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Capitalist SETTLER colonial, actually: Matan Kaminer, Capitalist Colonial: Thai Migrant Workers in Israeli Agriculture, Stanford University Press, 2024

14Jan25

Description: For decades, the agricultural settlements of Israel’s arid Central Arabah prided themselves on their labor-Zionist commitment to abstaining from hiring outside labor. But beginning in the late 1980s, the region’s agrarian economy was rapidly transformed by the removal of state protections, a shift to export-oriented monoculture, and an influx of disenfranchised, ill-paid migrants from northeast Thailand (Isaan). Capitalist Colonial, Matan Kaminer’s ethnography of the region and its people, argues that the paid and unpaid labor of Thai migrants has been essential to resolving the clashing demands of the bottom line and Zionist ideology here as elsewhere in Israel’s farm sector. Kaminer’s account mobilizes capitalism and colonialism as a combined analytical frame to comprehend the forms of domination prevailing in the Arabah. Placing the findings of fieldwork as a farm laborer within the ecological, economic, and political histories of the Arabah and Isaan, Kaminer draws surprising connections between the violent takeover of peripheral regions, the imposition of agrarian commodity production, and the emergence of transnational labor flows. Insisting on the liberatory possibilities immanent in the “interaction ideologies” found among both migrant workers and settler employers, and raising the question of the place of migrants who are neither Jewish nor Arab in visions of decolonization, this book demonstrates anthropology’s ongoing relevance to the struggle for local and global transformations.


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Closing the gap? Kaylee Grace Brink, ‘Australian media’s treatment of closing the gap: the influence of history narratives’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

13Jan25

Abstract: Australia’s Closing the Gap policy has undergone many iterations since its initial introduction in late 2007. These changes and redirections have resulted in various levels of media attention over the past decade and half. To analyse media discourse around Closing the Gap (CtG), this study used codebook thematic analysis informed by ideas of historical recognition versus negation. The newspaper articles span from 2008 to 2020 and include reporting from major Australian newspapers. This study found that the Australian media presents some recognition of the impact of historical policies and events with multiple caveats. The most important caution is the pervasive occurrence of neoliberal discourse, especially relating to the pathologisation of perceived deficits. In contrast, a noticeable amount of CtG reporting highlighted the need for CtG to better support Indigenous-led and designed programmes and Indigenous sovereignty.


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Skating against settler colonialism: Bethany Geckle, ‘Symbolic Sovereignty and the Decolonizing and Indigenizing Potentials of Skateboarding, Emerging Media, 2025

13Jan25

Abstract: Skateboarding is a practice that reimagines and repurposes the urban landscape by manipulating its designs for unintended purposes and creating new relationships with space. In this way, skateboarding may challenge the exclusionary urban logics in colonized cities. Extending this line of thought, I explore the decolonizing and indigenizing potential of skateboarding through the concepts of visual sovereignty and placemaking. I suggest skateboarding diversifies and contemporizes indigenous arts and practices, translates indigeneity into urban contexts that traditionally preclude indigenous peoples and cultures, builds communities between indigenous groups and across rural and urban geographies, and imagines other ways of being, doing, and relating to space that signals more indigenous futures.


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Settler colonial massacres, visualised now: Glenn Porter, ‘Out of the shadows: A photo-essay of antipodean colonisation, resistance and massacres’, Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, 2025

13Jan25

Abstract: Landscape photography can be classic renditions of the natural environment within a picturesque tradition found in early English landscape paintings; however, culturally, it can also mean images of other types of environments involving humanity, including human interactions reminiscent of urbanscapes, industrial environments, cityscapes, sites of violent crime, engagement of war and others. Critically, landscape imagery within visual arts also functions within a rhetorical political context by forming concepts of national identity. While this photo-essay comprises of landscape images, the work is not about the landscape or the objects within the space framed by the camera. This work is about ‘place’ and the political and historical events that occurred at these sites. The places photographed in this work are an attempt to draw attention to the violence referred to as the frontier wars between the British military, settlers and Indigenous peoples during colonisation. The objective of the work is to enhance a contemporary consciousness and hopefully amend the collective historical narrative that suggests the British displacement and occupation of Aboriginal Nations was a peaceful transition. Australian history has a blind spot when it comes to the violence during this period that involved fierce resistance from the Indigenous people, the internment of families into missions and the hundreds of massacres by colonists across the entire country.


