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Settler colonialism is a current affair: Zachary Levenson, ‘Review Essay: On Settler Colonialism, Its Critics, and Its Critics’ Critics’, American Journal of Sociology, 2026

12Jan26

Excerpt: “Settler colonialism” has become the latest academic concept transformed by pundits into a bogeyman. Just since October 7, 2023, to cite a few examples, Time featured a cover story cautioning that application of the label to Israel “run[s] the risk of perpetuating antisemitism,” and the New York Times published multiple “explainers” of the term, describing it as only recently gaining in popularity. And in an op-ed for the Times, columnist Bret Stephens (2024) insists that the term focuses excessively on Israel. For him, deeming a country to be “settler colonial” means insisting that all “settlers” leave immediately, or else, buried in an aside, “Live under new rulers”.


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The race of Indigenous peoples: Sofia Locklear, ‘”People love playing the ‘what are you?’ game with me”: Street Racialization of American Indian and Alaska Native individuals’, Social Problems, 2026

12Jan26

Abstract: American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) people are often excluded from the sociology of race within the United States. To expand research on racialization, this article examines how AIAN individuals experience and navigate racialization through the concept of “street race.” Drawing on interviews with a diverse sample of 47 AIAN individuals living in urban settings nationally, I find that respondents’ experience an erasure of their Indigenous identity and their assumed street race to be “Asian,” “Middle Eastern,” “Black,” “Latinx/Spanish-speaking,” and “White.” These results varied by geography across the United States and demonstrate that a legal AIAN identity does not always match with the day-to-day encounters of street race.


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On settler colonial Kashmir: Tasleem Malik, Maira Safdar, Fiazullah Jan, ‘Beyond occupation: memory, displacement, and the logic of settler control in Kashmir’, GeoJournal, 91, 2026, #9

12Jan26

Abstract: The settler colonial project of India in occupied Kashmir operates through a sustained project of domination, cultural erasure and demographic engineering. While India’s political, military, and demographic interventions in Kashmir are well-documented, their profound and enduring impacts on individuals, particularly the 1989 Kashmiri refugees, remain underexplored. This study addresses this gap by drawing on the ethnographic accounts of the Kashmiri refugees to examine India’s settler colonial project. Drawing on an interpretative phenomenological approach, this research examines how the refugees narrate their displacement and resistance and the long-term impacts of India’s settler colonial logic on their identity, history, culture, and psychological well-being. Situated within a settler colonial and postcolonial theory, this study argues that India’s state governance in occupied Kashmir is an enduring project of territorial occupation, demographic engineering, and cultural erasure. It examines the role of collective agency and the resilience of Kashmiris in shaping their identities in exile. By amplifying the narratives of Kashmiri refugees, this study seeks to articulate a framework that connects the macro-structures of power that view Kashmir as a security issue and an interstate conflict to the micro-texture of lived experiences, repositioning subaltern testimony and indigenous agency within postcolonial/decolonial literature.


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Reliable allies? Sarah Nelson, ‘The missing map: a meditation on allyship’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

12Jan26

Abstract: In 2019, I went on a search of the National Library and Archives of Canada. I was looking for the petitions of Pierre Shawinipinessi, an Algonquin leader who successfully petitioned the British government for land to be set aside for his community, only to have the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, twenty years later, deny that such a promise had ever been made. One of the documents I set out to find is a ‘map or sketch’ referred to in a letter. I never found this map. I position this map that I couldn’t find as a starting point, to identify and address the ways in which settler colonialism makes its presence felt, even among settlers working closely in allyship with Algonquin communities. The map is a metaphor for colonial engagement with Algonquin land, illuminating some of the forms of ethical trespass that settlers fall into, and exploring possibilities for maintaining or re-creating ethical space. Through a self-reflective examination of seven years of research and community work with Algonquin communities and settlers in Algonquin territory, this paper explores some of the challenges inherent in this work, and possible solutions related to the authority of Algonquin peoples in Algonquin land.


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Poetic refusal (of settler colonialism): Jeffrey Sacks, Poeticality: In Refusal of Settler Life, Fordham University Press, 2026

11Jan26

Description: “Will you not memorize a little poetry to halt the slaughter?” the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote. Darwish’s poetic statement points to world-evacuating and genocidal violences—in a triangulation of Palestine, Iraq, and the American settler state—as his language recalls us to a sonority in utterance and acts of refusal in collective form. Through readings of Arabic and Arab poetry, art, translation, and philosophy, Jeffrey Sacks illumines an indetermined, non-accumulative, non-propertied manner of lingual doing—across post-Ottoman topographies and states, and in excess of any single language—where language is a practice in sociality, the social is indistinct from the ontological, and being is a poetic mode—what this book calls “poeticality.” Poeticality studies the Lebanese-American poet and painter Etel Adnan, the Iraqi poet and translator Khālid al-Maʿālī, philosophers in the Arabic peripatetic tradition, and writings of Karl Marx, Paul Celan, Walter Benjamin, and others, to demonstrate a sense of form wholly other than what is advanced in self-determined social existence, linguistic self-understanding, and philosophical self-representation—a manner of address and a social pose, which Sacks summarizes under the heading “settler life.” Settler life—a form of life, a practice of reading, and an asymmetric distribution of social destruction—asserts itself as a generalized and regulating attack upon Black and Indigenous life, and upon all forms of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-heteronormative existence. “Everything is in the language we use,” the Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier has written. This book—learning from Long Soldier’s observation and with Darwish’s sense of the poetic—affirms the demand for Indigenous sovereignty, in Palestine, in Turtle Island, and elsewhere, a demand which, through the collective acts occasioned in it, decomposes and deposes all sovereign forms and all stately legalities, in refusal of settler life.


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Climate change resettlement and settler colonialism: Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat, Irit Katz, ‘Climate change resettlement and inhabitation: Spatialising cultures of colonial pasts and alternative futures in the global south’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2026

11Jan26

Abstract: Climate change is an inherently human-made phenomenon that shapes the mobilities of species and things who, in turn, influence the ways climate change is experienced by humans. These multifaceted climate mobilities are grounded in the spatial histories of imperialism and settler-colonialism, and the legacies of socio-cultural injustice inflicted upon the Global South. Central to climate mobilities is climate change resettlement, which, because it is often informed by colonial cultures of modernity and capitalism, tends to exacerbate environmental change and collapse. Spatial forms of climate change resettlement and related urban and architectural forms of inhabitation, as this special issue highlights, are rooted in the cultural crisis of coloniality, legitimised among colonial powers and local populations in the Global South. An examination of the cultural dynamics and related politics of power embedded in urban and architectural discourses, we argue, is key in understanding and unlearning past and current (neo)colonial approaches to climate change. This introduction to the special issue argues that, by investigating climate resettlement in its broader definition and practices—within the historical complexities of ecological and national coloniality and warfare—enables a more thoughtful engagement with sustainable climate inhabitation. In order to surpass the limitations of coloniality and its entangled cultural-climatic relations with modernity, the articles of this special issue offer new frameworks to spatially examine colonial pasts and imagine situated, yet radically alternative approaches for the future. A broad temporal lens, we argue, is necessary as we face environmental upheaval and learn to cope with the destructive impacts of climate change in the Global South and beyond.


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Hummusphobic gastrocolonialism: Dafna Hirsch, The Israeli Career of Hummus: Colonial Appropriation, Authenticity, and Distinction, Indian University Press, 2026

11Jan26

Description: How did an Arab dish become an Israeli culinary passion? Less than a century ago, hummus and other Palestinian staples were often met with disinterest and sometimes outright rejection among Zionist settlers. Yet for modern-day Israelis, hummus has become a dish that is both everyday and iconic, intertwined with cultural perceptions of authenticity, indigeneity, and masculinity. The Israeli Career of Hummus tracks how hummus has turned from an “Arab” or “Oriental” food into a national symbol and culinary cult in Israel. The Israeli Career of Hummus traces how hummus has turned from an “Arab” or “Oriental” food into a national symbol and culinary cult in Israel. Rather than regard culinary appropriation as a necessary outcome of land colonization, author Dafna Hirsch instead examines how changing gastronomic, economic, and political factors intersected with material and cultural production in a multilayered and socially stratified colonial context. Departing from the thesis of cultural erasure of hummus’s Arab or Palestinian provenance, Hirsch shows how the Arab identity of hummus functions as a semiotic resource, which is sometimes suppressed and at other times leveraged to lend authenticity to hummus—and thus to its consumers. Shedding new light on the sociohistorical process of culinary appropriation amidst settler colonialism and nation building, The Israeli Career of Hummus invites readers to consider the complex trajectory and multiple factors and mediators that transformed a humble staple into an emotionally charged and politically contested culinary icon.


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Physical education: Shrehan Lynch, Lisa Hunter, Carla Luguetti, Jay Laurendeau, Chen Chen, ‘Decanonise the “forefather”: Situating Muska Mosston’s Contributions to Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy within the Context of Zionist Settler Colonization of Palestine’, Journal of Emerging Sport Studies, 13, 2026

11Jan26

Abstract: Muska Mosston, renowned as a forefather of pedagogical innovation in the field of physical education and sport pedagogy, is celebrated for his Spectrum of Teaching Styles, which has permeated the field for decades. However, an examination of his biography reveals problematic ties to Zionist settler colonialism, including active participation in the dispossession and erasure of Palestinian communities. Using a decolonial lens, this paper critically interrogates the legacy of Mosston, challenging the normalisation of settler-colonial ideologies within academic discourse. In exploring Mosston’s legacy through a decolonial lens, we are also compelled to reflect: How do we engage with the work of scholars whose lives and ideologies are deeply intertwined with systems of oppression? Can we separate the value of their contributions from the oppressive systems they may have been a part of? Furthermore, we urge professional organizations and academic institutions to reflect on their complicity in idolatrizing and therefore normalizing such legacies; we suggest instead that they employ practices that uphold truth-telling, advance healing, embrace ethics and actively reduce violence. By foregrounding these self-and institutional-reflective questions, we seek to advance a more equitable, ethical and axiologically reflexive scholarly practice in physical education and the sport pedagogy community more broadly.


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Something fishy in the settler law: Roslynn Ang, ‘Refusing settler sovereignty: salmon fishing for Ainu rituals’, International Journal of Heritage Studies, 2026

11Jan26

Abstract: Settler laws over Indigenous land are often an unquestioned norm, and depending on the political climate of the settler nation, some states do accommodate Indigenous access to natural resources for their cultural practices. However, what happens when Indigenous communities refuse to ask settler authorities for permission to practice their heritage? This paper examines the actions of an Ainu Ekashi (elder) who fished for salmon on the Monbetsu River for the Kamuy cep nomi, a ceremony to welcome salmon migrating upstream. While the Ainu are allowed to fish for ritual purposes, the Ekashi refused to ask the Hokkaido prefectural government for permission. Consequently, he faced criminal charges from the prefecture. His actions galvanised Ainu community members and scholar-allies across the island, raising the question of sustainability in commercial salmon fishing within Indigenous lands. I argue that the Ekashi’s refusal to obtain settler permission is an act of social justice towards the decolonisation of Indigenous lands. His action also highlights the unfinished nature of settler colonialism and its failure to represent Indigenous heritage. Consequently, political acts of refusal through the discourse of an authorised intangible heritage can be a strategy for regaining a degree of Indigenous sovereignty.


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Transnational Christian settler colonialism from a settler colony: Thandi Gamedze, Sarojini Nadar, ‘Sanctifying settler colonialism: An intersectional discursive analysis of a South-African Christian Zionist media statement’, Journal for the Study of Religion, 38, 2, 2025.

10Jan26

Abstract: This paper presents an intersectional discursive analysis of a web statement issued on January 10, 2024 by a group of selfidentified South African Christian leaders opposing the South African government’s genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice. Using a critical discourse analytic framework informed by Michel Foucault’s theorization of discourse and power, the paper examines how the statement’s pragmatic, ethical, and theological dimensions work together to encourage and legitimize support for Israel through the language of moral and spiritual authority. Across three identified fronts, the statement deploys distinctive rhetorical strategies. On the pragmatic front, it invokes national interest and religious freedom to construct a regime of ‘moral reasonableness’. On the ethical front, it appropriates feminist and liberationist vocabularies such as ‘victim blaming’ to reframe Israel as the victim and Palestine as the aggressor. On the theological front, it redeploys the language of peace characteristic of apartheidera church theology, sanctifying inaction under the guise of neutrality. Additionally, read alongside the Kairos Document of 1985, the analysis situates the 2024 statement within a changing media ecology that transforms how religious authority is produced and circulated. Whereas the Kairos Document emerged from a slow, consultative print culture rooted in collective discernment, radical pedagogy, and liberation theology, the 2024 statement belongs to the fast, affect-driven environment of digital media. Its authority derives not from theological rigor but from rhetorical immediacy and emotional resonance. Drawing on Mitri Raheb’s notion of empire’s theological ‘software’, the paper argues that the statement exemplifies how digital media now function as moral infrastructure, transforming emancipatory theologies into instruments of ideological power. In doing so, it advances scholarship on religion and media by tracing the shift from the deliberative textuality of Kairos to the affective immediacy of digital circulation, revealing how the Christian Zionist discourse in South Africa performs a distinct kind of theological labor that both mediates and moralizes empire in the 21st century.


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