settler colonial studies blog

The environmental citizenship of settlers: Rocío M. Garcia, Mattias Borg Rasmussen, ‘Settling environmental citizenship: The presentation of self in conservation encounters’, The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2023

01Oct23

Abstract: Far from a settled fact, environmental citizenship is always in the making. In this article, we analyze how the settlers of a protected area in Patagonia, Argentina, seek to legitimize their claims for natural resources and territory through strategic representations of themselves. The self-presentation molds not only their own political subjects, but also the public authority of the governing offices. We argue that the legitimization of public institutions is partial and fragmented, allowing settlers to legitimize their claims and become active producers of environmental citizenship. The conservation encounters reproduce social practices, cultural symbols, and governmental artifacts. In this way, they contribute to the affirmation of state authority and the hegemony of the nation-state through their reproduction of the Patagonian imaginaries, while also curbing the sphere of influence of any particular institution.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The citizenship of settlers: Jatinder Mann (ed.), Citizenship in Transnational Perspective: Australia, Canada, and Aotearoa New Zealand, Palgrave Macmillan, 2023

01Oct23

Description: This edited collection brings together leading and emerging international scholars who explore citizenship through the two overarching themes of Indigeneity and ethnicity. They approach the subject from a range of disciplinary perspectives: historical, legal, political, and sociological. Therefore, this book makes an important and unique contribution to the existing literature through its transnational, inter- and multidisciplinary perspectives. The collection includes scholars whose work on citizenship in settler societies moves beyond the idea of inclusion (fitting into extant citizenship regimes) to innovative models of inclusivity (refitting existing models) to reflect the multiple identities of an increasingly post-national era, and to promote the recognition of Indigenous citizenships and rights that were suppressed as a formative condition of citizenship in these societies.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler colonialism as bioenhancement (really?): Konrad Szocik, Arvin M. Gouw, ‘Moral Bioenhancement for Space: Should We Enhance Morally Future Deep-Space Astronauts and Space Settlers?’, Theology and Science, 2023

30Sep23

Abstract: The idea of moral bioenhancement has been discussed in recent years by ethicists and philosophers. While such discussion covers many different issues on Earth, they have not yet been considered in the context of future human space missions. In this paper, we discuss the bioethics of biomedical moral enhancement for space whether it is possible, probable, and preferable. We show that the ethical context of moral bioenhancement for space differs from analogical contexts on Earth. We point out that space exploration policy should take into account the possibility of moral bioenhancement.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Indigenous authenticity through settler ventriloquism? Lindsay Stephens, ‘”As Long as it Gets Read”: The Lakota As-Told-To Genre, Authenticity, and Mediated Authorship in Mary Brave Bird’s Lakota Woman and Ohitika Woman’, Studies in American Indian Literatures, 35, 1-2, 2023, pp. 84-103

30Sep23

Abstract: This essay examines Mary Brave Bird’s controversial as-told-to autobiographies Lakota Woman and Ohitika Woman and situates them within the rich catalog of Lakota activist literature. Like most texts in the Lakota as-told-to genre, Brave Bird’s books, co-authored with Richard Erdoes, have long been denigrated and dismissed by scholars because of their collaborative roots; many critics challenge their authenticity and the nature of the stories being told. The first section of this essay interrogates the validity of those critics’ complaints, and the latter half counters those complaints by offering an alternative, updated reading of the texts that deploys two reading strategies proposed by Channette Romero: orality and discursive characterization. Through those lenses, we find that Mary Brave Bird’s stories, though they may be mediated to some degree through Richard Erdoes, serve as crucial artifacts of conditions in the American settler state in the twentieth century.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The Nakba as a settler structure: Bahia Munem, ‘Manifold Nakbas and the Making of a Palestinian Diaspora in the Americas’, Political Theology, 2023

30Sep23

Abstract: This article considers how ongoing Palestinian dispossession, manifold Nakbas (catastrophes), stemming from the active frontiers of Israeli settler colonialism and catalyzed by religious nationalism and international impunity, continues to extend and expand the Palestinian diaspora into the Americas and other regions. This also structures Palestinian personhood beyond the active space of the settler-colony. I utilize three seemingly disparate cases to make this argument. I begin with Israel’s military onslaught on Gaza in May 2021. I then offer a personal account, followed by ethnographic research conducted with Palestinian Iraq War refugees resettled in Brazil and also examine other military conflicts in the Middle East that have resulted in continual forced Palestinian displacements. Throughout, I demonstrate how Israeli settler colonialism is not an event but a structure which impacts Palestinian life far outside of the original space of displacement.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Governing is educating (even for settlers): Julie McLeod, Fiona Paisley, ‘Ambivalent histories: education, “race”, and the modernisation of settler/colonial governance in Australasia and the Pacific, 1900s–1960s’, History of Education, 52, 5, 2023, pp. 687-696

30Sep23

Excerpt: The history of colonialism and the history of education have tended to be regarded as separate spheres of governance and scholarship. Our focus here, however, is on understanding the ways in which they are deeply connected, seeing them as sharing the goal of modernity that sought to transform individuals, states and society, including the modernisation of colonial relations. This special issue thus seeks to bring history of education and the history of colonialism into closer dialogue to show the ways in which ‘education’ has been directly imbricated in liberal, progressive, ‘protective’ and humanitarian responses to the conditions of settler-colonialism in this period. It explores how efforts towards ‘native education’ in this region contributed to new forms of settler governance as well as to contestations and/or mobilisations of this, not least as seen by Indigenous people. While Africa and India have featured in histories of colonial education that have been largely framed in the context of British Empire, the Pacific offers an exceptional opportunity to study interactions between British and American imperial and colonial modes of governance and their various articulations. This encompasses a focus from ‘international’ expertise and exchange, to the ambivalent circulations between ‘universal’ and local contexts and practices. Australasia and Oceania have not been sufficiently recognised as key sites in international and inter-imperial exchanges concerning the future of colonised subjects in the era of liberal, international and humanitarian imperialism that characterised the early twentieth century. This is reflective of the relative lack of attention to Oceania in terms of histories of education in general and, we argue, it is also reflective of insufficient recognition of the social sciences in settler/colonial rule.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Selling settlers: Felicity Barnes, Selling Britishness: Commodity Culture, the Dominions, and Empire, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022

