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The occupied water between the river and the sea: Elisa Adami, ‘Thinking with Water in Palestine’, UAL Research Online, 01/11/25

17Jan26

Excerpt: Since the beginning of the war on Gaza and the ongoing genocide, Israel has denied Palestinians access to basic life necessities: electricity, fuel, medical supplies, food, and, crucially, water. The currently unfolding human-made famine that the besieged population is subject to is compounded by a policy of deliberate deprivation of water. This is no accident of war but part of a systematic plan to eradicate any possibility of life in the Strip – for, as the protestors at Standing Rock reminded us, ‘Mní wičhóni’ or ‘Water is life’.


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Come and see settler colonialism: Jennifer Lynn Kelly, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, Duke University Press, 2023

16Jan26

Description: In Invited to Witness, Jennifer Lynn Kelly explores the significance of contemporary solidarity tourism across Occupied Palestine. Examining the relationships among race, colonialism, and movement-building in spaces where tourism and military occupation operate in tandem, Kelly argues that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as both political strategy and emergent industry. She draws from fieldwork on solidarity tours in Palestine/Israel and interviews with guides, organizers, community members, and tourists, asking what happens when tourism is marketed as activism and when anticolonial work functions through tourism. Palestinian organizers, she demonstrates, have refashioned the conventions of tourism by extending invitations to tourists to witness Palestinian resistance and the effects of Israeli state practice on Palestinian land and lives. In so doing, Kelly shows how Palestinian guides and organizers wrest from Israeli control the capacity to invite and the permission to narrate both their oppression and their liberation.


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Occupying time AND space: Natalia Gutkowski, Struggling for Time: Environmental Governance and Agrarian Resistance in Israel/Palestine, Stanford University Press, 2024

14Jan26

Description: Struggling for Time examines how time is used as a mechanism of control by the Israeli state and a site of mundane resistance among Palestinian agriculture professionals. Natalia Gutkowski unpacks power structures to show how a settler society lays moral claim on indigenous time through agrarian environmental policies, science, technologies, landscapes, and bureaucracy. Shifting the analysis of Israel/Palestine from land and space to time, she offers new insight into the operation of power in agrarian environments and develops a contemporary framework to understand land and resource grabs under temporal justifications. Traveling across both policymaking arenas and Palestinian citizens’ agrarian fields, Gutkowski follows the multiple ways that state officials, agronomists, planners, environmentalists, and agriculturalists use time as a tool of collective agency. Through investigations of wetland drainage in Galilee, transformations in olive agriculture, sustainable agrarian development, and regulation of the shmita biblical commandment, the “year of release” for agricultural fields, this work highlights how Palestinian citizens’ agriculture has become a site for the state to settle and mediate time conflicts to justify its existence. As Struggling for Time demonstrates, time politics will take on ever greater urgency as societies and governments plan for an uncertain future in our era of climate change.


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Settler malaria: Amanda Cooke, Megan B. Brickley, ‘Ecologies of Risk: Malaria and Settler Landscape Transformation in 19th-Century Ontario’, American Journal of Human Biology, 38, 1, 2026, #e70181

14Jan26

Abstract: Objectives: This study examines how settler-driven environmental change shaped malaria transmission and mortality in 19th-century southern Ontario. It aimed to understand the biosocial and ecological conditions that sustained endemic malaria in a temperate, colonial context. Materials and Methods: We analyzed 2702 deaths attributed to probable malaria from 1831 to 1900 using civil, cemetery, parish, and municipal records. Each record was coded for age, sex, occupation, region, and season of death. To assess environmental influences, we incorporated monthly temperature and rainfall data from Toronto as a regional climate proxy. We examined demographic and spatial patterns at multiple scales, including towns, settlement type (urban/rural), and regional groupings, alongside temporal and seasonal variation. Statistical comparisons were used to explore associations, including nonlinear modeling of rainfall and malaria mortality. Results: Probable malaria mortality declined over time but persisted throughout the century. Children under 5 accounted for over half of recorded deaths, while adults in agricultural occupations were also disproportionately affected. Rural areas, particularly in western Ontario, experienced the highest mortality. Generalized additive model (GAM) results indicated a strong nonlinear association between rainfall and malaria deaths (p < 0.001), while temperature was not a significant predictor. Conclusions: Malaria’s persistence in 19th-century Ontario reflected a structural embedding of disease risk within settler-transformed landscapes. Deforestation, altered hydrology, and agricultural intensification created ecologies conducive to mosquito breeding. Vulnerability was not evenly distributed but shaped by age, labor, and proximity to altered environments. These findings underscore the importance of integrating environmental and historical data to reconstruct past disease ecologies and illustrate how evolutionary mismatch can drive vulnerability even in short-lived endemic contexts.


