settler colonial studies blog

Parallel settler thinking: Justin Holmes, Brian F. O’Neill, ‘Constructing Comparability: Climate Change Adaptation and the Transnational Settler Modularity of Desalination’, Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2025

30Aug25

Abstract: Regarding technology, “modularity” typically refers to an apparatus’ interchangeability, reproducibility, or transposability, i.e., “plug and play” applications. However, critical scholars contend that modularity is laborious and aspirational, not to be taken for granted. Where promoters of modularity often focus on material dimensions of technology, this article intervenes in these debates by revealing the necessary practical and discursive work required. We problematize desalination’s transnational modularity through an analysis of archival and ethnographic research of comparative connections between California and Israel. We argue desalination emerged from Israel’s project to restructure environmental, political, and economic risks with(in) Palestine. Through naturalizing colonization and extraction, desalination’s applicability to places such as California is made to appear self-evident. We demonstrate this process by interrogating three common arguments used to craft comparability between California and Israel: (1) desalination overcomes “natural” scarcity; (2) desalination produces geopolitical cooperation through “abundance”; and (3) desalination displays superior techno-managerial expertise. In so doing, we contribute to science and technology studies and critical environmental justice studies by illustrating how “adaptations” can emerge from settler-colonial projects. Founded on socionatural exploitation and domination, settler-colonial projects prove productive of modular capitalist endeavors and ongoing practices of constructing comparisons.

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Whingeing settlers: Darren Reid, Invoking Empire: Imperial citizenship and Indigenous rights across the British World, 1860–1900, Manchester University Press, 2025

30Aug25

Description: Invoking Empire examines the histories of Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand during the transitional decades between 1860 and 1900, when each of these colonies gained some degree of self-government, yet still remained within the sovereignty of the British Empire. The book applies the conceptual framework of imperial citizenship to nine case studies of settlers, Indigenous peoples, and metropolitan Britons who lived through these decades, to make two main arguments. First, Invoking Empire argues that colonial subjects articulated their imperial citizenship through a humanitarian lens to both support and challenge the rise of settler colonialism, revealing the complex entanglement of imperial and settler governmental authority as well as the multifarious uses and meanings of humanitarian discourses in the late nineteenth century. Second, the book argues that such humanitarian articulations of imperial citizenship were often rendered inoperable by a combination of imperial and settler governmental structures, emphasizing the multifaceted and overlapping barriers that prevented the realization of political rights guaranteed by imperial citizenship. By attending to continuities of imperial political subjectivities within self-governing colonies, as well as by showing that the rise of settler sovereignty was often contingent upon the many and repeated failures of imperial citizenship, Invoking Empire challenges teleological assumptions that the rise of the settler nation states was an inevitable or immediate result of winning responsible government.

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Indigenous film-making is about resisting settler colonialism: Amar Ramesh Wayal, A. P. Anupama (eds), Global Perspectives on Indigenous Film and Literature, Springer, 2025

30Aug25

Description: This edited volume comprehensively explores narrative survival in Indigenous film and literature, forging a literary and transitional approach to native writing. It navigates the evolution of Indigenous voices, spanning the oral tradition and literary forms from colonial times to the present. It covers a range of issues related to indigenous inequalities and diversities in film and literature. With chapters from global perspectives, including North America, Canada, New Zealand, and South Asia, it ensures an inclusive exploration of indigenous narratives. The diverse chapters address topics such as the aboriginal experience, residential school legacy, the invisible nation of Algonquins, tribal songs, decolonial futures, caste, survival narrative, trauma, and other marginalized groups such as low castes, linguistic minorities, and Adivasis (tribals). The book focuses on innovative concepts to understand the study of a particular indigenous group in isolation from others and more than the conventional comparative study of different indigenous groups. It deals with the challenges of achieving local indigenous rights and identities. It is a valuable resource for social science and humanities scholars, particularly for indigenous scholars, development professionals and administrators interested in the issues related to social diversity and indigeneity in a global setting.

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What unites settlers? Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America, W. W. Norton, 2008

30Aug25

Description: Relying on meticulous original archival research, historian Peter Silver uncovers a fearful and vibrant early America in which Lutherans and Presbyterians, Quakers, Catholics and Covenanters, Irish, German, French, and Welsh all sought to lay claim to a daunting countryside. Such groups had rarely intermingled in Europe, and the divisions between them only grew—until, with the arrival of the Seven Years’ War, thousands of country people were forced to flee from Indian attack. Silver reveals in vivid and often chilling detail how easily a rhetoric of fear can incite entire populations to violence. He shows how it was only through the shared experience of fearing and hating Indians that these Europeans, once irreconcilable, were finally united under the ideal of religious and ethnic tolerance that has since defined the best in American life.

