settler colonial studies blog

The burning fire of settler colonialism: Jack A Kredell, Apparatuses of Fire: Smokey Bear, Exception, and Wildfire Emotion, PhD dissertation, University of Idaho, 2026

31May26

Abstract: This dissertation examines the political, rhetorical, and affective dimensions of wildfire governance in the western United States through three interrelated studies that together constitute a critical account of what I call “apparatuses of fire”: the discursive, institutional, and logistical structures immanent to the material existence of landscape fire which have shaped relationships to landscape fire in the U.S. over the past century. Chapter One analyzes the visual rhetoric of the Smokey Bear fire prevention campaign, the longest-running public service advertising campaign in U.S. history, as a site where human-animal difference is systematically constructed and naturalized. Drawing on Heidegger’s distinction between human “world-forming” and animal “captivation,” the chapter argues that Smokey Bear posters position fire prevention not merely as a civic duty but as an ontological imperative grounded in the exclusive agential capacity of humans over captivated nonhuman animals. Through close visual analysis of nonhuman animals in Smokey Bear posters, the chapter traces how representations of animality evolve in response to shifting environmental policy while consistently maintaining the foundational structure of human exceptionalism that underwrites the campaign’s central message: “Only You Can Prevent Forest Fires” because non-human animals cannot. Chapter Two offers a political-theoretical account of modern state fire governance as a biophysical state of exception constituted through the inclusive-exclusion of what I call “proscribed fire.” Adapting Giorgio Agamben’s theory of exception (1998) to the domain of environmental governance, and combining it with Paul Virilio’s (2006) dromological analysis of speed and logistics, the chapter argues that the U.S. Forest Service has governed fire-prone landscapes since the Great Fires of 1910 by simultaneously including fire as an exogenous limit-figure and deploying ever-greater logistical speeds to maintain territorial control. This framework illuminates both the fire exclusion era (1910–1970) and the subsequent turn toward ecosystem-based management as continuous expressions of settler continuance (Whyte, 2018) rather than genuine paradigm shifts. The chapter concludes by examining the emergence of AI-driven fire surveillance and autonomous management technologies as the latest iteration of a dromocratic logic that threatens to further marginalize Indigenous and community-based approaches to fire stewardship. Chapter Three turns from state institutions to ordinary people as decision-makers, drawing on twenty-three long-form narrative interviews with rural Inland Northwest residents personally affected by wildfire. Drawing on Lazarus’s principle (2016) of “people think,” the chapter argues that the emotions rural residents feel in response to wildfire — frustration, compassion, and gratitude — are not merely affective reactions to adverse circumstances but autonomous forms of pyropolitical thought capable of exposing, and operating beyond, the structural limits of normative governance and its forms of knowledge. Taken together, the three chapters advance a critical pyropolitics attentive to the ontological assumptions, logistical imperatives, and affective dimensions of U.S. wildfire governance, and call for alternative relationships to fire grounded in ecological reciprocity, Indigenous sovereignty, and genuine community autonomy.

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Maimable indigeneity: Amanie Issa, Christo El Morr, ‘Disablement by Algorithm: AI as a Modern Tool of Settler-Colonial Violence in Palestine’, in Christo El Morr, Rachel da Silveira Gorman, Elham Dolatabadi, Laleh Seyyed-Kalantari (eds), AI for a Just World: Power, Liberation, and the People Left Behind, Chapman and Hall/CRC, 2026

30May26

Abstract: In this chapter, we examine how the Israeli military’s deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) systems—most notably the Lavender targeting program—operates as a contemporary extension of settler-colonial power that intentionally produces and conceals mass disablement. Situating these technologies within frameworks of racial capitalism, militarism, and ableism, we argue that algorithmic “precision-targeting” not only effectuates widespread impairment but also naturalizes this violence through the rhetoric of objectivity. Drawing on critical disability studies, crip theory, and settler-colonial critique, our analysis unfolds in three parts. First, we historicize the continuum from rubber-bullet maiming during the Great March of Return to AI-driven decision-support systems, showing how algorithmic thresholds of “tolerable error” encode political choices about whose bodies may be maimed rather than killed. Second, we unpack the epistemic logics of AI models; datasets, predictive heuristics, and minimal human oversight, to reveal how Palestinian lives are rendered killable and maimable data points. Third, we extend our critique globally, linking Palestine’s experience to analogous AI-enabled surveillance and debilitation in other regions. By foregrounding Palestinian disabled experience as a generative site for theorizing the co-constitution of disability, colonialism, and technology, this chapter contributes to peripheral crip critique and disability justice scholarship. We conclude by calling for a radical crip politics and transnational solidarity that rejects techno-colonial violence and reclaims AI futures centered on care, interdependence, and collective liberation.

