settler colonial studies blog

The settler grand (or tiny) tour: Bryan S. R. Grimwood , tebrakunna country and Emma Leeb, Freya Higgins-Desbiolles, ‘Unsettling geographies of tourism’, Tourism Geographies, 2024

25Sep24

Abstract: This article introduces the Special Issue on unsettling geographies of tourism. The overarching aim of this collection of articles is to bring together critical and creative analyses that help destabilize tourism’s relationship to settler colonialism. In this Introduction, we provide an overview of literature on geographies of settler colonialism and tourism, which works to situate the ‘unsettling’ agenda in relation to the decolonial and Indigenous geographies and the respective contributions of each article in the Special Issue. We also review the ethics of care and decolonizing approach that oriented our process of peer reviewing articles, understanding that peer review is fraught with practices of erasure, exclusion, and prescription and that decolonizing tourism geographies must include intentional practices of transforming our individual and collective responsibilities to each other and with the lands and waters from which scholarship originates. Towards the end of our Introduction, we present a summary of each article that amplifies and synthesizes their respective contributions to unsettling tourism geographies knowledge and research.

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Settler squares: D. B. H. Lehman, ‘The Midwest: Land of the Squares’, Middle West Review, 11, 1, 2024, pp. 77-87

25Sep24

Excerpt: In the age of settler invasion, all this rectangularity has been a convenient spatial link between local and federal understandings of belonging and ownership.

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Reflection of a reflection: Mary Stockwell, ‘Reflections on Settler Colonialism’, Middle West Review, 11, 1, 2024, pp. 411-421

25Sep24

Excerpt: Everybody’s story must be told because everybody—not just the few heroes we picked out from the great panorama of the past—made our lives possible.

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Settler robots!! Douglas C. Youvan, ‘Synthetic Humanity: The Role of Advanced AI in Resynthesizing Human Life on Mars and Beyond’, Whatever, 2024

23Sep24

Abstract: As humanity looks toward the stars, the prospect of colonizing other planets, particularly Mars, becomes increasingly feasible. However, the enormous challenges posed by space travel, environmental hostility, and human biological limitations have sparked new avenues of exploration. One such avenue involves the use of advanced artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics to prepare extraterrestrial environments and potentially resynthesize human life itself. This paper explores how AI could lead the charge in space colonization by autonomously constructing habitats, terraforming hostile planets, and ultimately recreating human life through synthetic biology and cloning. By considering AI as not only a tool but a caretaker and creator of future civilizations, we open a discussion on the ethical, philosophical, and technological implications of this groundbreaking approach. The role of AI in resynthesizing human biology, preserving culture, and shaping human evolution across the cosmos invites us to rethink our identity, our legacy, and our future as a multi-planetary species.

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A forgotten genocide is a successful settler project: Jeffrey S. Bachman, Esther Brito Ruiz (eds), A Modern History of Forgotten Genocides and Mass Atrocities, Routledge, 2025

23Sep24

Description: This is the first textbook of its kind to amass cases of genocide and other mass atrocities across the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries that have largely been pushed to the periphery of Genocide Studies or “forgotten” altogether. Divided into four thematic sections – Genocide and Imperialism; War and Genocide; State Repression, Military Dictatorships, and Genocide; and Human-Caused Famine, Attrition, and Genocide – A Modern History of Forgotten Genocides and Mass Atrocities covers five continents, including case studies from Biafra, Yemen, Argentina, Russia, China, and Bengal. They range from the French conquest of Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century to the Yazidi genocide perpetrated by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017, and show that at times of rising authoritarianism, military conquest, and weaponization of hunger, lines between what is war and what is genocide are increasingly blurred. By including genocides and mass atrocities that are often overlooked, this volume is crucial to the ongoing debates about whether “this atrocity or that one” amounts to genocide. By including key points, events, terms, and critical questions throughout, this is the ideal textbook for undergraduate students who study genocide, mass atrocities, and human rights across the globe.

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The violence of settler digital communication: Madi Day, Bronwyn Carlson, ‘Predators and Perpetrators: Cultures of White Settler Violence in So-Called Australia’, in Denton Callander, Panteá Farvid, Amir Baradaran, Thomas A. Vance (eds), Sexual Racism and Social Justice: Reckoning with White Supremacy and Desire, Oxford Academic, 2024, pp. 189-205

23Sep24

Abstract: White settlers across the continent now known as Australia have violently imposed on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives since first contact and continue to do so through digital communication technologies. This chapter examines how a culture of white violence toward Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples occurs both offline and online, applying Indigenous queer and feminist analysis to situate this violence within broader settings of settler colonialism and colonial heteropatriarchy. The chapter analyzes online discourse and predatory behavior from white settlers within larger systems of violence that service settler colonial societies. It troubles the distinction between offline and online violence and considers how hierarchies of desirability are reproduced in each. Finally, it argues that while there is significant attention to those targeted by white settlers, there is need for greater attention paid to the predators and perpetrators who enact violence in online and offline spaces.

