Abstract: This article examines how white middle class farming women are woven into the narratives of settler colonialism in Australia. Drawing on visual and textual analyses of 150 posts from three major institutional Instagram accounts featuring Australian farming women: @invisfarmer, @agrifutures and @nsw_rwn, we focus on the entanglement of settler colonialism with neoliberal feminism and its everyday enactment as neoliberal femininities. Neoliberal feminism promotes ideals of individualism, choice and self-optimization which are embodied by farming women through affective practices of positivity, resilience and passion, while other emotions, such as anger, are suppressed. These emotional performances legitimize settler claims to land and futurity, reinforcing the erasure of Indigenous presence in rural Australia. By centring rurality, this article extends discussions of settler colonialism, neoliberal feminism and neoliberal femininities which have largely focused on urban contexts.
Abstract: The essay explores the spatial myth of America as constructed through photography, focusing on the American West. It argues that photography has historically shaped the American myth by visualizing the frontier as a contact zone between wilderness and civilization. Using a theoretical framework grounded topological analysis, the essay juxtaposes 19th-century images of progress and expansion with contemporary photographs of desolation and abandonment, revealing a haunting return of the past through spatial configurations that challenge and perpetuate the myth differently. The essay traces the development of Western photography from Civil War-era documentation to the King Survey’s images that combined technological progress and wilderness, revealing how photography’s evidentiary power was intertwined with expansionist imperialism. It then examines the contemporary photographic representation of empty, decaying American spaces as a form of double exposure, where past progress and present abandonment co-exist and entangle topologically as one. This new perspective incorporates psychoanalytic concepts of extimacy and spatial theories such as Soja’s Thirdspace to argue for a breakdown of the binary myth of the frontier and a reconfiguration of photographic spaces as sites of lived experience and haunting. Ultimately, the analysis puts forward the notion of a photographic “ontopology,” where images are not mere temporal records but spatial analogies that sustain the myth of the West through an ongoing visual dialogue.
Abstract: This article examines a largely underexplored and non-obvious historical process: the interactions between the Portuguese imperial state and the emerging field of international indigenous law during the post-war period. It demonstrates how this process was shaped by contemporary dynamics of transformation, protection, and discrimination in relation to indigenous populations and their social, po-litical and physical environments. Although these processes were not directly or explicitly connected to environmental concerns, they reflected some of the logics that would later inform environmental actions and discourses at both local and international levels.
Abstract: What does it mean to live in the specter of death, both literal and symbolic? How does it feel to witness the plausibility of the destruction of one’s peoplehood? This paper investigates the multifaceted presence of death in the lives of Palestinian citizens in Israel, situating their experience within the broader sociological literature on death and structural violence, and the colonizing of emotions. While historical tactics in settler colonial cases have ranged from displacement to genocide depending on a convergence of factors, a persistent feature across colonized experience is the specter of death—felt and anticipated. The article examines four intersecting forms of death: (1) The proliferating crisis of intracommunal crime and homicide; (2) the imposition of social death through settler colonial practices in the wake of the war; (3) the affective and political experience of witnessing the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023; and (4) the convergence of material and symbolic violences, including the constant threat of incidental death. Through a critical engagement with sociological theories of death—particularly as they relate to biopolitics, necropolitics, and indigenous survivance—the paper conceptualizes death not as an endpoint but as a sociopolitical condition under settler colonial rule. In doing so, it foregrounds how Palestinians confront the colonizing of emotions and articulate forms of endurance, refusal, and collective meaning-making amid conditions of ongoing elimination.
Abstract: This essay takes a comparative perspective, looking at both Ireland and Palestine in order to assess the term “settler.” It argues that the planting of settlers in Ireland and Palestine was intended by Britain to subjugate their peoples and take control of their land, while providing a loyal local garrison for the colonial power, all of this under the rubric of a noble “civilizing” mission to tame and uplift the natives. Stripped of its ideological baggage, and placed in context, whether that of Ireland, North America, or Palestine, the term “settler” reeks of aggression toward, and disdain for, the native.