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Competition, not solidarity: Austin Tseng, ‘First Nations in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese-Australian writings: the lack of settler colonial empathy’, History Australia, 2026

30May26

Abstract: late nineteenth and early twentieth century chinese-australian discourses on First Nations peoples and issues were strongly influenced by prevalent writings on race and political concerns of that time. this article explores chinese-australian print media pertaining to First Nations affairs, demonstrating that this media conceived of relations with First Nations people under a paradigm of competition rather than solidarity. these findings highlight how First Nations issues were used by chinese-language media in australia to construct narratives both to express and shape the beliefs of their readership and to articulate their relationship to their ancestral and host countries. Furthermore, my findings moderate a tendency within scholarship to overemphasise the role of anti-colonial sentiment in chinese discourses, showing that this is subject to many caveats and nuances.

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Meanwhile in Kashmir: Goldie Osuri, Settler colonialism in Kashmir, Manchester University Press, 2026

30May26

Abstract: Settler/colonialism in Kashmir examines Indian rule in occupied Jammu and Kashmir through historical and present settler/colonial geopolitics. Engaging with settler colonial, decolonial and Indigenous studies, the book explores how European sovereignty was shaped by settler/colonialism. Settler/colonialism was catastrophic for Indigenous worlds and generated the climate crisis. The book explores how India draws on settler/colonialism’s catastrophic mechanisms to rule Kashmir, thus fuelling the climate crisis and participating in the geopolitical settler/colonial world order. Sites of analysis include the India China rivalry, Kashmir’s political economy, and India’s indigenisation of its Hindu sacred geography in Kashmir. Through this exploration, the author argues for asserting Kashmiri resistance as an Indigenous anti-colonial struggle. The intersections between sovereignty, catastrophe, Indigeneity, and ecology illuminate Kashmir’s place in the geopolitical settler/colonial world order. The book contributes to timely debates in Critical Kashmir, settler colonial, decolonial, Indigenous, and South Asian studies regarding settler/colonialism and planetary crises.

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The assumptions of settler colonialism need Mickey Mouse numbers: Joseph Francis, ‘How to Win a Nobel Prize Using Mickey Mouse Numbers: We Need to Talk about Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson’, The Poor Rich World, 27/05/26

27May26

Excerpt: Even when awarding the Nobel Prize in Economics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences conceded that the key data in AJR’s most widely-cited article were “sometimes sketchy.” In their 2001 American Economic Review article “The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation,” AJR had used the mortality rates of European settlers as an instrument for good institutions. Because they could not regress modern wealth on institutions directly (since wealth also affects institutions), they needed a variable that affected wealth only through its historical effect on institutions: an exogenous source of variation to identify causation. Settler mortality was supposed to be that variable. According to the Swedish economists, AJR’s data used “rough estimates on initial settler mortality,” but they still seemed to have successfully demonstrated that favourable disease environments allowed Europeans to establish good institutions with strong protections for property rights. For this reason, AJR argued, those former colonies where settler mortality had been low are wealthy today.

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Placemaking in the Indigenous new place: Kevin Pierce Wright, An Archaeological Study of Choctaw Placemaking in Nineteenth-Century Indian Territory, PhD dissertation, University of Oklahoma, 2026

27May26

Abstract: Beginning in 1831, the United States began to forcibly remove over 12,000 Choctaws from their homelands in the Southeast into Indian Territory. Despite the existing scholarship documenting the history of Indian Removal and the steps the Choctaw Nation took to form a new society, several broad questions exist within the Tribal community about the experiences Choctaws encountered during the initial decades of Removal. By examining the amptoba (pottery) from 19th-century homesteads in Oklahoma, this project examines the roles and ways in which Choctaw migrants used foodways to contend with the pressures of migration and settler colonialism. This project uses a mixed-methods approach to highlight migrant experiences and the relationships that families maintained with ancestral traditions. The results of archival, chemical, and morphological analysis reveal that while many families were prohibited from bringing cooking and serving wares with them along the Trail of Tears, many of these traditions were reconstructed in Indian Territory and used to form new relations. Furthermore, a comparison of archaeological contexts in which these objects were distributed in Mississippi and Oklahoma reveals that Indigenous placemaking efforts in Indian Territory relied heavily on the knowledge and actions of Choctaw women. Finally, this project argues that working in collaboration with descendant communities can lead to a more holistic anthropology and the production of knowledge that benefits living peoples.

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The problem and its resistance: Zahi Zalloua, To Exist as a Problem: Being Black, Being Palestinian, Bloomsbury, 2026

25May26

Description: In the first pages of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois meditates on the question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” In this profound response to that question,Zahi Zalloua endeavours to think through the shared Black and Palestinian experience of being racialized as a problem.Zalloua argues that today’s anti-Blackness is not a lingering feature of a regrettable past that only occasionally manifests its ugly face. Rather, anti-Blackness permeates white civil society. Black being stands for the anti-human, its being is barred and degraded. And while Black being denotes criminality, Palestinian being denotes terrorism – a problematic being produced by Orientalism and used to legitimize oppression. Both the Black and Palestinian are framed as existential threats that undermine the very structures of white and Zionist dominance. To Exist as a Problem provides a searing critique of such assumptions, arguing that Blacks and Palestinians do exist as a problem, but a different problem than the one dictated by the petrifying white and settler gaze. They exist as a threat because the mechanisms of structural racism make them so. In order for racism to thrive, they must be othered in the profoundest sense. In asking how a politics can be constructed in the face of this hegemony, Zalloua constructs a model of solidarity that places Black lives and Palestinian liberation at the forefront of the anti-racist struggle.

