settler colonial studies blog

Desettlerising public space: Isabel Coatlicue Durón, Indigenizing Public Space: Challenging the Colonial Present in Los Angeles, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2025

17Sep25

Abstract: Los Angeles is rarely examined as an on-going site of colonialism. This dissertation brings to the fore the ways in which indigenous thought leaders, artists, and activists challenge the colonial present in Los Angeles. Building on settler colonial studies, the colonial present considers the multilayered matrix of colonial legacies including Spanish, Mexican, and that of the United States to consider the fraught nature of how colonialism continues to operate in urban places such as Los Angeles. There are three questions at the heart of this study: How are colonial logics inscribed, spatialized, and experienced in Los Angeles, particularly at the nexus between public space and public art? How do Indigenous peoples, particularly the Tongva, contest colonial logics? And how do they articulate, conceptualize, and imagine a world that reconnects people to one another and to land? I interrogate how art is wielded as a tool for and against colonialism in public space and examine the ways in which Indigenous and Chicanx/Latinx activists in Los Angeles contest the colonial present and articulate a vision and path for indigenizing public space by examining three sites of struggle: (1) the struggle to deaccession and remove the Christopher Columbus Statue from Grand Park; (2) a Tongva-led walk in Placita Olvera that challenged the multiple colonialities at work in architecture, statues, and plaques; and (3) #Tongvaland, a billboard series that reflected the artistic and cultural production of Tongva artists including River Garza, Weshoyot Alvitre, and L. Frank and incorporated photographs of Tongva people taken by Chemehuevi artist Cara Romero. The central theoretical concept of Indigenizing Public Space emerges from dialogues over the struggle to deaccession and remove the Columbus Statue from Grand Park. No singular way of indigenizing public space exists, and this dissertation provides different possibilities for transforming public space as enacted and theorized by Tongva and Indigenous Activists in Los Angeles.

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The settler is what they eat: Dafna Hirsch, ‘Nutrition Science, Palestinian Food, and Jewish Settlers’ Acclimatization: The Work of Moshe Wilbushewich’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2025

16Sep25

Abstract: How should Jewish settlers live in the new environment? This question preoccupied early Zionist professionals, seeking to employ science in the service of Jewish “acclimatization.” This article focuses on the work of a specific man of science: nutrition scholar Moshe Wilbushewich, who lived and worked in Palestine since 1924 until his death in 1952. Much of Wilbushewich’s work in the interwar period was devoted to investigating the question, how to compensate for the physical inferiority of Jewishcompared to Arab workers, through nutrition and psychotechnics. As a scholar of nutrition, he performed scientific analyses of ingredients and dishes from the Palestinian kitchen and encouraged Jewish settlers to adopt some of them to make their nutrition more adjusted to the conditions of the land, and hence more “rational.” As I show, although Zionist experts embraced an environmental approach to “revitalizing” Jewish bodies, their perceptions were nonetheless shaped by assumptions about racial difference and hierarchy– between Arabs and Jews, and between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews.

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Australia for the white man is not a new idea (but it reverberates now): Evan Smith, Andrekos Varnava, ‘Transnational Whiteness and the Elite Backlash to Reforming the Australian Immigration Control System in the 1950s and 1960s’, The Historical Journal, 2025

16Sep25

Abstract: In the 1950s and 1960s, changes in the international situation, such as decolonization in Asia, led some Australians to question the usefulness of keeping the ‘White Australia Policy’, the basis for the country’s immigration system since Federation in 1901. Some argued that Australia’s international reputation, especially with newly independent countries in Asia and Africa, could be harmed by the maintenance of this policy. Events such as the Sharpeville Massacre in apartheid South Africa in 1960 caused further introspection into Australia’s racialized system. However, as pushes to reform the policy grew, others used international events to resist reforms. Using speeches by politicians and documents produced by policymakers, this article will show how events, such as the Notting Hill riots in Britain, the Little Rock controversy in the United States, and the Sharpeville massacre, were used as warnings about Australia potentially introducing similar ‘racial problems’ if it allowed more non-white migration. This article argues that these concerns tapped into a transnational whiteness that shared anxieties about decolonization, civil rights and non-white immigration in the postwar period, bringing a racialized solidarity forged at the turn of the twentieth century into the Cold War era.