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Storytelling the end of settler colonialism? Francesca Mussi (ed.), Indigenous Storytelling and Connections to the Land: More-Than-Human Worlds, Palgrave, 2024

23Sep24

Description: This book builds on the perspective that, for Indigenous peoples, relations to the land are familial, intimate, intergenerational, spiritual, instructive, and life nourishing, and it is these relations that Western societies sought to destroy as part of their colonial projects of territorial conquest and exploitation of resources. Positioning storytelling as a research methodology and a model of decolonial practice, this edited collection seeks to explore the following key questions: how does Indigenous storytelling contribute to understanding Indigenous identity and the crucial role of the land in Indigenous ways of life? How can Indigenous storytelling subvert colonial narratives of the land? How can Indigenous storytelling contribute to addressing colonial exploitations of the land and its resources? Can Indigenous storytelling become a rich mode for the investigation of current climate crises? And, finally, how does storytelling assist Indigenous peoples in restoring their intimate relations to the land and its natural gifts? Through critical analysis of a unique range of Indigenous storytelling practices, including fiction, performative art, new media platforms, archaeological findings and personal live-experienced stories, this collection aims to examine the interplay between colonialism and current environmental challenges, and to expose the impacts – past, present, and future – of Western worldviews on Indigenous connections to the land, whilst simultaneously bringing to the fore Indigenous ethos of care and land custodianship.

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Capitalising on settler colonialism: David McNally, ‘Marx on Colonization and Bonded Labor: The End of Capital and the Beginning of a Journey’, Review of Radical Political Economy, 2024

23Sep24

Abstract: The concluding chapter of Karl Marx’s Capital (volume 1) has received remarkably little scholarly commentary. This is especially surprising as Marx addresses there “the modern theory of colonization” developed by Edward Gibbon Wakefield. But rather than systematically pursue the issue of colonialism, Marx investigates Wakefield’s theory in order to illuminate the processes of primitive accumulation (or “originary dispossession”) that gave birth to capitalism in Europe. This article suggests directions in which Marx ought to have gone in order to analyze the globalization of capitalism outside of Europe by means of colonialism. In so doing, it proposes the need to recenter bondage, slavery, colonialism, and racism as constitutive elements of capitalism as a global system.

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Healthy developments: Margaret A. Chell, Caroline Smith, Damon P. Leader Charge, Stephanie W. Sun, Michael A. Sundberg, Vikas Gampa, ‘Community Collaboration to Develop a Curriculum on Settler Colonialism and the Social Determinants of Health’, Teaching and Learning in Medicine, 2024

23Sep24

Abstract: American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) communities continue to experience health disparities and poor health outcomes, which are influenced by social determinants of health. The theory of settler colonialism provides a framework for understanding the structures that affect social determinants of health and the resulting health disparities. Western biomedicine and medical education have been implicated in perpetuating settler colonialism, and as a result Indigenous medical educators and leaders have called for increased education and understanding of the structural and social determinants of health affecting Indigenous populations. One important method is through community-based approaches to curriculum design. In collaboration with community leaders and experts, we identified the need for a curriculum on health in the context of settler colonialism, with a focus on resilience and community-directed efforts to improve wellness and care. Alongside Indigenous leaders and educators, we developed a unique curriculum focused on settler colonialism, the social determinants of health, and the assets inherent to the Native Nation where we work. Developed for non-Native learners and clinicians, the curriculum is designed to help provide context for the historical and political etiologies of health inequities experienced by the local community. Local educators helped shape a video lecture series associated with readings and experiential learning activities in 10 domains, providing an overview of settler colonialism and how it affects the social determinants of health. Our model of education draws upon the strengths and assets of communities and can improve health outcomes as well as learners’ understandings of AI/AN-specific needs. We expect that our collaborative approach results in improved relationships among the Non-Native learners and providers and community members.

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Choreographed settler colonialism: Alexandra Giancarlo, ‘Indigenous dance, sport-for-development, and settler colonial (de)choreographies in the Indian Residential School System’, Leisure, 2024

23Sep24

Abstract: The Department of Indian Affairs and church counterparts who administered Canada’s Indian Residential School System promoted Euro-Canadian physical activities to reform and replace traditional Indigenous physical culture practices like the Sundance and the potlatch. Administrators used Western forms of movement to compel obedience to Euro-Canadian culture, including spirituality. An observer wrote that the students ‘must not sing, dance, beat a drum, or pray in the Indian way. They may dance in the manner of the White people …’ (Sheridan, ca. 1930s). The use of sport for such social engineering, usually by colonial state and church missions, has been called sport-for-development. This paper examines how these institutions conceptually framed, and put into practice, their interventions into Indigenous physical cultures using the terrain of the body. I argue that the Indian residential school system imposed ‘settler colonial choreographies’ in a domestic sport-for-development process.

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