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Reconciliation for sport: Britta Peterson, Meredith Wing, Audrey R. Giles, Rochelle Stewart-Withers, Valentina Ly, ‘Rendering the invisible visible: reflexivity and flexibility in a scoping review on sport for reconciliation’, Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health, 2025

28Aug25

Abstract: Numerous scholars have argued that sport is a vessel through which to enforce settler-colonial domination; however, sport can also represent a domain in which to support Indigenous-settler reconciliation. Nevertheless, differing understandings of reconciliation, particularly within diverse global contexts, can lead to ambiguity in its definition and application. Therefore, as part of a broader project on sport for reconciliation (SFR), we conducted a scoping review to examine the ways in which the term SFR is used in the academic literature. Through the scoping review process, we screened 2201 articles by title and abstract and conducted a full-text screening of 181 articles. Only four articles met our inclusion criteria. While scoping reviews typically focus on findings, we seek to centre the process itself, emphasising reflexivity and flexibility, two aspects often promoted yet rarely presented and made visible in practice. In response to this gap, we examine the tensions we experienced regarding the implications of exclusion, which were amplified by our understanding of colonialism. We argue that engaging in reflexivity can (re)conceptualise exclusion criteria, shifting from the binary of inclusion and exclusion to a critical investigation of what something is not. Subsequently, we propose a sixth step to Arksey and O’Malley (2005) scoping review methodology, ‘implications of excluded articles and reflexive insights’. We recommend this step be completed before the optional consultation stage. By centring reflexivity and flexibility, we offer a nuanced (re)conceptualisation of both SFR scholarship and the use of scoping reviews, particularly in research shaped by and grounded in colonial logics.

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The Soviet settler colony: Nicole Eaton, German Blood, Slavic Soil: How Nazi Königsberg Became Soviet Kaliningrad, Cornell University Press, 2023

26Aug25

Description: German Blood, Slavic Soil reveals how Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, twentieth-century Europe’s two most violent revolutionary regimes, transformed a single city and the people who lived there. During World War II, this single city became an epicenter in the apocalyptic battle between their two regimes. Drawing on sources and perspectives from both sides, Nicole Eaton explores not only what Germans and Soviets thought about each other, but also how the war brought them together. She details an intricate timeline, first describing how Königsberg, a seven-hundred-year-old German port city on the Baltic Sea and lifelong home of Immanuel Kant, became infamous in the 1930s as the easternmost bastion of Hitler’s Third Reich and the launching point for the Nazis’ genocidal war in the East. She then describes how, after being destroyed by bombing and siege warfare in 1945, Königsberg became Kaliningrad, the westernmost city of Stalin’s Soviet Union. Königsberg/Kaliningrad is the only city to have been ruled by both Hitler and Stalin as their own—in both wartime occupation and as integral territory of the two regimes. German Blood, Slavic Soil presents an intimate look into the Nazi-Soviet encounter during World War II. Eaton impressively shows how this outpost city, far from the centers of power in Moscow and Berlin, became a closed-off space where Nazis and Stalinists each staged radical experiments in societal transformation and were forced to reimagine their utopias in dialogue with the encounter between the victims and proponents of the two regimes.

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The settler colonial origins of modern social thought, actually: George Steinmetz, The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought: French Sociology and the Overseas Empire, Princeton, 2023

26Aug25

Description: In this provocative and original retelling of the history of French social thought, George Steinmetz places the history and development of modern French sociology in the context of the French empire after World War II. Connecting the rise of all the social sciences with efforts by France and other imperial powers to consolidate control over their crisis-ridden colonies, Steinmetz argues that colonial research represented a crucial core of the renascent academic discipline of sociology, especially between the late 1930s and the 1960s. Sociologists, who became favored partners of colonial governments, were asked to apply their expertise to such “social problems” as detribalization, urbanization, poverty, and labor migration. This colonial orientation permeated all the major subfields of sociological research, Steinmetz contends, and is at the center of the work of four influential scholars: Raymond Aron, Jacques Berque, Georges Balandier, and Pierre Bourdieu. In retelling this history, Steinmetz develops and deploys a new methodological approach that combines attention to broadly contextual factors, dynamics within the intellectual development of the social sciences and sociology in particular, and close readings of sociological texts. He moves gradually toward the postwar sociologists of colonialism and their writings, beginning with the most macroscopic contexts, which included the postwar “reoccupation” of the French empire and the turn to developmentalist policies and the resulting demand for new forms of social scientific expertise. After exploring the colonial engagement of researchers in sociology and neighboring fields before and after 1945, he turns to detailed examinations of the work of Aron, who created a sociology of empires; Berque, the leading historical sociologist of North Africa; Balandier, the founder of French Africanist sociology; and Bourdieu, whose renowned theoretical concepts were forged in war-torn, late-colonial Algeria.

