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Decolonisation is an art, a martial one: Tricia McGuire-Adams, ‘Grappling with Settler Colonialism Through Martial Arts: How Trauma Informed Martial Arts Provides Intergenerational Healing’, Journal of Emerging Sport Studies, 12, 2025

02Dec25

Abstract: The work of resurgence has been a primary focus of my research for some time as an Anishinaabe health, wellbeing, and physical activity researcher. I have focused on telling many Anishinaabek stories about resurgence through physical activity. But I have yet to tell my own. In my 2020 book, Indigenous feminist gikendaasowin: Decolonization through physical activity, I argued that physical activity has the power to disrupt embodied settler colonialism, to regenerate deep physicality, empowerment, and foster gwekisidoon gibimaadiziwin, which is to make positive changes in your life for wellbeing. My autoethnography is a deeply personal example of how I am navigating this journey of healing childhood trauma, growth, and resurgence. This is a personal decolonization process that has been growing all my life. I imagine myself as a full-grown spruce tree at this stage in my life, but I am now paying attention to my broken and crooked branches, the tilt of my stature, the spaces in between my boughs. As I continue to grow into a mature tree, I want to be fully aware of my imperfections, to welcome and understand them, to accept me for me. Rather than attempt to ignore them, imagining the spaces as not there, erased as embodied settler colonial spaces. These spaces and crooked branches are me, after all. In this autoethnographic article, I will share my own dibaajimowan/personal story of how I come to this work; how I grapple with settler colonialism and how I choose to use martial arts to strengthen my ability to address intergenerational trauma. Thus, in this paper, I ask the following questions: how is martial arts, BJJ in particular, helping me to address my childhood trauma? And, connecting to a broader Indigenous social issue, how can this self-study inform other Indigenous peoples, in particular women, who are navigating healing from trauma, whether it is personal, childhood or intergenerational trauma? It is a well-known practice amongst Anishinaabek to take up our responsibility to share our teachings so that others may learn. In speaking from my heart about these topics, I can share my story to demonstrate how I choose to grapple with settler colonialism.


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Disaster! Cassandra Shepard, Settler Colonialism Is the Disaster: A Critique of New Orleans After Hurricane Katrina and During the COVID-19 Pandemic, University of Illinois Press, 2026

01Dec25

Description: Rebuilding efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and during the COVID-19 pandemic unleashed perpetual disaster on New Orleans’ Black and Indigenous communities. Neoliberalism masked by the auspices of repair, progress, and inclusion reinforced the plight of the urban poor while exacerbating the racial and class inequalities that existed before the storm. Cassandra Shepard’s analysis draws on ideas of settler colonialism to chart how depriving Black and Indigenous people of critical resources intensified the harm, violence, and death inherent in systems of colonization. As Shepard shows, the rhetoric of improvement allows coloniality to masquerade as rebuilding while white elites consolidate power, profit, and privilege. Displaced and disenfranchised people of color, meanwhile, experience the impact of racial-disaster capitalism, with the chaos surrounding Katrina and COVID-19 obscuring the for-profit economic, political, and social exploitation of non-white New Orleanians. Ambitious and provocative, Settler Colonialism is the Disaster refutes the myth of New Orleans’ presumptive revival by shining new light on the ongoing colonization project at its heart.


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Decolonisation? David Myer Temin, Remapping Sovereignty: Decolonization and Self-Determination in North American Indigenous Political Thought, University of Chicago Press, 2023

01Dec25

Description: An examination of anticolonial thought and practice across key Indigenous thinkers. Accounts of decolonization routinely neglect Indigenous societies, yet Native communities have made unique contributions to anticolonial thought and activism. Remapping Sovereignty examines how twentieth-century Indigenous activists in North America debated questions of decolonization and self-determination, developing distinctive conceptual approaches that both resonate with and reformulate key strands in other civil rights and global decolonization movements. In contrast to decolonization projects that envisioned liberation through state sovereignty, Indigenous theorists emphasized the self-determination of peoples against sovereign state supremacy and articulated a visionary politics of decolonization as earthmaking. Temin traces the interplay between anticolonial thought and practice across key thinkers, interweaving history and textual analysis. He shows how these insights broaden the political and intellectual horizons open to us today.


