settler colonial studies blog

Sovereign displays: Debbie Bargallie, Bronwyn Carlson, ‘Performing Equity, Preserving Power: The Double Bind for Aboriginal Australian Women in Public Sector Workplaces’, Journal of Sociology, 2025

13Sep25

Abstract: In Australian public institutions, Aboriginal women’s visibility is often mobilised as an instrument of containment rather than a marker of structural change. Focusing on the Victorian Public Sector, this article examines how equity regimes incorporate Indigenous presence while preserving settler-colonial authority. Drawing on Make Us Count and interviews with 25 Aboriginal women, we show how they are hypervisible as symbols of diversity and reconciliation, yet excluded from leadership, safety and decision-making. This double bind is produced through the intersecting operations of race, gender, settler sovereignty and bureaucratic whiteness, in which Aboriginal women perform cultural and emotional labour under conditions of conditional belonging, while their critique is marginalised or penalised. Using Ali Meghji’s notion of theoretical synergy, we bring Critical Race Theory and Critical Indigenous Studies into the conversation, drawing particularly on Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s theorisation of the white possessive logic. We argue that equity, as currently enacted, operates as symbolic inclusion, a technology of governance that sustains institutional power, contributing to critical debates on race, settler colonialism, whiteness and Indigenous refusal.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The Indigenous city before and within the settler one: Sasha Maria Suarez, ‘The Indigenous Turn in Urban History’, Journal of Urban History, 2025

13Sep25

Excerpt: In recent years, scholarship on urban Indigenous history has embraced the interdisciplinary intersection of history and Indigenous studies, generating exciting new trends in the field. Early scholarship set a strong foundation but largely examined the contexts of United States postWorld War II era policy and Indigenous activism as represented by the Red Power movement. The works of scholars such as Paul Chaat Smith, Robert Warrior, Troy Johnson, Donald Fixico, and Susan Lobo, balanced the prescriptive assimilationist agendas of the 1950s and 1960s with American Indian resistance staged by intertribal organizations such as Indians of All Tribes and the American Indian Movement.1 In the last decade, emerging scholarship on urban Indigenous history has continued to build upon these early foundations by expanding its scope chronologically, geographically, and theoretically, providing flourishing new literature on the long durée of Indigenous presence in what scholars have articulated as the “settler city.”2 Even more so, we have seen a shift to the examination of Indigenous urbanity prior to the arrival of European settlers in places such as the United States, Canada, and Australia.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The superannuation of settler colonialism: Levon Ellen Blue, Peter Anderson, Mark Brimble, ‘Superannuation Reimagined: Moving Beyond the Origins to an Indigenous Focus’, Australian Journal of Social Issues, 2025

13Sep25

Abstract: Retirement income systems, such as superannuation, are meant to be non-discriminatory and consider disadvantage faced by members of society. There are significant differences between the life expectancies of Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. The gap in life expectancies is not considered when determining when Indigenous peoples can retire. In this paper, we revisit what has been written about Indigenous peoples having early access to superannuation. To understand the financial implications of early access to superannuation we use existing data to model what early access to superannuation would look like at age 45, 50, 55 and 60. Based on our modelling we reveal the projected shortfalls and in some cases surpluses in projected superannuation balances. Last, we propose ways to close the superannuation gap and create intergenerational wealth for Indigenous peoples by adding a fourth pillar to the current three pillar retirement income system.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Against the religion of settler colonialism: Ulrich Duchrow, Mark Braverman (eds), Interreligious Solidarity for Justice in Palestine-Israel: Ecumenical Response to International Law Violations, Palgrave, 2025

11Sep25

Description: This volume provides a historical context for the present escalation of hostilities between Palestinians and the State of Israel. It brings together interdisciplinary chapters written by international specialists in the field of interreligious engagement. It presents Jewish and Palestinian perspectives as well as the South African perspective regarding apartheid, international law, antisemitism, and the suppression of the Palestinian voice in Germany and the USA. It further delves into the historic and ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian experience, and discusses the ethnic cleansing carried out by Israel and supported by the Western powers, particularly the U.S. The volume ultimately offers theological and hermeneutic alternatives to prevailing understandings of the Bible as supporting modern Jewish hegemony in historic Palestine. It’s an important read for scholars working in the intersection of religion, politics and power.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The discovery of hot water* (explaining the diverse geographies of colonialism and settler colonialism): Christian Welzel, Stefan Kruse, Lennart Brunkert, Steven A. Brieger, ‘The CW-Condition and Colonialism’, in Christian Welzel, Stefan Kruse, Lennart Brunkert, Steven A. Brieger, The Cool Water Effect, Palgrave, 2025, pp. 341-370

