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The settler colonial education of migrants: Theresa Burruel Stone, Pamela Rivas, ‘A call to reshape our desires: contesting the “inevitable answer” of inclusion within empire’, Race Ethnicity and Education, 2023

15Dec23

Abstract: While increased college access is widely celebrated for racialized peoples, the end goal of inclusion maintains engagement with and desires for wellbeing within the U.S. white supremacist settler state. This paper examines a culturally relevant college preparation program designed primarily for Mexican-origin youth in California to consider the college-going competencies and desires the program socializes youth through and to. Drawing from educator and youth pláticas embedded within an ethnography of the Bridge Program, this scholarship argues that the competencies youth were socialized into for college-going purposes simultaneously prepared them to uphold the settler colonial state. Engaging language socialization and settler colonial studies perspectives, this paper finds that Bridge Program youth were socialized into understandings of better lives as only possible within U.S. empire by framing college as an almost singular pathway to wellbeing. This work calls for anticolonial desires, visions of and pathways to better lives beyond empire’s boundaries.


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Settler capitalism without wage labour: Ann Pomeroy, ‘Rethinking class, capitalism and exploitation from the perspective of family farming in Aotearoa/New Zealand’, Sociologia Ruralis, 2023

15Dec23

Abstract: Using empirical evidence and an exploration of literature on simple commodity and capitalist farm production, a theoretical argument is developed to show that, despite not employing labour, self-employed family farmers (at least in New Zealand) are capitalist, not simple commodity, producers. This has major implications for not only class theorists from a Marxist perspective, with whom we are primarily concerned, but also poses questions for Weberian inspired stratification adherents preoccupied with occupation and lifestyle. Land ownership, together with the different way capital can be generated in broad-acre livestock farming compared to other industrial settings, enables family farmers to generate profits and accumulate capital. This means that rather than being subsumed by capital, self-employed owners of farm enterprises appropriate surplus value not by directly hiring labour to generate income from their large landholdings but indirectly by utilising the labour of other enterprises and by hiring bourgeois or petit-bourgeois operators (purchasing equipment, technology and knowledge, and using the distribution, processing, marketing and other services supplied by other businesses). Buying and selling land also supports these capitalist enterprises. Although not expropriating surplus value directly to operate their enterprises, capitalised family producers have, as was pointed out in 1985 by David Goodman and Michael Redclift, achieved political legitimacy by distancing themselves at the ideological level from capitalism (despite embracing capitalism at the economic level). By disguising their class interests, such producers are adept at legitimating state policy in their interests.


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The social-settler work of multicultural inclusion: Rupaleem Bhuyan, Sandra Osazuwa, Jill Hanley, Catherine Schmidt, Yoosun Park, ‘“Unless we are Native, we are all immigrants to Canada”: Tensions between multicultural inclusion and settler-colonial consciousness among Canadian social workers’, Journal of Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work, 2023

15Dec23

Abstract: This paper presents a discourse analysis of how social work values, knowledge, and attitudes toward immigrants are represented in 173 open-ended responses to a national survey (n = 1125) of Canadian social workers attitudes toward immigrants. Through discourse analysis of social workers’ commentary, we discuss notable tensions between social workers’ affinity for multicultural inclusion and their critiques of Canadian settler-colonialism. While respondents broadly emphasize “respect for diversity” and the need to advocate for immigrants as expressions of their Canadian and social work identity, some suggest that inequalities facing Indigenous communities should be addressed before Canada continues to increase its investment in immigration. We consider how dichotomizing concerns for Indigenous and immigrant communities reflect the limits of multicultural inclusion and the need to further decolonize social work education and practice. Paper to be submitted to Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Diversity in Social Work.


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The settler colonial city: Lorenzo Veracini (ed.), Special Issue: Urban Indigeneities and Settler Colonial Cities, Urban History Review, 51, 2, 2023

14Dec23

Access the special issue here


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Settling on science fiction: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘Settler Colonialism and Science Fiction: Imagining the Worlds Turned Inside Out’, Journal of Global Postcolonial Studies, 2023

14Dec23

Abstract: For those who were not Indigenous to it, the Americas were once the ‘New World’, colonies, and distant and alien places. When it comes to imagining new worlds, there is no better new world than a literally brand new one. Mars is the closest, and humans recently hurled a few sophisticated objects at it. Billionaire Elon Musk is planning to hurl a few more in that direction and turn it into a colony. Mars, however, has been mainly an imagined place. Science fiction as a literary genre has imagined it, and many other new worlds, and has routinely done so to reflect on real or impending contradictions developing in this one. The contradictions are in a sense where the new worlds are imagined from, but the new worlds are imagined as colonies located somewhere else. This paper sketches the evolution of science fiction colonialism and focuses on the ways in which it is contiguous with a political tradition I have elsewhere defined as ‘the world turned inside out’.


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The world turned inside out today? Joseph Bernstein, ‘Who Would Give This GuyMillions to Build His Own Utopia? Dryden Brown wants Praxis to be a crypto-city for tech bros and tastemakers’, New York Times, 12/12/23

14Dec23

Excerpt: When he took the stage at a conference for “start-up societies” in Amsterdam in October,27-year-old Dryden Brown cut a rumpled figure, moving stiffly in a gray hoodie with a T-shirt poking out at the bottom. He was there to tout his company, Praxis, which has an ambitious goal: to create a newcity on the Mediterranean.


