36

18Dec24

Excerpt: In virtually every example of modern settler colonialism, settlers have unsurprisingly been the staunchest defenders of the unequal colonial order, whether in the form of segregation, harsh punitive laws or even genocidal militia warfare against colonized peoples. Settler lobbies often fiercely resisted humanitarian reforms issued by the metropole and resented other metropolitan interference in colonial affairs. This dynamic may have been exacerbated as transimperial settlers attempted to assimilate into the majority settler culture. As James McDougall writes of Algeria, ‘As the divisions between communities and individuals of different European origins became blurred and tended to dissipate, so the line demarcating Europeans en bloc from [Muslim] Algerians … became harder, remaining as the primary focus of social and political antagonism.’ In this way, the most vulnerable segment of colonial societies, the indigenous population, could thus come to bear the brunt of transimperial settlers’ desire for inclusion as they sought to differentiate themselves from such subalterns.

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Bookish settler colonialism: Hannah August , Gabriella Edelstein, ‘Collecting Early Modern English Books in British Settler Colonies: Contexts, Problems, and Opportunities’, Parergon, 41, 2, 2024, pp. 189-215

17Dec24

Abstract: Although it differs from other Australian and New Zealand libraries’ rare books collections in several ways, the Emmerson Collection is only the most recent private collection of early modern English books to find a home in a public library in a British settler colony in the South Pacific. In this article, we consider the similarities and differences between the Emmerson Collection and these other named collections of early modern English books in New Zealand and Australia, exploring both the Emmerson’s particular affordances and the ways in which all these collections invite scholarly reflection on the relationship between their origins, their content, and their location on colonised land.

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Mediated settler colonialism: Marco Castillo, Carolina Bank Muñoz, ‘Media Tropes and the Legacy of Settler Colonialism in Chile’s Constitutional Reform Process’, Critical Sociology, 2024

17Dec24

Abstract: This article examines the legacies of racism and settler colonialism in contemporary Chile by examining political discourses in the context of the country’s failed Constitutional reform process. We analyze newspaper articles during the period of the first progressive and the second conservative constitutional projects, which were both rejected in popular referendums in 2022 and 2023, respectively. Through our analysis, we find how media narratives of the two main printed national outlets created a notion of dual enemies, portraying Mapuche indigenous people as internal enemies or ‘terrorists’ and immigrants, particularly Black immigrants, as external agitators during this period. We argue that settler colonial legacies and racial dynamics are central but understudied features in the analysis of Chilean social reality and show how the constitutional process provided an opportunity to see these dynamics enacted in the context of political transformation.

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The settler colonial asylum: Tim (Thanh) Nguyen, ‘Insanity’ as an American Empire: The Canton Asylum for Insane American Indians, 1902-1934, MA dissertation, Dartmouth College, 2024

17Dec24

Abstract: This graduate thesis involves a retelling of the history of the now defunct Canton Insane Asylum, built in the early 20th century located in Canton, South Dakota. It was America’s first federal psychiatric facility dedicated exclusively for American Indians. The Canton Insane Asylum for American Indians is a touchstone whose microhistory reflects larger political and economic sentiments in both the state of South Dakota and in the United States writ large. Conceiving South Dakota, as first and foremost a white settler society erected on land forcibly wrested from American Indian people, the asylum played an important economic development role and helped transform Canton, South Dakota. All of this was accomplished through physical and medical violence and exploitation of vulnerable American Indians. The Canton Insane Asylum for American Indians was aided and abetted by cheerleading state officials and callously managed by various colonial superintendents of whom one is particularly noteworthy—Dr. Harry Reid Hummer. Methodologically, this thesis leverages archival records (housed and littered across three national archives: Kansas City, Dallas, Texas, and Washington, D.C. as well as state archives) consisting of governmental reports, the insane asylum’s financial records, oral testimonies, and patient case files. Where primary sources are lacking, secondary sources are used. More specifically, the thesis highlights the brutal scientific management and medical practices as carried out by the insane asylum executives and staff members; the inherent capitalistic ethos propelling the insane asylum, the business of confinement, and the manner in which pseudoscience and epidemiology data were contorted to justify the confinement of American Indians. The first patient arrived in 1902, and the facility permanently closed in 1934 due to dehumanizing conditions. Over its lifetime, it warehoused more than three-hundred and seventy American Indians.

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Food for anti-settler colonial thought: Christiane Dabdoub Nasser, ‘Food and the Transmission of Culture: Linking Past, Present, and Future’, Jerusalem Quarterly, 2024

17Dec24

Excerpt: The transmission of food culture is a long, slow, organic process, an immersive experiential learning communicated across generations and across frontiers, with ruptures due to emigration, war, and displacement. The contributions to this second special edition of the Jerusalem Quarterly devoted to Palestinian food and foodways draw attention to the role of women, men, and children in securing this transmission, and the deliberate interference in this transmission to serve political agendas. From traditional wedding celebrations in early twentieth-century Palestine to contemporary cookery books and vlogs, transmission is examined through the lenses of Palestinian and diasporic identities, settler colonialism, commodification, resistance, survival, and “gastro-diplomacy.” Lifestyles become an embodiment of food practices interwoven with relationships and identities, with the Gaza Food Kitchen as a poignant example of community mobilization and documenting “the heartbreaking [current] realities on the ground.” Social media posts and reels show the preparation of traditional dishes while bombs are being dropped on Gaza, familiar existential images as the war enters its second year, confirming how sheer survival is a form of resistance. Settler colonialism is scrutinized as an agent of rupture that unsettles age-old practices, denies Indigeneity, tampers with memory, and alters history in the service of a triumphant Zionism keen on constructing a narrative to suppport its colonizing claims to Palestine.

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