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Settler colonial denizenship: Ibrahim Khatib, ‘Citizen-subjects in an ethnocratic regime: Palestinians in Israel within a settler colonial context’, Citizenship Studies, 2025

22Sep25

Abstract: This article examines the idea of ‘citizen-subjects’ to highlight the contradictions between the modern state’s view of citizenship and the realities within an ethnocratic regime and settler-colonial context. By focusing on Palestinians in Israel, it explores how their citizenship status is systematically diminished to prioritize a Jewish national identity. The citizen-subjects framework shows how their political participation depends on adopting the Israeli- Jewish narrative, focusing on socio-economic issues over national politics and avoiding discussions of collective rights – thus conflicting with both citizenship rights and Indigenous peoples’ rights. This was especially evident during the United Arab List’s role in the 2021–2022 government coalition. Nevertheless, Israeli policies continue to restrict Palestinian political agency and expressions of national identity, thereby reinforcing an ethnocratic system that subjugates them to the Jewish majority. By applying the citizen- subjects framework, this article highlights the ways state policies shape and constrain Palestinian political and national expression, offering insights for broader debates on citizenship, indigenous rights, and the limits of political inclusion in ethnocratic contexts.


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The horror of settler colonialism: Naomi Simone Borwein (ed.), Global Indigenous Horror, University Press of Mississippi, 2025

22Sep25

Description: The volume Global Indigenous Horror is meant to elicit discussion. Contributions herein are an exploration of what Indigenous Horror is and to whom. Beginning with a preface by Cheyenne and Arapaho Horror writer Shane Hawk, the book is structured into four parts, and grounded in an Indigenous journey/ing approach to knowledge acquisition, as advocated by various Indigenous scholars. Part 1 focuses on Indigenous ways of knowing and theorizing. Part 2 offers further examples of Indigenous Horror in the context of cultural and literary practices, while further extending discourses discussed in the book to the literal level. Part 3 continues the exploratory ‘journey’ with examples of Indigenizing Horror and Gothic from various global perspectives. Part 4 contains illustrative interviews with speculative writers of Indigenous descent—including Shane Hawk (Cheyenne and Arapaho), Dan Rabarts (Ngāti Porou), Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfoot), Gregory C. Loui (Kānaka Maoli), and Gina Cole (Pasifika). Part 4 offers actualizations of hypothetical concepts in the pages of Horror and other speculative fiction. The Epilogue chapter is an act of “Dis/insp/secting Global Indigenous Horror”—as a field of study, a hybrid genre, and a volume. This epilogue is comprised of an academic conversation or dialogue between settler and Indigenous scholars, and as metacommentary is a counterpoint to interviews with Indigenous writers in Part 4. By extending the dialogue about what Global Indigenous Horror is, the epilogue furthers the synoptic praxis of the volume. In the process (or journey/ing) towards an understanding of Global Indigenous Horror, contributions offer a methodological toolbox to investigate cultural practices and literary (and supra-literary) approaches to Indigenous Horror, ways of theorizing, and ways of knowing.


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Settler colonialism is a choral project: Lukas Sawatsky, Converging paths: settler colonialism and the Canadian choral tradition, MA dissertation, University of Manitoba, 2025

20Sep25

Abstract: This thesis resists the grand narrative of Canadian music history by examining Canadian choral works through a settler colonial theoretical framework. I specifically focus on the politics of translation and the relationship between text and music. I exemplify my methodology in this thesis with a brief discussion of R. Murray Schafer’s Miniwanka: Moments of Water (1971), explaining how his use of Indigenous words constitutes a form of extractive composition, or a use of Indigenous culture undertaken without the consent of those to whom it belongs in a settler-colonial context. I then apply this methodology to my primary case studies: Imant Raminsh’s Along the Flower Trail: Earth Chants (1982) and Andrew Balfour’s Nagamo (2022). Both works engage with the politics of translation: Raminsh sets Indigenous song in English translation, and Balfour sets English texts translated into Cree and Ojibway. I contrast Raminsh’s extractive methods with Balfour’s unsettling methods to point the way towards a reinvigorated musical practice that avoids reifying settler colonialism. These close readings provide methods to further understand Canadian music history and its close relationship with settler colonialism.


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Labouring for the settler: Jane Lydon,'”Forced Free Labour’: Connecting the Abolition of Slavery and Settler Colonisation in the Thought of Henry George Grey’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2025