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Settler colonialism is a current affair: Zachary Levenson, ‘Review Essay: On Settler Colonialism, Its Critics, and Its Critics’ Critics’, American Journal of Sociology, 2026

12Jan26

Excerpt: “Settler colonialism” has become the latest academic concept transformed by pundits into a bogeyman. Just since October 7, 2023, to cite a few examples, Time featured a cover story cautioning that application of the label to Israel “run[s] the risk of perpetuating antisemitism,” and the New York Times published multiple “explainers” of the term, describing it as only recently gaining in popularity. And in an op-ed for the Times, columnist Bret Stephens (2024) insists that the term focuses excessively on Israel. For him, deeming a country to be “settler colonial” means insisting that all “settlers” leave immediately, or else, buried in an aside, “Live under new rulers”.


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The race of Indigenous peoples: Sofia Locklear, ‘”People love playing the ‘what are you?’ game with me”: Street Racialization of American Indian and Alaska Native individuals’, Social Problems, 2026

12Jan26

Abstract: American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) people are often excluded from the sociology of race within the United States. To expand research on racialization, this article examines how AIAN individuals experience and navigate racialization through the concept of “street race.” Drawing on interviews with a diverse sample of 47 AIAN individuals living in urban settings nationally, I find that respondents’ experience an erasure of their Indigenous identity and their assumed street race to be “Asian,” “Middle Eastern,” “Black,” “Latinx/Spanish-speaking,” and “White.” These results varied by geography across the United States and demonstrate that a legal AIAN identity does not always match with the day-to-day encounters of street race.


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On settler colonial Kashmir: Tasleem Malik, Maira Safdar, Fiazullah Jan, ‘Beyond occupation: memory, displacement, and the logic of settler control in Kashmir’, GeoJournal, 91, 2026, #9

12Jan26

Abstract: The settler colonial project of India in occupied Kashmir operates through a sustained project of domination, cultural erasure and demographic engineering. While India’s political, military, and demographic interventions in Kashmir are well-documented, their profound and enduring impacts on individuals, particularly the 1989 Kashmiri refugees, remain underexplored. This study addresses this gap by drawing on the ethnographic accounts of the Kashmiri refugees to examine India’s settler colonial project. Drawing on an interpretative phenomenological approach, this research examines how the refugees narrate their displacement and resistance and the long-term impacts of India’s settler colonial logic on their identity, history, culture, and psychological well-being. Situated within a settler colonial and postcolonial theory, this study argues that India’s state governance in occupied Kashmir is an enduring project of territorial occupation, demographic engineering, and cultural erasure. It examines the role of collective agency and the resilience of Kashmiris in shaping their identities in exile. By amplifying the narratives of Kashmiri refugees, this study seeks to articulate a framework that connects the macro-structures of power that view Kashmir as a security issue and an interstate conflict to the micro-texture of lived experiences, repositioning subaltern testimony and indigenous agency within postcolonial/decolonial literature.