Abstract: Based on the study of colonial archives relating to New Caledonia and on the rich historiography on Australia, especially pertaining to the colony of New South Wales, this article focuses on the ‘indigenous reservation’ as a particular object of study and attempts to shed light on its origins and its development in two territories built and conceived by France and Britain as settler colonies. Rather than providing a direct comparison, the article places in parallel two colonial contexts in which the ‘indigenous reservation’ became a familiar reality during the 19th and 20th centuries as a solution to ‘the problem’ of indigenous presence in territories claimed as ‘new’ by Europeans. As this article lays out, however, the indigenous reservations in New Caledonia and Australia had neither the same history nor the same function.
Abstract: The future of outer space and space law is closely related to the newly developing wave of neo-colonialism on earth. The increasing impact of major power relations, resource driven agendas and with this transformation in global geopolitics, world has seen populist leaders such as Donald Trump emerge in the United States, which means that much of mankind’s colonization in space will be shaped by these factors that are discretely happening on earth. This paper contends that as emerging geopolitical dynamics and the expansion of corporate entities in space alter the prospects for outer space and space law, there are also new challenges. The historical neo-colonial behavioral patterns on earth have increased the risk of “space colonialism”. Such practices threaten peaceful and sustainable exploration of space for all. The study looks at the weaknesses of current space law, particularly the Outer Space Treaty; resource exploration, the activities of the private sector i.e. non state actors and conflict prevention. It calls for a legal framework which is both robust and accommodating of the increasing participation by private actors, protecting equitable access to space resources and preventing this from being monopolized by just a few. The paper explores the need for international cooperation, innovative public private governance models and new mechanisms of law to manage resources to protect the environment and resolve conflicts. It emphasizes the need for perspectives from developing countries to be taken into account, to ensure that benefits are equitably shared and not widening already existing global inequalities. Finally, this paper calls for a multidisciplinary approach which combines perspectives from international relations with those of space law so that all humans can look forward to a time when development in outer space is peaceful, sustainable and fair.
Description: Reflections from the lone traveller, for whom a highway was never the intended destination. Walking the Bypass recounts Ken Wilson’s singular experience of walking alongside the decidedly pedestrian-unfriendly Regina Bypass, all while situating the highway within the ongoing history of settler colonialism in southern Saskatchewan. Through a series of ambitious and unconventional walks, Wilson sets out to understand the arrival and significance of the new (and politically contentious) highway encircling Saskatchewan’s capital as well as the Global Transportation Hub, a sprawling warehouse park the Bypass was intended to serve. He offers a new perspective on these heavily travelled yet untrodden spaces in a region dominated by industrial agriculture and high-speed transportation. Reflecting on the profound transformations to the land since the arrival of settlers in the 1880s, he wonders whether it’s possible to form a connection with the land through walking—even on the gravelly edge of the freeway. In vivid and sincere prose that captures the thoughts of a man trudging along the roadside, Walking the Bypass explores how walking can transform non-places into places and enable settlers to forge a relationship with the land around them.
Description: Turning a lens on the dark legacy of colonialism in horror film, from Scream to Halloween and beyond. Horror films, more than any other genre, offer a chilling glimpse—like peering through a creaky attic door—into the brutality of settler colonial violence. While Indigenous peoples continue to struggle against colonization, white settler narratives consistently position them as a threat, depicting the Indigenous Other as an ever-present menace, lurking on the fringes of “civilized” society. Indigenous inclusion or exclusion in horror films tells a larger story about myths, fears, and anxieties that have endured for centuries. Bloodied Bodies, Bloody Landscapes traces connections between Indigenous representations, gender, and sexuality within iconic horror classics like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Friday the 13th. The savage killer, the romantic and doomed Indian, the feral “mad woman”—no trope or archetype escapes the shadowy influence of settler colonialism. In the end, horror both disrupts and uncovers colonial violence—only to bury its victims once more.
Abstract: Many scholars have noted that while Du Bois clearly analyzed, theorized, and critiqued racialized labor exploitation, he did not have a framework for understanding settler colonialism. This paper systematically examines Du Bois’s corpus of works and adds nuance to this claim. The paper argues that Du Bois did, in fact, theorize settler-colonial dynamics as evidenced by his work on Kenya and South Africa, but he had a narrow, singular conceptualization of settler colonialism as having only one modality—the logic of dispossession. He did not take into consideration eliminatory logics that also form part of settler-colonial domination. The paper excavates the strengths of Du Bois’s analysis of settler colonialism, while highlighting its noteworthy limitations.