20Sep25

Abstract: This article investigates the connections between emancipation in Britain’s slave colonies and settler colonisation through the policies of Henry George Grey, 3rd Earl Grey (styled Viscount Howick 1807–1845). When Grey became Under- Secretary for the Colonies in his father’s administration in late 1830, he turned his attention to emigration, colonial land administration, and slavery. As an adherent of the new principles of colonisation – promoted over the previous eighteen months by Edward Gibbon Wakefield – Grey furthered policies to commodify and appropriate colonial land, compelling the landless to labour for them. Notably, between 1831–1833, in dialogue with Colonial Office staff, Grey applied these principles to a radical slavery amelioration Order in Council, and subsequently to a scheme for abolishing slavery in the Caribbean, aiming to compel emancipated slaves to continue to work. Disappointingly for Grey, this plan was dropped at the last minute in favour of a compromise with the West Indies interest. However as Grey later pointed out, its principles remained a blueprint for colonial policy over following decades, including issues of free labour, imperial land policy, colonisation, and labour emigration. This article re-examines the shared principles within Grey’s vision for the amelioration, abolition and aftermath of slavery and their application to numerous post- emancipation contexts beyond the new settler colonies of Australasia, to demonstrate the ways in which achieving the abolition of slavery and expanding territory through conquest were interrelated, not separate, processes. These principles map the emergence of new forms of labour coercion within the development of a global free labour market, and reveal the ways in which the process of privatising Indigenous Country was foundational to racial capitalism.


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Settler colonialism is a form of eugenics: Laura Dowd, Rose Marie Äikäs, ‘Forced Sterilizations, Ethical and Clinical Dilemmas of Social Work Under Settler-Colonial State: Utilizing Truth and Reconciliation Commission to Address Harms’, Studies in Clinical Social Work: Transforming Practice, Education and Research, 2025

20Sep25

Abstract: BIPOC survivors of forced sterilizations have been excluded from American social work policy and clinical practice, either marginalized or entirely erased. Despite the field’s role in perpetuating racialized birth control, reconciliation is essential within the social work profession. Using Villarosa’s (2022) article “The Long Shadow of Eugenics in America” as a framework, Villarosa confronts us with the Relf sisters and the social work profession’s direct involvement in their victimization. We challenge the profession’s understanding of the Code of Ethics and accountability regarding its complicity and explore ways to center survivor voices moving forward. Our paper emphasizes settler colonialism, eugenics, processes of truth-telling and reconciliation, living survivors, and the social work profession’s role in utilizing Truth and Reconciliation Commissions to address racial trauma by challenging hegemonic narratives of what is considered truth, who has the power to produce it, and what it truly means to tell it. Applying Foucault’s microphysics of power, every social worker is implicated in challenging settler colonialism and refusing to stay silent.


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Hopeful settlers: Marjo Lindroth, Heidi Sinevaara-Niskanen, ‘Hope and dispossession: Strange bedfellows in Indigenous-state relations’, Cooperation and Conflict, 2025

20Sep25

Abstract: This article investigates the dynamics between hope and dispossession in the relations between Indigenous peoples and states. These relations, historically marked by colonial interventions, boast hopeful developments ranging from the recognition of rights to truth and reconciliation processes. Drawing on critical hope scholarship and research on contemporary colonialism, this article delves into the question of reconciliation and the (allegedly) reorganised Indigenousstate relations. Engaging with the state continues to be, in many ways, problematic for Indigenous peoples whose hopes often clash with those of the state. Even though experiences from completed truth and reconciliation processes around the world have been fraught with foundational shortcomings, the shortcomings have not discouraged Indigenous peoples from initiating and taking part in reconciliation. Embracing this global trend, three Nordic countries – Finland, Sweden and Norway – have each embarked upon a truth and reconciliation process with the Sámi people. Utilising the recent Nordic processes as reference points, this article reveals how states employ hope to govern their relations with the peoples, an aspect that has been neglected to date. In particular, it highlights how the element of time (integral to hope) and the clash of parties’ disparate hopes are key to understanding power asymmetries in these relations.


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The manifest currency of Indigenous currencies: Ashley Cordes, Indigenous Currencies: Leaving Some for the Rest in the Digital Age, MIT Press, 2025

20Sep25

Description: Indigenous Currencies follows dynamic stories of currency as a meaning-making communication technology. Settler economies regard currency as their own invention, casting Indigenous systems of value, exchange, and data stewardship as incompatible with contemporary markets. In this book, Ashley Cordes refutes such claims and describes a long history of Indigenous innovation in currencies, including wampum, dentalium, beads, and, more recently, the cryptocurrency MazaCoin. By looking closely at how currencies developed over time through intercultural communication, Cordes argues that Indigenous currencies transcend the scope of economic value, revealing the cultural, social, and political context of what it means to exchange. The book’s two main case studies, the gold rush and the code rush, frame a deep dive into how Indigenous ways of being have shaped the use and significance of currency and vice versa. Settler currencies, which have developed in the wake of wars and through massively scaled forms of material extraction, offer a very different story of the place of currencies within settler economies of dispossession. The second part of the study asks how contemporary cryptocurrencies may play a critical role in cultivating Tribal sovereignty. The author analyzes structural properties of the polymorphic blockchain to provide key insights into how emergent digital spaces, with their attendant forms of meaning and value represented by code, NFTs, and Web 3.0, are inextricably connected to Indigenous knowledges. The book cultivates a vision of currency in which the principle of leaving some for the rest establishes a way of imagining relationships of exchange beyond their enclosure within settler-capitalist parameters of extraction and into currents of deep reciprocity.