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Community Based Monitoring against settler colonialism (I guess it would be about what exactly is being monitored)? Nicole J. Wilson, ‘Does community-based monitoring advance Indigenous self-determination? Inuit-led monitoring and governance in Nunavut and Greenland’, Environmental Science & Policy Volume 172, 2025, #104215

16Sep25

Abstract: Existing literature on Community-Based Monitoring suggests that participation in monitoring can increase the extent to which decision-making is informed by observed environmental trends. Yet, there is an ambivalence within the literature concerning the value for Indigenous peoples. Some scholars maintain that CBM programs replicate and reinforce colonial political inequalities while others suggest that such programs can and do support Indigenous self-determination. In this study, I explore such questions through empirical engagement with case studies of two established Indigenous-led programs in Nunavut, Canada, and Greenland that involve the collection of Indigenous Knowledge for use in decision-making. I contribute to the field by examining monitoring as a process through which knowledge and governance are co-constituted through politically unequal relationships. Considering this, I argue that Indigenous-led CBM can support self-determination in environmental governance given the right conditions. I identify three factors that are fundamental to achieving this. First, explicit legal acknowledgement of Indigenous rights, authority, and knowledge systems is key to mobilizing CBM data. Second, while the fundamental goal of such programs is to enhance the use of knowledge in decision-making, Indigenous leadership and data governance are important safeguards against extractive knowledge production. Finally, a theory of power is necessary to critically analyse both the directly observable and more subtle ways in which power influences the potential for CBM programs to promote Indigenous self-determination.

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Settler nativist environmentalism: Emine Fidan Elcioglu, ‘Seeding the divide: John Tanton, the Sierra Club and the struggle over US environmentalism’, Race & Class, 2025

16Sep25

Abstract: At the turn of the twenty-first century, the Sierra Club, one of the most prominent environmental organisations in the united States, faced a polarising internal battle over whether to endorse immigration restrictions. Two dominant explanations have emerged to account for why immigration became such a flashpoint in an environmental organisation. one, advanced by watchdog groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center, cast the controversy as a far-right infiltration, a cynical effort to greenwash xenophobia. The other, grounded in critical race and decolonial theory, argued that exclusionary politics have always been an intrinsic part of environmentalism, given its settlercolonial and eugenicist foundations. I offer a third explanation by turning to the 1970s, a pivotal moment when mainstream environmentalism briefly embraced population control as an ecological imperative. Drawing on archival records, I show how this institutional flirtation with population control − though shortlived − created an infrastructure and ideological opening that activists like John Tanton would later exploit. As population control lost mainstream legitimacy due to political backlash and the rise of laissez-faire demographic thinking, Tanton repurposed its ecological language and organisational networks to build an immigration restrictionist movement. I show how he strategically reworked liberal environmentalism to cast racial exclusion as ecological necessity. At the same time, however, the archival record reveals paths not taken, reminding us that environmentalism, like any political project, has always been a terrain of struggle.

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Earthshattering settler colonialism: Anna Brickhouse, Earthquake and the Invention of America: The Making of Elsewhere Catastrophe, Oxford University Press, 2024

16Sep25

Description: Earthquake and the Invention of America: The Making of Elsewhere Catastrophe explores the role of earthquakes in shaping the deep timeframes and multi-hemispheric geographies of American literary history. Spanning the ancient world to the futuristic continents of speculative fiction, the earthquake stories assembled here together reveal the emergence of a broadly Western cultural syndrome that became an acute national fantasy: elsewhere catastrophe, an unspoken but widely prevalent sense that catastrophe is somehow “un-American.” Catastrophe must be elsewhere because it affirms the rightness of “here” where conquest, according to the syndrome’s logic, did not happen and is not occurring. The psychic investment in elsewhere catastrophe coalesced slowly, across centuries; varieties of it can be found in various European traditions of the modern. Yet in its most striking modes and resonances, elsewhere catastrophe proves fundamental to the invention of US-America—which is why earthquake, as the exemplary elsewhere catastrophe, is the disaster that must always happen far away or be forgotten. The book’s eight chapters and epilogue range from Plato to the Puritans, from El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Voltaire to Herman Melville and N.K. Jemisin, examining along the way the seismic imaginings of Edgar Allan Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, Frederick Douglass, Emily Dickinson, and Jose Martí, among other writers. At the core of the book’s inquiries are the earthquakes, historical and imagined, that act as both a recurrent eruptive force and a provocation for disparate modes of critical engagement with the long and catastrophic history of the Americas.

