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No common ground, not even online: Matthew Homer, ‘The Problem with Common Ground: Translation and Colonial Logics in the ‘Imiloa Astronomy Center Online Interface’, Technical Communication & Social Justice, 1, 1, 2023, pp. 107-128

25Mar23

Abstract: The ‘Imiloa Astronomy Center attempts common ground with Native Hawaiians who protect Mauna a Wākea from occupation by astronomical research. Through interface analysis of the ‘Imiloa website, I consider navigation in three ways: a traditional Hawaiian practice of culture, a user interaction within a digital interface, and a rhetorical figure that steers users through colonial logics. I argue that the ‘Imiloa interface creates a colonial user experience by translating Hawaiian knowledge into Eurowestern frames of knowledge, excluding the political meaning of Mauna a Wākea, and appealing to an ethical tourism ethos. I suggest reflexive approaches of interfacing with cultural knowledges.


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Dispossessory by (non)default: Shiri Pasternak, ‘How Colonialism Makes Its World: Infrastructure and First Nation Debt in Canada’, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2023

25Mar23

Abstract: The default prevention and management policy (DPMP) is a federal policy that was ostensibly designed to address debt and default in First Nation communities in Canada. The policy works through various levels of external intervention into First Nation finances. According to research findings presented in this article, when First Nations are under the policy a new form of deficit is created rather than improved: Housing stock and water infrastructure becomes much worse off than for First Nations who have never been under the policy. This article puts infrastructure to work as method (Cowen 2020) to explore how intimate geographies of infrastructure and “infrastructure denial” (Curley 2021), such as housing and water systems on reserves, connect socioeconomic policy frameworks with theories of settler colonial dispossession.


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The market against settler colonialism? Azri Amram, ‘The Palestinian-Israeli market: ‘feels like somewhere else’, Identities, 2023

25Mar23

Abstract: This article explores the relations between Israel’s Mizrahi Jews (Middle East and North African countries’ descendants) and Palestinian citizens as manifested in the popular open-air market of Kafr Qasim, a Palestinian town in central Israel. The town’s market is a unique space where Jews and Palestinians work, shop, and hang out side by side. This article argues that visitors, vendors, and market owners perceive the market as a space offering an alternative social and political order for various groups suffering from oppression within Israeli society. Specifically considering settler colonialism implications and the status
of Mizrahi Jews in Israeli society. Following findings from an ethnography conducted in Kafr Qasim between 2016–2019, it is argued that the town’s market carries elements such as perceptions of shared cultural space and elsewhereness that allow both Mizrahi Jews and Palestinian citizens to feel more comfortable than in other public places in Israel.


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Are the hobos not settlers? Robert Suits, ‘Hoboes, Wheat, and Climate Precarity, 1870–1922’, Agricultural History, 97, 1, 2023, pp. 1-47

23Mar23

Abstract: This article explores the role of early migrant workers (“harvest hands” or “hoboes”) in the American wheat industry. It argues that the constant threat of drought and other climatic disasters created a state of climate precarity for workers. In the variable climate of the Great Plains, these disasters could not be forecast, and employers instead shunted climatic risk onto impoverished migrants, whose contracts were ad hoc, informal, and could be made, completed, or broken in a matter of hours. It compiles data from over ten thousand newspapers in the Great Plains to show not only how harvest hand employment varied with the climate but also how climatic instability often only became apparent as harvest hands arrived in the state. This made it virtually impossible for employers to plan ahead for labor, as the demand for harvest hands could vary dramatically even from year to year. Though government and union action pointed the way to possible alternative systems, they never emerged. Ultimately, the hobo-wheat complex was an emergent property of climate and industrial capitalism, unplanned by any group or authority, made by the choices of each.


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Settlers on ice: Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment, Duke University Press, 2022

23Mar23

Description: Beginning in the mid-1800s, Americans hauled frozen pond water, then glacial ice, and then ice machines to Hawaiʻi—all in an effort to reshape the islands in the service of Western pleasure and profit. Marketed as “essential” for white occupants of the nineteenth-century Pacific, ice quickly permeated the foodscape through advancements in freezing and refrigeration technologies. In Cooling the Tropics Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart charts the social history of ice in Hawaiʻi to show how the interlinked concepts of freshness and refreshment mark colonial relationships to the tropics. From chilled drinks and sweets to machinery, she shows how ice and refrigeration underpinned settler colonial ideas about race, environment, and the senses. By outlining how ice shaped Hawaiʻi’s food system in accordance with racial and environmental imaginaries, Hobart demonstrates that thermal technologies can—and must—be attended to in struggles for food sovereignty and political self-determination in Hawaiʻi and beyond.