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Two faces of the same settler coin: Leah Perry, Indigenous Dispossession, Anti-Immigration, and the Public Pedagogy of US Empire, Ohio State University Press, 2024

19Sep25

Description: From the founding of the United States, enduringly consequential debates over Indigeneity and immigration have occurred on the battlefield and in Congress, in courtrooms, at territorial borders, and in mainstream culture. In Indigenous Dispossession, Anti-Immigration, and the Public Pedagogy of US Empire, Leah Perry traces the ways that the US created its empire through public pedagogies—which she defines as policy and media discourses—surrounding Indigenous dispossession, gendered state violence, and racialized immigration. These pedagogies have propelled the expansion of US empire, including the redrawing of the US as a neoliberal democracy. Perry argues that by changing the discourse around gender, race, immigration, and Indigeneity, the United States has continued its imperial project through different eras, always predicated on Indigenous dispossession. In exploring crucial components of empire, such as welfare, eugenics, disability, sexual violence, foodways, queerness, and policing, Perry interrogates violence against Indigenous peoples and against immigrants, examining these not independently—as is so often the case—but as co-constitutive. Indigenous Dispossession, Anti-Immigration, and the Public Pedagogy of US Empire thus intervenes in and fills a gap in immigration studies, Indigenous studies, race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, and US history.


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Rez Metal resistance! Viki Rey Eagle, Ancestor’s Rez Metal (Re)Mapping an Indigenous Sonic Resistance, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2025

19Sep25

Abstract: This doctoral dissertation investigates how Rez Metal artists have challenged and reclaimed dominant historical narratives that promote the erasure of Indigenous Peoples and reinscribe stereotypes of poverty, isolation, desolation, and colonial drawn boundaries of the reservation. This research aims to show how Rez Metal resists settler colonial boundaries of map making through the production of distinctive and visual images that help to (re)map longstanding settler colonial understandings of the Indian reservations and Native people’s connection to land. Visual images are a part of how we experience, imagine, learn, and produce knowledge. (Pink, 2021: 2.). Sound too plays a distinctive role shaping our experience of the world through its various manifestations in language, music, land, and sensory experiences. Native Americans uniquely experience absolute invisibility in many domains of American life. Their voices are also often silenced or ignored. When Native Americans are seen and heard, however, it is often through an imaginary rendering of “Indians” as relics of some unfortunate past and disappeared is intrinsic to American settler colonialism. (Leavitt, P.A., Covarrubias, R., Perez, Y.A. and Fryberg, S.A. (2015).By tracing the origins of stereotypes about Indian people and by producing new photographic images and sonic representations of contemporary Rez Metal artists, fans, and promoters, this research utilizes digital photography and the analysis of musical performance/ appreciation as critical (re)mapping practices (Goeman 2008 & Iralu 2021) to “unsettle” and push against settler created borders and “expectations” (Deloria, 2004) of how Native people should be. This dissertation project will thus explore how the sights, images, and sounds of Rez Metal reconfigure place-making and (re)map Indigenous experiences. Drawing from theories and methods that are rooted in Indigenous forms of knowledge and Native feminist spatial practices (Goeman, 2008), the project seeks paths to address the colonial boundaries of such ridged borders such as urban and Rez, which often also are configured according to unexamined gendered assumptions. This dissertation research is based off 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork within New Mexico, Arizona and included a Native American Artist in Residency at the Denver Art Museum curated exhibit show titled (Re)Mapping a Rez Metal resistance.


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Asian American settler literature: Kerishma Vidya Panigrahi, Looking Up: Reading for Settler Colonialism in Contemporary Asian American Literature, PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, 2025

17Sep25

Abstract: This dissertation examines how contemporary Asian American literature engages settler colonialism not through direct representation of Indigenous characters or moments of AsianIndigenous encounter, but through formal and narrative strategies that illuminate the structural logics of settler colonialism. While much of Asian American literary scholarship explores settler colonialism through explicit references to or representations of such interactions, this project instead asks we might read for its presence in the absence of such representations. I argue that literary form offers a crucial site to understand how Asian American literature engages the entangled logics of settler colonialism and racism. To this end, I read four contemporary Asian American novels for their formal and narrative strategies: the compromised status of truth and memory in the confessional form in The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen in Chapter One; the narrative cartography produced by a polyvocal crowd of narrators in Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange in Chapter Two; and the questionable unity of first person plural narrators in Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea and Vauhini Vara’s The Immortal King Rao in Chapter Three. Taking temporality as its organizing heuristic, the dissertation interrogates the dominant narrative arc through with Asian American history is typically plotted: a linear progression from migrant exclusion, to multicultural inclusion, to model minority assimilation. I read these novels as they relate to constructions of linear time—of past, to present, to future—through critical Asian American, Native, Black, and queer temporal interventions that disrupt such normative teleologies, and foreground the entangled histories of migration, racialization, and settler violence. By doing so, these I hope this project helps us expand the dominant formal and temporal frames and reading practices through which Asian American literature and subjectivity has been understood, and situate it within a broader critique of U.S. settler colonialism.


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