10Sep25

* An Italianism: meaning the reinvention of the wheel

Abstract: This chapter demonstrates that the CW-Condition shaped the dominant form of colonialism, namely “extraction colonialism” under a weak CW-Condition and “settlement colonialism” under a strong CW-Condition. A key conclusion is that the causal arrow in the association between the CW-Condition and colonialism runs from the former to the latter, instead of the other way around.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

The settlers CHANGE THE LAND: Zach Wallis, Metabolic Explosion, Settler Colonialism, and the Ambivalence of Ecology in Pākehā New Zealand, 1868-1899, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2025

10Sep25

Abstract: In the late nineteenth century, following the conclusion of the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s, settler society in Aotearoa undertook a political economic project aimed at intensifying and consolidating the local settler colonial project. In doing so, the 1870s were marked by metabolic explosion: the systematic, temporally compressed, and politically driven transformation of environment, ecology, energy, landscape, political economy, and society in the archipelago. In their attempt to consolidate settler colonialism, Pākehā society thus became inheritors of the British fossil economy, and the varying political economic and environmental practices they adopted combined to form a metabolic feedback loop of dizzying complexity and simultaneity. This thesis examines how Pākehā society understood ecology, defined broadly as a set of discourses concerning collective human relations to nature and ideas about the relationship between species. Adopting a cultural materialist approach centered upon the relationship between metabolic explosion, settler colonialism, and discourse, this thesis delivers a critical assessment of the structure and politics of Pākehā ecological discourse in late nineteenth-century New Zealand. Using actors’ categories provided by William Pember Reeves’ 1898 history, The Long White Cloud, it finds that these discourses assumed a dialectical structure. The “thesis” valourized colonization by understanding the archipelago as “void space,” meant to be filled by foreign flora, fauna, and people. The “antithesis” bemoaned the ruinous and ecocidal character of Pākehā settlement, with the effect of influencing early and often unsuccessful attempts at forest preservation. The “synthesis,” emerging out of Darwinian natural history, was an ambivalent utilitarianism, overdetermined by metabolic explosion and the cultural logic of settler colonialism and which precluded any truly radical critique of Pākehā environmental and ecological transformation. Despite the supersession of this thinking by the early twentieth century, a similar utilitarian ambivalence has marked popular discourse about the environment and ecology in the Occident and beyond throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Weber the settler colonialist (who was trying to reconcile socialism and capitalism and thought settler colonialism was the answer): Victor Stazzeri, The Young Max Weber and German Social Democracy, Haymarket Books, 2023

10Sep25

Description: The Young Max Weber and German Social Democracy examines the formative years of a classic social thinker once called the ‘bourgeois Marx’ from the standpoint of his relationship to the foremost working-class organization of his time. It argues that Weber’s early engagement with the standpoint of the rural worker — not his later study of the ethics of ascetic Protestant entrepreneurs — first convinced him of the central role of culture in human agency. The crisis of liberalism in a rapidly modernising, conflict-ridden Imperial Germany embarking on colonial expansion emerges in the work as the decisive setting for the genesis of Weberian social thought; the rising labour movement, in turn, as the young Weber’s little-know yet crucial interlocutor.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

More on the sexual fantasies of settlers: María Laura Martinelli, Settler Colonial Fantasies: Scenes of Captivity and Desertion in the Southern Cone of Latin America, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2025