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If settler colonialism is permanent occupation, an occupation that is permanent is settler colonial: Rimona Afana, ‘The Occupation–Colonialism Continuum: Impact on Transitional Justice in Palestine/Israel’, in Nada Kiswanson, Susan Power (eds), Prolonged Occupation and International Law: Israel and Palestine, Brill, 2023

23Mar23

Excerpt: Though belligerent occupations are, under international law, presumed to be extraordinary, temporary, and conservationist, Israel’s occupation of Palestinians appears normalised, permanent/indefinite, and invasive/interventionist. Given its role in blocking resistance and normalising subjugation, the occupation functions as a tool of and smokescreen for colonialism. While diverging from “classic” settler colonialism in logic, in implementation the Zionist project features practices emblematic of colonial enterprises elsewhere. To delineate the specificity of transitional justice in the (com)promised lands, the continuities between different layers of harm were mapped. As evidenced by my theoretical and empirical findings, these harms include settler colonialism and its offshoots: ethnic cleansing, military occupation, annexation, apartheid, the conflict’s protracted and deliberate non-resolution, third party interventionism, and a pervasive culture of intransigence.


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Glitch (undoing settler colonialism): Melissa Nesrallah, ‘Settler Colonial and Indigenous Geographies: The Mirrored Shield as Indigenous Fugitivity and Radical Glitchfrastructure’, Space + Society, 10/10/17

23Mar23

Excerpt: ‘While this particular understanding of fugitivity is extremely useful when describing the precarity of life under settler colonial occupation for Indigenous peoples, I would like to propose that an alternative conception of the fugitive is necessary when discussing the creative forms of resistance that have defined much of the #NoDAPL movement. What follows is a meditation on the idea of Indigenous fugitivity as radical glitch, or “glitchfrastructure”‘.


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Civil society and settler colonialism: Sonia Najjar, Settler colonialism, civil society and the Judaisation of East Jerusalem, PhD dissertation, Queen’s University Belfast, 2023

22Mar23

Abstract: The thesis investigates the role of civil society organisations in the Judaisation of East Jerusalem, Palestinian marginalisation and resilience within such processes. The research conducted is unique due to the analysis of the statements and perspectives provided directly by ‘settlers’ which I believe is fundamental to any work that deals with settler colonialism yet is lacking in the literature. It draws upon interviews with Palestinian and Israeli civil society actors. It is also unique in the use of diverse, interdisciplinary literature including political science, colonialism, settler colonialism, law, archaeology, heritage tourism, aspects of theology, civil society as well as scholarship on resilience and resistance.


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The scientific religion of settlers: Tisa Wenger, ‘Spiriting the Johnstons: Producing Science and Religion Under Settler Colonial Rule’, in Myrna Perez Sheldon, Ahmed Ragab, Terence Keel (eds), Critical Approaches to Science and Religion, Columbia University Press, 2023

22Mar23

Excerpt: The “Chippewa Lament,” though published anonymously, was most likely written by George Johnston, or Kahmentayha, son of an Ojibwe woman and a Scotch-Irish trader in the northern Michigan town of Sault Ste. Marie.1 George’s father had fought against the United States in the War of 1812 alongside the Ojibwe (Chippewa), part of the larger family of Anishinaabe nations, and the family was intimately involved in the changes that ensued. In 1823, George’s sister Jane, Obabaamwewe-giizhigokwe, married the newly appointed U.S. Indian agent Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, who represented U.S. imperial authority on Anishinaabe lands.


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Droning settler colonialism: Yaar Dagan, Drones, settler colonialism and the law, PhD dissertation, Keele University, 2023

22Mar23

Abstract: This dissertation explores two sets of questions. The first focuses on the development of military drones and the use of this technology for distinctly settler colonial purposes. The second focuses on the challenges posed by lethal drones to the legal and normative framework of warfare. In doing so, this dissertation deals not only with the challenges that drones pose to specific humanitarian regulations but, more fundamentally, with the destabilisation of key categories of warfare, including the concept of war itself. This dissertation starts with the following premise: Settler colonialists are persecuted collectives who suffered from persecution, mainly in Europe, so they were looking for a oneway ticket out of their state of origin. However, their dreams of a new homeland were shattered when they realised that their destinations were already populated. Consequently, they committed horrible crimes, including genocide, ethnic cleansing and transfer. Unlike traditional colonialists, settlers have been primarily concerned with taking over indigenous land – and maintaining independent sovereignty over the acquired territory. This dissertation seeks to show that a peculiar combination of settler colonialism, militarism, and technical ingenuity led Israeli engineers to develop drones and turn their country into the world’s leading weapon exporter. With over two million people, Gaza has become a human laboratory where new, ever more destructive weapons are tested and sold worldwide for profit. This dissertation also seeks to articulate the paradox that drones, initially endorsed as a ‘safer’ technology reducing risks to innocent civilians, have, in most cases, been fatally harmful to non-combatants. Moreover, they have destabilised the legal categories of warfare, ushering in an era of perpetual and endless conflict on an unprecedented global scale, creating a permanent dread for millions of people, controlled, harassed, and suppressed by settler colonial and imperial powers.


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