settler colonial studies blog

Settler colonialism is a prison: Kelly Tabbutt, ‘Indigenous Carceral System Inequalities in the US: A Synthesis of the Literature About the Nature and Sources’, Sociology Compass, 19, 10, 2025, #e70123

28Oct25

Abstract: Racially disproportionate incarceration, or over-incarceration, of Indigenous people is a significant issue in the US. Overincarceration of Indigenous people in the US is a critical and deep-rooted social issue. Racialized structural inequalities in general are theorized to underpin racialized inequalities in carceral system capture (arrest and incarceration) and outcomes including sentence length, monetary penalties, and supervision. Further, settler colonialism is theorized to underpin these inequalities where they are experienced by Native people. However, this research area is still in the earlier stages of development in the US. Nonetheless, a notable body of literature is available that demonstrates the existence of Native carceral system, or “criminal justice system,” inequality at the stage of arrest, incarceration, and post-release supervision, as well as in the case of the assessment of legal financial obligations. As well as those that theorize the underlying structures that create, maintain, and exacerbate these inequalities of criminalization and carceral system capture. This review and synthesis of the literature provides a comprehensive illustration of the state of carceral system inequalities experienced by Native (Indigenous) individuals and communities in the United States from the criminalization of Nativeness within US law and culture to the modern experiences of disparate carceral system involvement and the disparately harsh outcomes of this involvement.

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The place of place learning: Samantha Lancaster, ‘Experiencing Indigenous Spaces Available to Purchase’, in Hongyu Wang, Jo Flory (eds), Curriculum as Lived: Currere, Mindfulness, and Nonviolent CompanionshipAvailable to Purchase, Emerald, 2025

26Oct25

Abstract: This chapter focuses on place-based learning experiences of a White, non-Indigenous, settler educator. The chapter describes her experiences as she visited Indigenous historical places in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Following the Indian Removal Act, peoples from the Mvskoke Creek Nation settled in the area that is now known as Tulsa. Through laws and policies established by Whites, some of these Indigenous spaces have almost completely been erased from public memory. This chapter reveals how place-based learning can enhance learning experiences of students through storytelling and counter-storytelling that focus on Indigenous experiences to combat settler colonial narratives of Indigenous places.

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Commissioning ‘the truth’: Sara Amighetti, ‘Truth commissions in the decolonisation context: a philosophical appraisal’, Rethinking History, 2025

25Oct25

Abstract: This paper offers a philosophical appraisal of the role truth commissions might play in addressing the legacy of colonial injustice in contexts that do not fit the paradigmatic model of transitional justice. In recent years, calls for redress in democratic settler states have prompted interest in the extension of transitional justice mechanisms beyond post-conflict or post-authoritarian societies. Yet this extension raises two important challenges. The scope challenge concerns whether transitional justice is conceptually suited to settings without political rupture, while the bootstrapping challenge questions whether institutions shaped by liberal assumptions can adequately respond to structural and ongoing forms of colonial violence. The paper analyses the normative and conceptual stakes of these challenges, drawing on recent work in political theory and the Indigenous studies. While acknowledging the limits of the transitional justice paradigm, it argues that truth commissions may still contribute to processes of historical reckoning—particularly by enabling practices of collective unlearning and public confrontation with inherited structures.

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Italian colonialism and settler colonialism: A History of Italian Colonialism: The Promised Land, Giuseppe Finaldi, Routledge, 2026

25Oct25

Description: This book examines Italy’s colonial history from the outbreak of the First World War to the first stirrings of Fascism in 1919. Offering a sweeping account of events and a vast array of characters, this second volume moves between Rome and the Alps, Libya, East Africa and beyond to tell of an Italy struggling to profile itself as an empire while it fought out the First World War. It recounts how Italy clung on in Africa with anti-colonial forces triumphing in Libya and threatening in Eritrea and Somalia, and how finally emerging victorious in Europe, it hoped to reap the rewards of victory on the colonial front. This volume is of great value to students and scholars alike interested in Italian, European, African and colonial history.