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Indigenous Shakespeare: Jamie Paris, ‘Becoming a Wolf: Indigenous Pedagogies and Settler Supervision in Sayet’s Where We Belong’, Literature Compass, 2025

16Sep25

Abstract: This article discusses Indigenous pedagogies and deep relationally Mohican playwright and educator Madeline Sayet’s Where We Belong. The play challenges the idea that Shakespeare is settler property, and it frames Sayet’s quitting her doctoral program and returning to her community as heroic. This paper argues that an Indigenous pedagogy should be based on love, kinship, and belonging.

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Besieged: Una McGahern, ‘The Practice of Siege Warfare: Reckoning with War, Genocide and Settler Colonialism in Palestine’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2025

16Sep25

Excerpt: When Major General Giora Eiland penned his now infamous op-ed in Haaretz, referenced above, he sought to justify what has become known as Israel’s “surrender or starve plan,” or the plan to “ethnically cleanse” northern Gaza of its Palestinian population by invoking US military logic and doctrine on the practice of modern siege warfare. Arguing that “there is no component in [the] proposal that is in violation of humanitarian international law,” this discursive framing served a further purpose: to obscure a much longer history of genocidal siege warfare and its practice since the early wars of the Palestinian Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic), as the second quotation above highlights.

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Multicultural settler colonialism: Tyler Ritchie, From Migration to Manaakitanga: Rethinking Multiculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand, PhD dissertation, Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, 2025

16Sep25

Abstract: Aotearoa New Zealand is an increasingly diverse country that relies on social cohesion between Indigenous, settler, and migrant groups. As a result, migrant groups have called for the adoption of multiculturalism by the government, but this concept has not been examined from Indigenous perspectives. This dissertation examines the perspectives of Māori, the Indigenous peoples of Aotearoa, on the ways they experience and understand multiculturalism in their day-to-day lives. This work sought to fill a gap in the wider literature by conducting three qualitative studies that examine the relationship between indigeneity and migration. In Study 1 I conducted exploratory research that examined what whānau Māori thought about multiculturalism. Through focus groups across Aotearoa, twenty-nine participants shared that they experience positive relationships with migrant groups and value diversity in their communities. However, they also highlighted a lack of capacity to manaaki migrants due to colonisation and the undermining of their right to self-determination. Study 2 investigated whether migration influenced the perspectives of Māori on multiculturalism by interviewing Māori migrants to Australia. Six participants felt significant shifts in expressing their Māoritanga as migrants, and they reported that the presence of multicultural policy was undermined by racism toward both migrants and Indigenous Australians. Study 3 aimed to examine the multicultural policy context in Aotearoa, finding that at present policy was not perceived as particularly effective by those across the migration sector. Case studies developed from interviews with iwi, NGO, and local government representatives highlighted a need for more involvement of Māori and increased co-governance when developing multicultural policy. Following this, a Critical Tiriti Analysis illustrated gaps between the existing policy and articles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Together, these studies provide evidence that a conceptualisation of multiculturalism in Aotearoa must be reimagined. Importantly, this concept should reflect (and promote) a national identity that centres Māori as tangata whenua and makes clear the responsibilities settler and migrant groups have under Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Considering the lack of policy that supports social cohesion, this research highlights the value of centring Indigenous perspectives and concepts such as manaakitanga in multicultural literature. Ultimately, only through decolonisation will multiculturalism be successful in Aotearoa New Zealand.

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But was it? Amanda Kingston, ‘”Oklahoma was empty”: Storying Land in Oklahoma Land Run Settler Memory’, Journal of Curriculum Theorizing, 40, 2, 2025, pp. 16-34

16Sep25

Excerpt: ‘You know’, the studendt responded, ‘where we dress up like pioneers and line up at a park to run and stake our claim. Just like the 89ers’. Prior to my teaching in Oklahoma, I was vaguely familiar with the history of the Oklahoma Land Runs in the late 1880s and 1890s. The federal government had brokered treaties of Oklahoma territory—or “Indian Territory”—at that time with Indigenous Nations such as the Cherokee Nation through the Treaty of Echota and the Choctaw Nation through the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek. While I knew pieces of these histories, I did not yet know about the widespread reenactment practices in elementary school in which school children lined up along a playground, dressed in pioneer garb with cowboy hats and make-shift covered wagons, waiting for the signal to run and claim a piece of the land. Nor had I considered the exact work schooling did in the United States to uphold particular structures of a settler nation-state society.

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