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The impropriety of struggling against settler colonialism: Myles Lennon, ‘Improperty: Black land stewardship and the paradox of liberation on stolen land’, American Ethnologist, 2025

11Jan25

Abstract: The cognates proper and property have a racialized relationship: ownership rights were historically rooted in white supremacist notions of propriety. Thus, Black people’s efforts to challenge these rights entail the improper: breaches of rules that render us as property and as propertyless. I ethnographically illustrate this transgression to theorize the intersection of property and the improper, or improperty: modes of ownership that paradoxically unsettle the logics of accumulation and enclosure that are proper to the property form. I introduce improperty to contextualize nascent Black land projects that are funded through the nonprofit industrial complex, online crowdsourcing, and microreparations. These projects simultaneously reproduce the capitalized relations they wish to supplant and create exciting new possibilities for decolonial land work, minimizing the dependence on commerce and the settler state that has traditionally hampered Black farms. Embracing this simultaneity can deepen our understanding of the transformative power of Black land stewardship.


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A fascist/settler country: Patrizia Dogliani, ‘A Fascist Country’, in Patrizia Dogliani, A Social History of Italian Fascism, Palgrave, 2024, pp. 115-144

11Jan25

Excerpt: The chapter discusses some fundamental policies put in place by fascism: policies to prevent new emigration abroad, limited urbanization brought about by major public works, reclamation and inland colonization, increase in rural works and rural society, investments in selected infrastructures. To justify these policy the regime espoused the mirage of a new “terre al sole” (lands in the sun) in the colonial territories, while also attempting to redistribute the population across the metropolitan peninsula and islands A wide gap persisted between the language of the reclamation program and its reality. The regime and its officials were ultimately incapable of actualizing the ambitious project of regenerating the landless peasants into a population of autonomous small-scale landowners. Once consolidated in power, fascism took up this legacy of reclamation, placing it at the ideological center of its rural policy. On a concrete level, the Fascist state transformed the reclamation project from an intervention that was essentially directed at land drainage to an “integral reclamation.” Land reclamation became a “national redemption” with the reclaimed areas seen as “redeemed lands.” This land was then mainly settled by veterans, who received the land as compensation for their sacrifice during the war and above all to create outposts of the new civilization. The reclamation was also accompanied by the creation of “news towns” in the Roman countryside.


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Shock, horror! Settler frontier: Robert G. Parkinson, Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier, W. W. Norton, 2024

11Jan25

Description: We are divided over the history of the United States, and one of the central dividing lines is the frontier. Was it a site of heroism? Or was it where the full force of an all-powerful empire was brought to bear on Native peoples? In this startingly original work, historian Robert Parkinson presents a new account of ever-shifting encounters between white colonists and Native Americans. Drawing skillfully on Joseph Conrad’s famous novella, Heart of Darkness, he demonstrates that imperialism in North America was neither heroic nor a perfectly planned conquest. It was, rather, as bewildering, violent, and haphazard as the European colonization of Africa, which Conrad knew firsthand and fictionalized in his masterwork. At the center of Parkinson’s story are two families whose entwined histories ended in tragedy. The family of Shickellamy, one of the most renowned Indigenous leaders of the eighteenth century, were Iroquois diplomats laboring to create a world where settlers and Native people could coexist. The Cresaps were frontiersmen who became famous throughout the colonies for their bravado, scheming, and land greed. Together, the families helped determine the fate of the British and French empires, which were battling for control of the Ohio River Valley. From the Seven Years’ War to the protests over the Stamp Act to the start of the Revolutionary War, Parkinson recounts the major turning points of the era from a vantage that allows us to see them anew, and to perceive how bewildering they were to people at the time. For the Shickellamy family, it all came to an end on April 30, 1774, when most of the clan were brutally murdered by white settlers associated with the Cresaps at a place called Yellow Creek. That horrific event became news all over the continent, and it led to war in the interior, at the very moment the First Continental Congress convened in Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Michael Cresap, at first blamed for the massacre at Yellow Creek, would be transformed by the Revolution into a hero alongside George Washington. In death, he helped cement the pioneer myth at the heart of the new republic. Parkinson argues that American history is, in fact, tied to the frontier, just not in the ways we are often told. Altering our understanding of the past, he also shows what this new understanding should mean for us today.