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Boom settlers: Mary E. Thomas, Bruce Braun (eds), Settling the Boom: The Sites and Subjects of Bakken Oil, University of Minnesota Press, 2023

12Dec23

Description: Examines how settler colonial and sexist infrastructures and narratives order a resource boom. Settling the Boom studies how the disruptive forces of an oil boom in the northern Great Plains are contained through the extension of settler temporalities, reassertions of heteropatriarchy, and the tethering of life to the volatility of oil and its cruel optimisms. The collection reveals the results of sustained research in Williston, North Dakota, the epicenter of the “Bakken Boom”.


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Settler colonial numeracy: Laura Soderberg, ‘Data-Driven Childhoods: Settler Colonialism and Numeracy in the Boys’ Literature of Francis La Flesche and Francis Rolt-Wheeler’, American Literature, 2023

09Dec23

Abstract:The turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century marked a time of intensified data collection in the United States focused especially on childhood. This article explores how two children’s narratives, Francis La Flesche’s The Middle Five (1900) and Francis Rolt-Wheeler’s The Boy with the U.S. Census (1911), reflect and respond to this conjunction of boyhood, settler colonialism, and official surveillance. Read together, these texts provide a window into the ways that data collection mediated between the everyday lives of children and the bureaucratic machinations of US colonial governance, marking those data as a site at which governance could be asserted or contested. The colonizing discourse with which these texts engage treats numeracy (rather than the more common literacy) as the threshold for citizenship and reduces Indigenous people, in particular, to the passive objects of measurement and administration. More surprisingly, though, these books also display the role that children’s literature played in placing children themselves in a relationship with numerical data collection, either as enthusiastic and active participants or wary counteragents. While Rolt-Wheeler portrays bureaucracy as an imperialist adventure in which white boys should joyfully partake, La Flesche offers a portrayal of the harm that this incessantly quantitative thinking did to Native children, but he also adds a nuanced critique of the epistemologies underlying such thinking.


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Remix (settler colonialism)! K. Aurylaitė, ‘Contemporary Indigenous Remix: Poets Matthew James Weigel and Jordan Abel Sampling from Settler Colonial Archives’, in S. B.dard-Goulet, C. Premat (eds), Nordic and Baltic Perspectives in Canadian Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Northern Spaces Narratives, Stockholm, Stockholm University Press, 2023, pp. 47–100

09Dec23

Abstract: This chapter discusses two poetry books by Canada’s Indigenous writers, It Was Treaty/ It Was Me (2020) by D.n.sųłin.́ and M.tis Matthew James Weigel and Injun (2016) by Nisga’a Jordan Abel, as different examples of textual remix. Each of them, albeit in different ways, responds to and exploits the contemporary accessibility and materiality of language, which results from its availability in the digital space and on the Internet, and which, in turn, inspires a series of appropriative procedures (such as copying-pasting, sharing, and remixing, for example) to which language – seen as matter – is then subjected. Critics have referred to contemporary culture, which is dominated by new media technologies, as ‘remix’ culture (Manovich, 2015; O’Neil, 2006; Navas, 2012; Goldsmith, 2010; Dworkin, 2010), in which every Internet user re/produces cultural content, even if they often do so mechanically and uncritically. The poets discussed in this chapter engage in reflective and critical dialogues with the textual material they select, appropriate, and transform—that is, remix, often radically and provocatively— for their own works. Both Weigel and Abel sample from settler colonial archives rather than Indigenous sources, revisiting versions of the past as constructed by colonial sources. However, they do not engage in revisionist rewritings of the sources or their messages. Instead, both poets undertake a series of what Walter Mignolo (2014) theorize as ‘decolonial gestures.’ Their poems foreground investigation of and dialogue with the sources as processes to open the source texts for unlimited re-readings and allow them to arrange and articulate their own space within the formulas and structures of settler colonialism, whose ongoing effects on Indigenous land and being both seek to expose and address.


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Indigenous dispossession, settler illegitimacy: Jeremy Patzer, ‘Frail Legitimacies: Examining the Settler-Colonial Legal-Politics Underlying the Wet’suwet’en Crisis’, in Kathryn M. Campbell, Stephanie Wellman (eds), Justice, Indigenous Peoples, and Canada: A History of Courage and Resilience, Routledge, 2023

08Dec23

Abstract: Professor Patzer provides a current example in this chapter for understanding settler colonialism in practice, illustrated through what occurred during the recent crisis affecting the Wet’suwet’en land defenders in British Columbia. Here, he scrutinizes the mixture of law and politics that has dispossessed the Wet’suwet’en of much of their land and ability to fully determine their future, given they are facing the pending imposition of a pipeline on their unceded territory. By delegitimizing Wet’suwet’en traditionalists, the settler state ignores and obscures how they have been challenged when called upon to explain the legitimacy of colonial dispossession, especially in British Columbia, where much of the land is not accounted for by historical land cession treaties. Patzer maintains that while the higher courts have recently been engaged in rewriting Canadian Aboriginal law to produce new legal principles to address past controversies, in effect, what they have produced are “half-measures” of justice. These practices are reflective of an inability to engage with difficult questions about the legitimacy of the Crown’s sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and their lands, further perpetuating colonial conflicts.


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