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Definitely in unexpected places (settler colonialism in Afghanistan): David B. Carter, Austin L. Wright, Luwei Ying, ‘Population Displacement and State Building: The Legacies of Pashtun Resettlement in Afghanistan’, International Organization, 2025

01Dec25

Abstract: Population displacement is a prominent state-building strategy. Using either force or positive inducements, states sponsor the resettlement of racial, ethnic, or linguistic groups to consolidate territorial control. We evaluate the long-run consequences of large-scale displacement by analyzing a historical episode in Afghanistan: the relocation of Pashtun communities during the rule of Emir Abd alRahman. Using historical records, we reconstruct the map of relocated tribes to identify contemporary settlements that are connected to the original displaced settlements. We analyze novel, microlevel survey data on more than 80,000 subjects to study how contemporary attitudes about the central government and the Taliban as well as individuals’ identity salience differ across coethnic communities separated by the emir’s state-building effort. We argue that under conditions common to many historical cases, settlers develop regional political identities that are neither ethnocentric, nor pro-centralstate, nor focused on national identity. We show that the long-term consequences of the state-led resettlement of Pashtuns to northern Afghanistan are stronger attachments to regional government and local institutions, along with greater hostility to the central government and the Taliban relative to Pashtuns in the south and east.


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Migropessimists (when in settler colonialism): Lorenzo Veracini, Simone Battiston, Francesco Ricatti, ‘Migropessimism of the Intellect, Migro-Optimism of the Will: The Italian-Australian Experience’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2025

30Nov25

Abstract: Focusing on the Italian-Australian experience, this article outlines its authors’ migropessimism and their subsequent migro-optimism. We initially focus on what we perceive as the migrant’s ‘ontological death’. We will then follow unsuccessful attempts to carve a political space and more successful attempts to pursue spaces of personal autonomy. The immigrants to a settler society like Australia witness a settler colonial sovereignty that is asserted and yet remains defective. Conversely, they face an Indigenous sovereignty that is denied and yet endures. This witnessing confirms that for migrants to settler colonial countries sovereignty is always someone else’s. For Indigenous peoples and for settlers, in their relational opposition, sovereignty is political life; for migrants, sovereignty is like the Epicurean death: they will never encounter it. If migrants are, then sovereignty is elsewhere, since they have already left. And if sovereignty is, then the migrants are no longer, since they have become settlers.


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Sanctioned? Jessica Whyte, ‘Sanctioning Settlers and Settlers’ Sanctions: Financial Warfare and Economic Peace in Occupied Palestine’, Middle East Critique, 2025

30Nov25

Abstract: This article examines the Biden Administration’s 2024 sanctions on Israeli settlers in the West Bank, which were justified on the grounds that ‘extremist settler violence’ threatened peace and stability. While praised by some as a historic step toward accountability, these measures are best understood as part of a long US practice of using targeted financial sanctions to enforce the ‘peace process’ while legitimizing Israel’s colonization of Palestinian land. The article shows that, rather than being novel, the settler sanctions repeat the model of the Oslo Accords, when Washington used targeted financial sanctions against Palestinians, Arabs, and two Israeli organizations that it framed as threats to ‘peace’. The earlier Oslo sanctions were tools of a distinctly ‘economic peace’, in which Palestinians are expected to abandon the struggle for national liberation in favor of individual economic advancement. The more recent sanctions, introduced in the context of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, functioned not as accountability but as deflection – reframing state violence as individual misconduct, stigmatizing Palestinian resistance, and reinforcing the coercive economic order underpinning Israeli colonization. These coercive underpinnings came to the fore in the form of settlers’ sanctions, as the Israeli state engaged in economic warfare to further Palestinian dispossession and expropriate more Palestinian land.