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Colonisation, financialisation, violence: Hannah Forsyth, ‘Settler capitalism: new histories of colonisation, financialisation and violence’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

25May26

Excerpt: Due in part to the rise of settler colonial studies as a field, theoretical and empirical understanding of the dynamics of capitalism incorporates racial capitalism, defined as a totalising, global historical process that has forged (and continues to shape) political, social and institutional relations. Together the four histories here under review demonstrate how far thinking on connections between settler colonialism and capitalism has now progressed. These four books reveal developments in historical capitalism as the Anglophone settler-colonial world was established. The imperialist violence that Lenin perceived are shown to be connected to the logics of settler colonialism, which has in turn become embodied in the global financialised and technologised economy. These new works show the importance of the history of capitalism broadly and of racial capitalism, in particular, to the field of settler colonial studies.

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Family therapy and settler colonialism: Olga Smoliak, Carmen Knudson-Martin, ‘The Enduring Logics of Settler Colonialism in Family Therapy: A Case Analysis of Sociocultural Attunement’, Family Process, 2026

24May26

Abstract: Drawing on insights from critical Indigenous studies, settler colonial studies, and critical whiteness studies, the authors examine how settler colonial and white supremacist ideologies may continue to structure their own family therapy theorizing and
practice, with particular attention to the concept and practice of sociocultural attunement (SCA) as applied to Socio-Emotional
Relationship Therapy (SERT). SCA was developed within settler colonial structures and is increasingly promoted as a decolonial, anti-oppressive practice in family therapy. An anticolonial lens, paradoxically, makes visible the nature and extent of racial
settler colonial logics in SCA, highlighting the need for a more nuanced analysis of SCA (and other therapy practices) that acknowledges tensions and contradictions. The authors’ critical analysis invites reflection on the cultural and material conditions
in which family therapy concepts and practices are produced, circulated, and applied and illustrates how interrogating family
therapy concepts and practices can disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions, improve distinct forms of accountability for the impact of therapy, and reveal new targets for socially responsible work.

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Settler colonialism and genocide: Jacob Blau, Legal frameworks, intent, and the reality of its victims: examining process of genocide in Palestine through settler-colonialism, MA dissertation, Northeastern University, 2026

24May26

Abstract: Rigid legal frameworks of genocide have threatened the concept’s applicability to protracted forms of violence. This had led many historians and sociologists to avoid scholarly discussions regarding the nuances of the definition (intent, consequences, types of violence) that would allow more states to be held culpable for genocide. However, historical and sociological approaches into genocide, explored closely in this thesis, offer fluid understandings of the term that should inform the legal definitions. I apply this approach to Palestine and argue that Zionism’s goal to establish a majority Jewish state in an inhabited region exhibits an instance where the “slow violence” of settler-colonialism fits into a larger process of genocide. In doing, genocide’s origins are examined closely through the term’s architect, Raphael Lemkin, and how his neologism sought to include cultural and political forms of violence. While these types of violence should have been included in genocide’s definition, western powers lobbied to restrict the United Nations Genocide Convention (UNCG) to physical forms of violence so to remain blameless for past and future crimes against indigenous populations. I confront these exclusive definitions in legal and non-legal contexts by tracing the intentional dispossession, displacement, and removal of the Palestinian population first explicated by Zionist leader Theodor Herzl in 1895. In analyzing diaries, policies, and rhetoric of Zionist leaders, I examine intent in how the indigenous population was percieved as lesser- unable to cultivate or make use of their land, which later justified settler colonial violence. I look at how leaders advertised and lobbied Zionism and demonstrate that the ideology is laden with myths and falsehoods, and that it was driven by the tragic reality of antisemitism creating the notion that Jewish security through statehood was required regardless of the consequences. I provide a historical overview of this reality for Palestinians where Zionists displaced and dispossessed Palestinians through legal means- capitalizing on Ottoman legal reforms, an absentee land-owner class, and its alliance with the British Mandate, and violent means- coercion, fencing, and militancy. To be clear, Zionists enacted settler colonial expansion often illegally to undercut laws, often half-measures in the case of the Mandate, that aimed to restrict their territorial expansion. The settler colonial reality also saw the British-Zionist hegemony reject Palestinians their rights to self-determination through policy, exclusionary legal categorizations, attacks against political leaders, which facilitated the replacement of Palestinians with a Jewish population. While this hegemony ignored a Palestinian political future, resistance movements against Zionist settler colonialism and the British mandate were present throughout the process of genocide.

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