30Sep23

Description: From the 1920s until the outbreak of the Second World War, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand filled British shop windows, newspaper columns, and cinema screens with “British to the core” Canadian apples, “British to the backbone” New Zealand lamb, and “All British” Australian butter. In remarkable yet forgotten advertising campaigns, prime ministers, touring cricketers, “lady demonstrators,” and even boxing kangaroos were pressed into service to sell more Dominion produce to British shoppers. But as they sold apples and butter, these campaigns also sold a Dominion-styled British identity. Selling Britishness explores the role of commodity marketing in creating Britishness. Dominion settlers considered themselves British and marketed their commodities accordingly. Meanwhile, ambitious Dominion advertising agencies set up shop in London to bring British goods, like Ovaltine, back to the dominions and persuade their fellow citizens to buy British. Conventionally nationalist narratives have posited the growth of independent national identities during the interwar period, though some have suggested imperial sentiment endured. Felicity Barnes takes a new approach, arguing that far from shaking off or relying on any lasting sense of Britishness, Dominion marketing produced it. Selling Britishness shows that when constructing Britishness, advertisers employed imperial hierarchies of race, class, and gender. Consumption worked to bolster colonialism, and advertising extended imperial power into the everyday. Drawing on extensive new archives, Selling Britishness explores a shared British identity constructed by marketers and advertisers during advertising’s golden age.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Definitely Unworthy: Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory, W. W. Norton, 2021

30Sep23

Description: A masterful and unsettling history of “Indian Removal,” the forced migration of Native Americans across the Mississippi River in the 1830s and the state-sponsored theft of their lands. In May 1830, the United States launched an unprecedented campaign to expel 80,000 Native Americans from their eastern homelands to territories west of the Mississippi River. In a firestorm of fraud and violence, thousands of Native Americans lost their lives, and thousands more lost their farms and possessions. The operation soon devolved into an unofficial policy of extermination, enabled by US officials, southern planters, and northern speculators. Hailed for its searing insight, Unworthy Republic transforms our understanding of this pivotal period in American history.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Extraction and settlement: Clifford Gordon Atleo, Jonathan Martin Boron, ‘Extractive Settler Colonialism: Navigating Extractive Bargains on Indigenous Territories in Canada’, in Paul Bowles, Nathan Andrews (eds), Extractive Bargains, Springer, 2023, pp. 97-118

30Sep23

Abstract: Canada currently faces the challenge of implementing the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, while also managing the shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy. This shift will require massive new mineral extraction projects in ways that will continue to impact both the Global North and the South. The provincial government of British Columbia and the Canadian federal government have ostensibly committed to the current era of “reconciliation.” Despite this, conflicts over Indigenous jurisdiction and resource development persist in the fossil fuel (i.e. Trans Mountain, Coastal Gas Link) and renewable energy sectors (i.e. Site C dam). Extractive bargains occur at local, national, and global scales. With respect to ongoing fossil fuel extraction in Canada, Indigenous peoples and territories have often been sacrificed in favour of the “national interest.” Myriad factors—legal, political, economic—have led to greater Indigenous involvement in mainstream resource extraction projects via revenue-sharing and impact benefit agreements. We argue that these extractive bargains have been largely Faustian in nature. At the heart of the problem is an ongoing denial of self-determination and Indigenous nations’ (in)ability to exercise true free, prior, and informed consent with respect to development projects, fossil fuel or renewable.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Settler laws for a settler climate: Luciana Iocca, Teresa Fidélis, ‘Are the rights and knowledge of indigenous peoples and local communities being attended to by climate framework laws?’, Climate Policy, 2023

30Sep23

Abstract: Climate change has become a central concern on the international political agenda, challenging the decision-making of different levels of administration and types of actors. Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLC) have been recognized as relevant actors in climate matters, given their knowledge about territory, biodiversity, and their harmonious practices towards nature. With the evolution of knowledge on climate change, an increasing number of countries have developed climate laws. Given the provisions of the Paris Agreement to consider IPLC and their knowledge for climate action, it is relevant to assess how the contents of these types of laws pursue such ambition. By describing and categorizing the contents of climate laws, this article develops evidence-based research about how IPLC are attended to in climate framework laws of different countries. It examines whether the related contents of these laws align with the recommendation of the Paris Agreement regarding the need to consider traditional, indigenous, and local knowledge in the design of adaptation measures. The results show that only one-third of the identified climate laws refer to IPLC. Within these laws, those communities and their knowledge are scarcely attended to. However, a few climate laws develop relevant elements about these communities. The most common element relates to the participation of IPLC in deliberative bodies or climate decisions. In contrast, the least common element relates to the involvement of relevant communities in climate research. Notably, the climate laws of Finland (Europe) and Peru (South America) emerge as more comprehensive in addressing the IPLC and their knowledge than what is found in other countries. Despite the recognized relevance of IPLC and their traditional knowledge for climate change adaptation, the use of climate framework laws to formally foster such recognition is still lacking. Setting up a scheme to monitor how the translation of the Paris Agreement is being undertaken into subsequent legislative processes is desirable. Such a scheme may clarify how IPLC and their traditional knowledge are effectively being considered as initially expected.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute