Abstract: Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the notion of Palestine/Israel as a ‘laboratory’ for the production and export of advanced weapons, security knowhow and technology. Critics of Israeli wars and the ongoing colonization of Palestine use the laboratory metaphor to make sense of Israeli state policies and practices used in controlling Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and fighting wars but also to address how Israeli instruments of violence come to travel elsewhere. This article brings these discussions into sharper focus by examining how the concept of the laboratory is employed in making sense of Israel’s perceived centrality in global patterns violence and militarism, here termed the laboratory thesis. The article argues that although the thesis develops powerful insights, it has analytical limitations. It further calls into question the thesis’ polemical force, suggesting that critical references to Palestine/Israel as a laboratory reinforce misleading ideological tropes at the core of Israel’s settler colonial project. The article takes these concerns as an opportunity to re-assemble the policing/security laboratory as a critical concept, in relation to Palestine/Israel, the global war on terror and beyond.

Excerpt: The word “settler” tends to carry with it connotations both bucolic and nostalgic. Even certain dictionary definitions are at pains to remove it from the colonial circumstances in which it is most often employed. The Oxford Living Dictionary offers a definition and sample sentences that exemplify the willful act of erasure at the heart of everyday understandings of the word:

A person who settles in an area, typically one with no or few previous inhabitants.

“the settlers had come to America to look for land”

“Jewish settlers”

The field of settler colonial studies has worked to undo the erasure performed by this definition by theorizing settler colonialism as a distinct structure of imperial domination defined by a genocidal project aimed primarily at seizing Native territory rather than exploiting Native labor. Settler colonialism, in the United States and other settler societies around the globe, is a structure that must be dismantled in the present, rather than an event that can be consigned to the historical past. For settler colonial studies, “settler” names both the perpetrators and the beneficiaries of this form of structural violence.

Excerpt: The desire to undertake a special issue on Indigenous Food arose during a conversation that took place between the co-editors following a panel on the same topic at the annual conference of the Native American Indigenous Studies Association in 2015. The panel contained a mixture of conversations that focused on the meanings and relationships of Indigenous peoples with land and food; the efforts and importance of re-knowing and re-defining those relationships through stories centred around community and family; and the ways in which settler colonialism operates to undermine Indigenous food sovereignty at both the structural and epistemological levels.

Abstract: In the context of expanding community engagement efforts by universities and growing awareness of the past and current impacts of settler-colonialism in Canada, this study explores one Indigenous-settler, community-university partnership. Building on a framework of community-university engagement and decolonization, this case study explores a partnership between Fraser Valley Aboriginal Children and Family Services Society (Xyolhemeylh) and the Division of Health Care Communication at the University of British Columbia (UBC-DHCC). This partnership, called the “Community as Teacher” program, began in 2006 and engages groups of UBC health professional students in three-day cultural summer camps. This qualitative case study draws on analysis of program documents and interviews with Xyolhemeylh and UBC-DHCC participants. The findings of the study are framed within “Four Rs”—relevance, risk-taking, respect, and relationship-building—which extend existing frameworks of Indigenous community-university engagement. Committed to a foundation of mutual relevance to their missions, both community and university partners undertook risk-taking, based on their respective contexts, in establishing and investing in the relationship. Respect, expressed as working “in a good way,” likewise formed the basis for interpersonal relationship-building. By outlining the findings in relation to these four themes, this study provides a potential framework for practitioners and researchers in Indigenous-university partnerships

Abstract: In this overview, I reflect on how the essays of this issue exemplify a range of “entanglements” between emerging Indigenous practices and art theory. Further, I try to draw attention both to some earlier models of the experiments in the projects presented as well as to the specific history of exhibitions that has influenced the developments in the art world. Finally, following the ways in which the essays attend to the disruptions Indigenous practice presents to settler colonial hegemony, I introduce a resonance between the interventions of decolonization and the semiotic concept of defamiliarization. 

Abstract: This chapter applies a decolonial frame to the study of racism in the Italian-Australian context. The first part provides a historical outline of Australian racist and xenophobic attitudes, policies, and practices against Italians. The second part analyses the strategies these migrants employed in response to such prejudice; it highlights, in particular, Italian migrants’ constant attempts to be recognised as white and respectable, often to the detriment of other, darker, and more subaltern groups. The third part of the chapter argues for the importance of a decolonial approach to the study of Italian migration history. This section emphasises the Italian role in the dispossession of First Nations’ land and the persisting prejudice against Indigenous people, while also drawing attention to the many positive relationships between Italians and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Description: Violence and intimacy were critically intertwined at all stages of the settler colonial encounter, and yet we know surprisingly little of how they were connected in the shaping of colonial economies. Extending a reading of ‘economies’ as labour relations into new arenas, this innovative collection of essays examines new understandings of the nexus between violence and intimacy in settler colonial economies of the British Pacific Rim. The sites it explores include cross-cultural exchange in sealing and maritime communities, labour relations on the frontier, inside the pastoral station and in the colonial home, and the material and emotional economies of exploration. Following the curious mobility of texts, objects, and frameworks of knowledge, this volume teases out the diversity of ways in which violence and intimacy were expressed in the economies of everyday encounters on the ground. In doing so, it broadens the horizon of debate about the nature of colonial economies and the intercultural encounters that were enmeshed within them. 

Abstract: The Canadian and international scholarship on settler colonialism has focused primarily on relationships between Indigenous people and settlers and the connected practices of racialization, dispossession, and violence that underpin these. Investigating British family letters from early settler British Columbia – a widely produced and circulated body of sources that largely ignore these scholarly foci – this article contends that settlers’ personal everyday also played a significant role in the foundations of settler colonialism. Taking epistolary discussions of food as a specific lens onto this issue, it explains that correspondents used descriptions of food acquisition and preparation to explain key points of difference between British Columbia and the United Kingdom, while writing about dining in ways that emphasized their continued connections and aspirations to metropolitan family norms. At the same time, this focus sustained silences, most notably about Indigenous people. Overall, the article argues, British family letters largely did not construct meaning for settlers’ lives in antagonistic contrast to the practices of locally racialized “others” but, rather, in trans-imperial communication and comparison to metropolitan “others.” In doing so, this correspondence reproduced Britons’ disregard of Indigenous people, translated British Columbia into a legible, relatable, and exclusive settler home, and entrenched this understanding as colonial knowledge in extended family networks. In this way, letters about food reflected a broader politics of the personal everyday that underpinned the settler colonial project.

Abstract: The decolonisation of criminology should not be seen as an event marked by the publication of an eponymous text, rather it should be seen as the scholar-activism that is on-going especially in the face of the reality that postcolonialism appears to be giving way to the project of recolonisation. Moreover, the struggle for decolonisation continues due to the fact that the postcolonial does not capture adequately the ambition of permanence in settler colonialism. Imperialism is stubbornly intolerant of decolonisation especially in an exclusionary scholarly field like criminology that remains under the dominance of patriarchal white supremacist imperialist thought. Like all Eurocentric disciplines, Criminology demands the ‘submission’ of critical Indigenous scholars as a condition for toleration and tokenistic rewards by the ‘guild masters’ in the discipline with the institutionalised racist-sexist-imperialist power to pass or fail, award or deny grants, publish or perish, approve policies or criminalise Others. As a consequence, most of the former colonised locations have failed to develop teaching in criminology with the exception of settler colonial locations where the discipline is booming even while Indigenous scholars continue to be marginalised everywhere.

Description: Many people learn about Indigenous politics only through the most controversial and confrontational news: the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s efforts to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, for instance, or the battle to protect Bears Ears National Monument in Utah, a site sacred to Native peoples. But most Indigenous activism remains unseen in the mainstream—and so, of course, does its significance. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui set out to change that with her radio program Indigenous Politics. Issue by issue, she interviewed people who talked candidly and in an engaging way about how settler colonialism depends on erasing Native peoples and about how Native peoples can and do resist.