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Fired up settlers: Nicholas Spengler, ‘Playing with fire: unhousing and unsettlement at the antebellum hearthside’, Textual Practice, 2025

30Nov25

Abstract: This article compares Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables (1851) and Melville’s Pierre (1852) as antebellum US ‘romances’ in which the hearthside is represented not as a nostalgic emblem of domestic stability and sociality but as a contested site of property and labour. Through a framework that relates Paula Geyh’s ‘unhousing’ to Anna Brickhouse’s ‘unsettlement’ and Mark Rifkin’s ‘settler common sense’, I read the hearth in House and Pierre as inspiring thoughts and acts of fiery rebellion against the house and the legacies of settler colonialism and racial capitalism on which it is founded. Holgrave and Clifford fantasise about burning down the titular house in Hawthorne’s novel, and Melville’s Pierre sets fire to a part of his legacy – his father’s portrait – as he abandons the family hearth to live with Isabel, the dark-featured woman who claims to be his half-sister. While these arsonist impulses suggest a form of ‘unhousing’ that attempts to reform the settler sovereignty and racial narcissism of the family, I argue that Isabel performs the more radical gesture of ‘unhousing’, one that alludes to the domestic insurrections of Black servants and slaves who refused their subordinate position by burning the homes and bodies of their masters.


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Settler womanhood now: Laura Rodriguez Castro, Barbara Pini, ‘Settler colonialism, neoliberal feminism and the ‘white middle-class farming woman’ in Australia’, Postcolonial Studies, 2025

30Nov25

Abstract: This article examines how white middle class farming women are woven into the narratives of settler colonialism in Australia. Drawing on visual and textual analyses of 150 posts from three major institutional Instagram accounts featuring Australian farming women: @invisfarmer, @agrifutures and @nsw_rwn, we focus on the entanglement of settler colonialism with neoliberal feminism and its everyday enactment as neoliberal femininities. Neoliberal feminism promotes ideals of individualism, choice and self-optimization which are embodied by farming women through affective practices of positivity, resilience and passion, while other emotions, such as anger, are suppressed. These emotional performances legitimize settler claims to land and futurity, reinforcing the erasure of Indigenous presence in rural Australia. By centring rurality, this article extends discussions of settler colonialism, neoliberal feminism and neoliberal femininities which have largely focused on urban contexts.


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The settlers’ Manifest Undestiny: Zoltán Dragon, ‘Spaces in Crisis: Photography of Abandonment, Desolation and Emptiness in the U.S.A.’, Americana, 21, 1, 2025, pp. 28-38

30Nov25

Abstract: The essay explores the spatial myth of America as constructed through photography, focusing on the American West. It argues that photography has historically shaped the American myth by visualizing the frontier as a contact zone between wilderness and civilization. Using a theoretical framework grounded topological analysis, the essay juxtaposes 19th-century images of progress and expansion with contemporary photographs of desolation and abandonment, revealing a haunting return of the past through spatial configurations that challenge and perpetuate the myth differently. The essay traces the development of Western photography from Civil War-era documentation to the King Survey’s images that combined technological progress and wilderness, revealing how photography’s evidentiary power was intertwined with expansionist imperialism. It then examines the contemporary photographic representation of empty, decaying American spaces as a form of double exposure, where past progress and present abandonment co-exist and entangle topologically as one. This new perspective incorporates psychoanalytic concepts of extimacy and spatial theories such as Soja’s Thirdspace to argue for a breakdown of the binary myth of the frontier and a reconfiguration of photographic spaces as sites of lived experience and haunting. Ultimately, the analysis puts forward the notion of a photographic “ontopology,” where images are not mere temporal records but spatial analogies that sustain the myth of the West through an ongoing visual dialogue.


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Settlers against nationalists (rhetorically embracing indigeneity for colonialist purposes): José Pedro Monteiro, ‘Portuguese Late Colonialism and International “Indigenous” Politics: the Spectrum of Protection, Transformation and Discrimination (1945–1972)’, e-Journal of Portuguese History, 2025

30Nov25

Abstract: This article examines a largely underexplored and non-obvious historical process: the interactions between the Portuguese imperial state and the emerging field of international indigenous law during the post-war period. It demonstrates how this process was shaped by contemporary dynamics of transformation, protection, and discrimination in relation to indigenous populations and their social, po-litical and physical environments. Although these processes were not directly or explicitly connected to environmental concerns, they reflected some of the logics that would later inform environmental actions and discourses at both local and international levels.


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