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The settler colonial police: Paul Bleakley, ‘Capital, Settler Colonialism and Police Violence in Imperial Queensland’, in Emma D. Watkins, Eleanor Bland (eds), Imperial Crime and Punishment, Emerald, 2025

26Aug25

Abstract: In the wake of its separation from New South Wales in December 1859, Queensland’s growth was predicated largely by its value as a ‘new frontier’ for European colonists seeking to expand their pastoral and agricultural wealth. The process of settler colonialism was facilitated by the Queensland colonial (later, state) government, who routinely used the Queensland Native Mounted Police (QNMP) for more than 50 years to protect the interests of white landowners, at the typically fatal expense of the region’s Indigenous peoples. The exercise of state violence by the paramilitary-oriented QNMP was reflected in punitive expeditions that resulted in massacre; however, the use of colonial or state police agencies to defend capital with violence was not limited to conflict on the frontier. Drawing on archival material, such as the transcripts of judicial inquiries and internal government correspondence, this chapter reaffirms the existence of a nexus between capitalist expansion and state violence in the imperial period and makes connections between violence committed on behalf of Queensland’s landed pastoralists in the mid- to late-1800s and similar (albeit, less fatal) interactions with labour into the early 1900s. Through this, it is possible to critically interrogate the historical role of police as agents of state in Queensland, with implications for how politically motivated law enforcement was carried out to varying extents throughout the pre-Fitzgerald era, prior to sweeping reforms of the Queensland Police Force (QPF) at the dawn of the 1990s.

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The base of the triangle: Leila K. Blackbird, Embodied Violence: Slavery and Settler Colonialism on America’s Third Coast, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2025

25Aug25

Abstract: This dissertation examines the intertwined histories of slavery and settler colonialism in Louisiana and the greater Gulf South from the Mississippian era through the early American republic, centering the violences that structured imperial expansion, racial capitalism, and territorial conquest. Rather than treating African enslavement and Indigenous elimination as parallel but distinct processes, this dissertation employs a synthetic framework that reveals their deep structural entanglements across French, Spanish, and Anglo-American regimes, foregrounding the centrality of Indigenous enslavement alongside African chattel slavery and their disproportional impacts on women and children. It demonstrates how settler colonial logics have been enacted through various legal and spatial regimes, but also through forms of ongoing structural violence, which have been embodied and are still experienced today. It further argues that the rise of the U.S. South and the consolidation of American empire were built on these interlocking systems of violence against Black and Indigenous peoples; slavery transformed the Gulf South and Lower Mississippi Valley from a richly networked Indigenous world to a racialized geography of elimination, enslavement, and extraction, practices which are foundational—not peripheral—to American settler colonialism. Using a place-based multi-sited historical methodology, this dissertation illuminates how Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous people have experienced and resisted such embodied violence, including reproductive control, forced displacement and diaspora, legal erasure, and intergenerational trauma. The epilogue brings this history into the present, examining how former Native American villages and cultural sites were turned into plantations and then petrochemical-industrial sites, perpetuating cycles of disease, disaster, and death against descendant communities and tribal nations for profit. By combining archival and decolonial methods, this dissertation reorients U.S. history from the margins, insisting on the Gulf South—the Third Coast—as central to the making, and unmaking, of American empire.

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Anthropocene or settlerocene? Tracy A. Stephens, ‘The Anthropocene and Settler Moves to Innocence in Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport’, Studies in the Novel, 57, 3, 2025, pp. 325-342

25Aug25

Abstract: Lucy Ellmann’s 2019 novel Ducks, Newburyport, which presents the internal monologue of an anxious mother of four, is a snapshot of American life in the Anthropocene, as the protagonist worries about her complicity in environmental degradation. The novel illustrates that the Anthropocene is a settler move to innocence that disguises both the role of settler colonialism in causing the climate crisis and the responsibility of settlers to work toward decolonization. It makes this critique through its attention to Indigenous history, the protagonist’s attitudes toward her family’s resource use, and her daughter Stacy’s Indigenous identity. Throughout the novel, interspersed with the protagonist’s monologue, is the story of another mother: a cougar who loses, searches for, and is eventually reunited with her kittens. The paralleling of these stories and Stacy’s identification with the cougar suggest that hope for the future lies in decolonization and the restoration of kinship ties with non-humans.

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