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A settler society’s failed reconstitution: Tristan Partridge, ‘Indigenous Representation: How Recognition, Reciprocity, and Reserved Seats Shaped the Constitutional Convention’, in Javiera Barandiaran, Tristan Partridge (eds), Demanding a Radical Constitution: Environmentalism, Resilience, and Participation in Chile’s 2022 Reform Efforts, Palgrave, 2025, pp. 25-43

11Jan25

Abstract: When the Constitutional Convention began rewriting Chile’s constitution in 2021, 17 of the 155 assembly seats were reserved for Indigenous representatives. This unprecedented achievement, though a compromise, was the result of decades of ongoing struggle for Indigenous recognition and representation as well as intensified organizing during, and after, the 2019 estallido. This chapter relays how the agreement took shape, noting key debates and exchanges in the formation of this landmark in Chilean politics, highlighting the influence of persistent anti-Indigenous sentiment across Chile, and placing the move for Indigenous representation and visibility in constitutional politics within the context of parallel struggles across Latin America.


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Higher education against settler colonialism: Benjamin E. Norquist, Christopher S. Collins, ‘Higher Education Resisting Settler Colonial Transfer in Palestinian Bethlehem’, Comparative Education Review, 2025

09Jan25

Abstract: This article analyzes the perceptions and actions of Palestinian faculty and administrators at colleges and universities in Palestinian Bethlehem. We explore the meaning of higher educational practices and structures under settler colonial conditions of gradual dispossession of ancestral land. The physical conditions and policies of occupation and settler colonialism create a hostile epistemological environment for Palestinian people and bodies of knowledge. Within the knowledge production/distribution environment of higher education, there are ways in which institutions recreate or resist oppression. Participants in this study described their aspirations for students, the challenges they perceive that their students face, and their efforts to help students resist forces to weaken connection to land and knowledge. Finding that Palestinian educators seek to nurture student commitments to remain rooted to the land, this article surfaces the notion of adaptive pedagogies and epistemological resistance.


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Policing settlers: Sophie Hamel-Touchette, RCMP Officers Posted to Nunavut Communities: Exploring the Policing and Private Life Challenges of Qallunaat Police in Inuit Nunangat, MA dissertation, University of Ottawa, 2025

09Jan25

Abstract: As a result of a signed agreement between the Government of Canada and Nunavut, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) is contracted to police Nunavut hamlets. This iteration of contracts began when the Territory was formed in 1999 and involves the recruitment of Regular Members from across Canada. To better understand the experiences of these Members, this thesis project engages with the literature on rural and remote policing, and explores the uniqueness of policing in Nunavut (Ruddell & Jones, 2018). Inspired by informal Member comments about the “harsh reality” of these posts, this project investigates accounts of everyday policing in several hamlets. Through a qualitative approach, specifically semi-structured interviews, and framed by Settler Colonialism theory and Bourdieu’s theory on Habitus, this project applies “policing habitus” to understand the daily living and working conditions of police officers in Nunavut. The analysis shows that officers identify a number of obstacles in their “field” of work, including insufficient resources for the communities of Nunavut, a complex array of responsibilities and requests that fall outside of police duties and yet to them, the complexities of negotiating relationships in small hamlets, and the frustration of feeling as though they are a “band-aid” solution to deep and historical issues. The thesis concludes with a series of policy recommendations.


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