10Sep25

Abstract: This dissertation explores the entanglements of colonialism, discourses of sexuality, and eroticism in the Southern Cone of Latin America through an interdisciplinary lens that includes historical anthropology of the borderlands, settler colonial studies, political theory, gender and sexuality studies, and psychoanalysis. It centers on the persistent colonial fantasies surrounding white women allegedly captured during Indigenous raids in the regions that now comprise Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. I conceptualize these narratives—combining the figure of the captive woman (la cautiva), Indigenous raids (malones), and the borderland setting—as “scenes of captivity.” These scenes form a rich and evolving cultural and literary archive that spans from the seventeenth century to the present. The dissertation argues that placing the erotic language of these scenes within settler colonial contexts reveals how domination is imagined and reproduced through cultural forms in unexpected ways, often entangled with narratives of sexuality and desire. This approach traces the legacy of Spanish colonialism into the contemporary political imagination. Rather than interpreting la cautiva as a mere allegory of emerging nation-states, I situate scenes of captivity within a global settler colonial framework. Drawing on a constellation of texts—including colonial chronicles, Jesuit writings, 19th-century essays, serialized fiction (folletines), novels, and contemporary erotic literature—I examine how these narratives have sustained, and at times subverted, settler colonial imaginaries across centuries. The dissertation begins with an analysis of Ruy Díaz de Guzmán’s Historia of the conquest of the Río de la Plata and its resonances in Jesuit texts from the Araucanía and Tucumán borderlands, where Indigenous desire was portrayed as excessive and threatening, and sexuality served as a key tool in the racialization of Indigenous peoples. It then turns to 19thcentury texts by Chilean politician Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna and Argentine writer Eduarda Mansilla—Elisa Bravo (1884), Lucía Miranda (1860), and Pablo, ou la vie dans les Pampas (1868)—to examine the economies of desire that animated these scenes during contested military occupations of Mapuche and Rankulche territories. Finally, the dissertation explores contemporary imagination of the Pampas as heterotopic spaces in works such as Osvaldo Baigorria’s “Semen indio” and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Las aventuras de la China Iron. By tracing how these scenes reappear and shift across time and media, the dissertation argues that they not only use sexualized narratives to justify colonial domination, but also paradoxically inform visions of gender and sexual liberation. From their colonial origins to contemporary re-elaborations, scenes of captivity are accompanied by gestures of desertion that destabilize their logic. These gestures, I argue, open possibilities for gender liberation that exist in tension with, and sometimes in contradiction to, Indigenous sovereignty. By situating captivity and desertion at the intersection of gender and Indigenous liberation, this research reveals the enduring and unresolved tensions between these emancipatory projects—tensions that remain central to the most radical political struggles in Latin America today.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Acquiring Indigeneity before Rome: Rebecca Childs, Colonisation and the Feminine: Foundation Myths and Roman Identity in Vergil’s “Aeneid”‘, MA dissertation, University of Waterloo, 2025

10Sep25

Abstract: In this paper, I explore how Indigenous women have historically been utilised within settler colonial frameworks, both ancient and modern. Interpreted through post-colonial theory and the lens of settler colonialism in colonial Canada, I examine how two ancient Indigenous Italian women—Camilla and Lavinia—are depicted and treated in Vergil’s Aeneid. Through their suitability and readiness for marriage, their representation, and their indigeneity and relationships to the Italian land, the text reveals how each woman is positioned within the Trojan colonialist agenda. Camilla, though possessing Roman traits, is constructed as an ‘Other’—a liminal and nonconforming Volscian warrior whose deep connection to the land renders her as an impediment and unassimilable to the Trojan colonialist programme. Therefore, she is erased. Lavinia, by contrast, embodies both Indigenous Italian identity and proto-Roman ideals associated with Augustan femininity. Thus, Lavinia is assimilable into the Trojan colonialist programme. Ultimately, this analysis underscores how gender and indigeneity intersect in literary narratives to reflect broader colonial strategies of erasure and assimilation.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

Uneducating settlers: Samia Al-Botmeh, ‘Palestinian higher education: resistance to settler colonialism in the face of erasure’, Globalisation, Societies and Education, 2025

08Sep25

Abstract: This paper strives to illuminate the logics of Israel’s attacks on Palestinian higher education and historicises the ways in which Palestinian universities are significant sites of resistance to settler colonialism in the face of erasure. Since October 2023, the Israeli genocide in Gaza has taken the colonial logics of erasure to their most extreme conclusion: the mass destruction of schools and colleges in addition to the relentless killing of students and staff. Historically, Palestinians have come to consider higher education as a sphere where power, agency and resistance can be understood and relations of solidarity can be built. Palestinians place huge value on higher education as they see it as a mechanism of resistance but also a means to build a free and flourishing Palestinian society. By analysing these experiences through an anti-colonial lens, this paper argues that Palestinian universities serve vital functions that are specific to the struggles of colonised populations. First, providing a vital intellectual and viable space for intense political debate and plurality of ideas that contribute towards social and political movements aimed at liberation. Second, providing a platform for imagining a more just life, free from subjugation and colonial oppression.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed

what’s new

contribute