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Reliable allies? Sarah Nelson, ‘The missing map: a meditation on allyship’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2026

12Jan26

Abstract: In 2019, I went on a search of the National Library and Archives of Canada. I was looking for the petitions of Pierre Shawinipinessi, an Algonquin leader who successfully petitioned the British government for land to be set aside for his community, only to have the Superintendent of Indian Affairs, twenty years later, deny that such a promise had ever been made. One of the documents I set out to find is a ‘map or sketch’ referred to in a letter. I never found this map. I position this map that I couldn’t find as a starting point, to identify and address the ways in which settler colonialism makes its presence felt, even among settlers working closely in allyship with Algonquin communities. The map is a metaphor for colonial engagement with Algonquin land, illuminating some of the forms of ethical trespass that settlers fall into, and exploring possibilities for maintaining or re-creating ethical space. Through a self-reflective examination of seven years of research and community work with Algonquin communities and settlers in Algonquin territory, this paper explores some of the challenges inherent in this work, and possible solutions related to the authority of Algonquin peoples in Algonquin land.


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Poetic refusal (of settler colonialism): Jeffrey Sacks, Poeticality: In Refusal of Settler Life, Fordham University Press, 2026

11Jan26

Description: “Will you not memorize a little poetry to halt the slaughter?” the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote. Darwish’s poetic statement points to world-evacuating and genocidal violences—in a triangulation of Palestine, Iraq, and the American settler state—as his language recalls us to a sonority in utterance and acts of refusal in collective form. Through readings of Arabic and Arab poetry, art, translation, and philosophy, Jeffrey Sacks illumines an indetermined, non-accumulative, non-propertied manner of lingual doing—across post-Ottoman topographies and states, and in excess of any single language—where language is a practice in sociality, the social is indistinct from the ontological, and being is a poetic mode—what this book calls “poeticality.” Poeticality studies the Lebanese-American poet and painter Etel Adnan, the Iraqi poet and translator Khālid al-Maʿālī, philosophers in the Arabic peripatetic tradition, and writings of Karl Marx, Paul Celan, Walter Benjamin, and others, to demonstrate a sense of form wholly other than what is advanced in self-determined social existence, linguistic self-understanding, and philosophical self-representation—a manner of address and a social pose, which Sacks summarizes under the heading “settler life.” Settler life—a form of life, a practice of reading, and an asymmetric distribution of social destruction—asserts itself as a generalized and regulating attack upon Black and Indigenous life, and upon all forms of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-heteronormative existence. “Everything is in the language we use,” the Oglala Lakota poet Layli Long Soldier has written. This book—learning from Long Soldier’s observation and with Darwish’s sense of the poetic—affirms the demand for Indigenous sovereignty, in Palestine, in Turtle Island, and elsewhere, a demand which, through the collective acts occasioned in it, decomposes and deposes all sovereign forms and all stately legalities, in refusal of settler life.


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Climate change resettlement and settler colonialism: Fatina Abreek-Zubiedat, Irit Katz, ‘Climate change resettlement and inhabitation: Spatialising cultures of colonial pasts and alternative futures in the global south’, Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 2026

11Jan26

Abstract: Climate change is an inherently human-made phenomenon that shapes the mobilities of species and things who, in turn, influence the ways climate change is experienced by humans. These multifaceted climate mobilities are grounded in the spatial histories of imperialism and settler-colonialism, and the legacies of socio-cultural injustice inflicted upon the Global South. Central to climate mobilities is climate change resettlement, which, because it is often informed by colonial cultures of modernity and capitalism, tends to exacerbate environmental change and collapse. Spatial forms of climate change resettlement and related urban and architectural forms of inhabitation, as this special issue highlights, are rooted in the cultural crisis of coloniality, legitimised among colonial powers and local populations in the Global South. An examination of the cultural dynamics and related politics of power embedded in urban and architectural discourses, we argue, is key in understanding and unlearning past and current (neo)colonial approaches to climate change. This introduction to the special issue argues that, by investigating climate resettlement in its broader definition and practices—within the historical complexities of ecological and national coloniality and warfare—enables a more thoughtful engagement with sustainable climate inhabitation. In order to surpass the limitations of coloniality and its entangled cultural-climatic relations with modernity, the articles of this special issue offer new frameworks to spatially examine colonial pasts and imagine situated, yet radically alternative approaches for the future. A broad temporal lens, we argue, is necessary as we face environmental upheaval and learn to cope with the destructive impacts of climate change in the Global South and beyond.


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