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More settlers out there (on settler colonialism in Star Trek): E. Leigh McKagen, ‘(Re)Creating Home and Empire in Contemporary Star Trek’, in Caroline Alphin, E. Leigh McKagen, Shelby E. Ward (eds), Future Spaces of Power: The Cultural Politics of Digital and Outer Spaces, Bloomsbury, 2025

23Oct25

Description: Future Spaces of Power explores political, cultural, and societal narratives of future space(s) on a global scale to complicate the cultural logic of systemic futures that exist outside the boundaries of dominant political imaginaries. Contributors critically engage with alternative visions found in literature, film, and other cultural artifacts that encourage us to either live with or escape from the systemic conditions of neoliberalism and late capitalism and consider what these alternative visions might do – or fail to do – in combating anti-democratic futures, environmental degradation, and new forms of imperialism. Through these analyses, the volume collectively argues that anti-postmodern and postmodern readings of future spaces overlook the everyday lived experiences of certain bodies – including chronic health problems, effects from systemic racism, and other experiences of insecurity, fear, and death in the face of institutionalized violence – by disregarding differential experiences of time within different spatial contexts. Contributors suggest that critiques of narratives occurring within and about virtual and metaspaces, artificial intelligence, space exploration, and even the colonization of outer space can provide critical insights concerning global futures and our perceptions of space and time, especially as they inform how we should live in the present amid environmental destruction, information capitalism, neoliberalism, and the remaining infrastructures of colonialism. Ultimately, this book interrogates how a variety of media shape and inform our understanding and assumptions about conceptualizations of future space(s) as it demonstrates how governmentality eliminates and regulates surplus bodies – both overtly and covertly – through the technological, spatial, discursive, and temporal management of space.

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Settlers out there: Kyle Boggs, Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors, The Ohio State University Press, 2025

23Oct25

Description: In Recreational Colonialism and the Rhetorical Landscapes of the Outdoors, Kyle Boggs chronicles the struggle between Indigenous peoples who have rooted religious and cultural ties to outdoor sites across the US and elsewhere and the settlers who claim the right to freely recreate in those same places. Synthesizing theories of rhetoric, environmental studies, and settler colonialism, Boggs confronts the ways that settler colonial experiences and expectations have been narrated through rhetorical practices on these so-called public lands. Fusing journalism and personal narrative with scholarly research, Boggs’s argument comes to bear on his central case study of a northern Arizona ski development on a mountain held sacred by at least thirteen Indigenous tribes. In illuminating the striking ways that settler imaginaries are accommodated, performed, and sustained in the everyday, Boggs offers a powerful reminder that even during leisure activities (in this case, sports such as ultrarunning, rock climbing, and skiing), complex webs of power control who can access resources and land and who has the right to protect histories and cultures.

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Settlers out of this world, literally: Les Johnson, Kenneth Roy (eds), Interstellar Travel: After Arrival, Elsevier, 2025

22Oct25

Description: Interstellar Travel: After Arrival is a comprehensive, technical look at the necessary considerations for settlement on an extra solar planet following interstellar travel, addressed by leading experts in the fields of space development. The book features the current and future plans for lunar, Mars, and asteroid settlement, and how what we learn from such future endeavors might apply to settlement at destinations around other stars. In addition, scientists who have been considering the construction of large space structures and terraforming discuss realistic options to be considered. Other chapters cover necessary considerations such as whether terraforming is possible and how it might be accomplished, the ethical issues and scientific constraints to interacting with an alien biosphere, and what we might learn from settling within our own Solar System that would apply to settling elsewhere. The third book of a three-book compilation, this new release presents up-to-date and realistic technical and scientific considerations of the challenges that settling on an exoplanet would bring, including review of the current technological capabilities and how they might be put towards life on an extra solar planet.

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Humoring settlers: Kirsten Sandrock, ‘Scottishness, Humour, and the Aesthetics Chandler Haliburton’s The Clockmaker’, Studies in Canadian Literature, 47, 1, 2022

22Oct25

Excerpt: Today, Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796-1865) is no longer viewed without controversy as “the ‘father of American humour’” (Cogswell). Whereas earlier scholarship praises the author’s “compassionate humour” and reads Sam Slick’s witticisms as part of the “free exchange of ideas between men and women” (Harding 224), recent approaches to The Clockmaker have flagged the political nature of Slick’s humour. Ruth Panofsky (“Breaking”) and George Elliot Clarke (“Must”; “White”) have demonstrated how Slick’s jokes target female characters and Black characters especially often. As Panofsky claims, “Women and Blacks represent two disenfranchised groups whose vulnerable positions in an all-white patriarchy make them easy targets for his often-times vicious humour” (“Breaking” 42). For Clarke, Slick’s gibes align with the “English-Canadian conservatism” of Haliburton, who was “bourgeois in his blood, Tory to the bone, and Gothic in spirit” (“Must” 4). Following up on these inquiries into the ideological nature of Slick’s jokes, this article suggests that The Clockmaker’s humour is part of a nineteenth-century settler colonial tradition that creates an illusion of a harmonious British Atlantic Canada. While laughter has been recognized as a veritable tradition in postcolonial and transcultural literatures (Balce; Dunphy and Emig; Reichl and Stein), the following discussion links the forms and functions of humour in Haliburton’s works to discussions of settler colonial aesthetics (Bryant; Gould; Rudy; Veracini; Wolfe). Haliburton’s humour idealizes settler colonial relations in Atlantic Canada and turns conflict into comedy. This pertains to differences not only between British and non-British characters but also within the English-speaking community. Settlers from different parts of the British Isles are satirized, though with the overall function of imagining them as a diverse, agreeable body of like-minded settler colonists. Discourses of Scottishness in The Clockmaker and its sequels illustrate this naturalizing and idealizing function of humour in settler colonial fiction.

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Structure: Jeremia Pelgrom, Clemens Six (eds), Settler Colonialism as a Structure? Structural Logics, Long-Term Patterns, and Critical Reflections, University of Groningen, 2025,

22Oct25

Description: Since Patrick Wolfe’s groundbreaking work on settler colonialism’s logic of elimination, the field has rapidly expanded, sparking debate about its origins, characteristics, and global impact. This volume advances the discussion by offering a long-term, comparative analysis of settler colonialism as a structural phenomenon. Drawing on diverse case studies – from ancient Mediterranean societies to contemporary visions of settling Mars – contributors critically examine key questions: What defines settler colonialism? How does access to land shape its dynamics? What socio-political and cultural forces underpin settler expansion? By broadening the geographic and temporal scope beyond familiar contexts, this book challenges established paradigms and invites fresh perspectives on a complex and multi-layered concept. Ideal for scholars and students in history, political science, Indigenous studies, and global studies, this volume encourages ongoing dialogue and provides new tools for understanding settler colonialism’s enduring influence on past and present global relations.

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Veganvashing settler colonialism: Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond, ‘In Israel’s Warped Logic, Veganism and Genocide Go Hand in Hand’, CounterPunch, 12/09/25

22Oct25

Excerpt: People around the world are waking up to the outlandish tenor of Israeli propaganda. It’sderanged to legitimize occupation and genocide on the grounds of self-defense. Or to cast refugees burned alive and forcibly starved to death as imperiling Western civilization. Or to frame the colonial entity’s armed forces – which gleefully brag about murdering children and destroying homes, and post trophy photos clad in the lingerie of women they murdered – as “the world’s most moral army.” Yet the discursive acrobatics do not end there. A lesser-known element of Israel’s disinformation campaign is its self-proclaimed status as the leading nation in animal rights. A richbodyof scholarship addresses the paradoxical relationship of veganism and animal liberation to colonialismin so-called Israel. On the one hand, the settler colony dehumanizes Palestinians, mobilizing the species divide to legitimizetheir erasure. On the other, it boasts of providing plant-based meals and synthetic combat wear to vegan soldiers. This framing perverts vegan ethics, which repudiate killing, confinement and the use of force against living beings. As Ahmad Safi, co-founder of the Palestinian Animal League, challenges, “What good is it if an Israeli soldier is vegan and wears leather-free boots if his gun is aimed at Palestinians?” This reality-distortion is known as veganwashing.

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