Description: Like all empires, Japan’s prewar empire encompassed diverse territories as well as a variety of political forms for governing such spaces. This book focuses on Japan’s Kwantung Leasehold and Railway Zone in China’s three northeastern provinces. The hybrid nature of the leasehold’s political status vis-à-vis the metropole, the presence of the semipublic and enormously powerful South Manchuria Railway Company, and the region’s vulnerability to inter-imperial rivalries, intra-imperial competition, and Chinese nationalism throughout the first decades of the twentieth century combined to give rise to a distinctive type of settler politics. Settlers sought inclusion within a broad Japanese imperial sphere while successfully utilizing the continental space as a site for political and social innovation.

In this study, Emer O’Dwyer traces the history of Japan’s prewar Manchurian empire over four decades, mapping how South Manchuria—and especially its principal city, Dairen—was naturalized as a Japanese space and revealing how this process ultimately contributed to the success of the Japanese army’s early 1930s takeover of Manchuria. Simultaneously, Significant Soil demonstrates the conditional nature of popular support for Kwantung Army state-building in Manchukuo, highlighting the settlers’ determination that the Kwantung Leasehold and Railway Zone remain separate from the project of total empire.

Excerpt: This essay addresses an anthropological and historical understanding of the concepts and practices of an indigenous sovereignty, specifically the Araucanian polity, from the early Spanish contact period to briefly the present. The Araucanians or Mapuche, as they are known today, are located in the south-central Andean region of Chile. Although the primary focus is on the middle 16^th to middle 17^th centuries during the Arauco War (~AD 1551 to 1641), the Mapuche successfully resisted the Spanish conquest for more than 250 years by forming a confederated proto-state or polity comprised of partner domains (i.e., Catiray, Arauco, Tucapel, Puren) and different ethnic groups. The Spanish called this polity the “Estado Indomito” (“unconquered state”; see Ercilla y Zúñiga [1569] 1982). In 1641, the Spanish Crown recognized the polity as a sovereign political order. The Chilean historian Alberto Medina interprets the meaning of the term estado as it was used in the 16^th century.

Abstract: In settler colonial contexts the historical and ongoing dispossession and displacement of Indigenous peoples is foundational to understanding the production of urban space. What does it mean that cities in what is now known as Canada are Indigenous places and premised on the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples? What roles do new urban reserves play in subverting or reinforcing the colonial-capitalist sociospatial order? This paper examines these questions in relation to new urban reserves in Canada. Most common in the Prairie provinces, new urban reserves are satellite land holdings of First Nation communities located outside of the city. While the settler state narrowly confines new urban reserves to neoliberal agendas, First Nations are successfully advancing reserve creation to generate economic self-sufficiency, exercise self-determination, and subvert settler state boundaries. I argue that new urban reserves are contradictory spaces, as products and vehicles of settler-colonial state power and Indigenous resistance and place-making.

Abstract: Many of the social investigations carried out in social settlements established in Britain and the USA in the period from the 1880s to the 1920s are early examples of participatory research based on a theory of knowledge with ‘citizen experience’ at its centre. This research, much of it done by women, was often methodologically innovative and enormously influential in shaping public policy. Its history is bound up with that of disciplinary specialization, in which women’s research and reform work have been classified, and thus hidden, as ‘social work’.

Excerpt: Because the application of the term “wild” has been and continues to be used to oppress nonhumans and animalizable humans, ferality traverses racist routes—historically, politically, and theoretically. Building on Halberstam’s argument that anticolonial indigenous theory is anarchic—wild or feral—we can conclude that to be against the nation state, against the settler state, is to be against domestication. An anticolonial politics is thus for the wild and for the feral. 

DEADLINE: 10 February 2017

In the field of International Relations, the settler-colonial present is often muted in quests to unravel contemporary crises. Yet, its core logics persist in ongoing movements of territorial conquest, capital accumulation and dispossession of peoples, often under the guise of development, state-building, and good governance. Glen Coulthard (2014), in his discussion of Canadian settler colonialism, argues that the obfuscation of settler-colonial relations derives from its ability to make its constitutive hierarchies seem natural; its strength depending on its ability to incorporate the cultural and ideological activity that takes place within society and transform it into legitimating support. In rendering its history and present ‘normal’, it reshapes critique of colonial social relations – in which the dispossession of the native is a ceaseless feature – to give it moral parameters that entrench its legitimacy. This section aims to interrogate the mechanisms through which settler-colonial logics are normalised and hidden, determined moral and made final. Its particular focus is on the way knowledge is harnessed to control narrations of past and present, as well as the relations between colonialists, natives and the different populations that have been made subordinate to, and yet essential producers of this project. It is our contention that it is the elasticity of settler-colonial knowledge that makes it so difficult to challenge; in effect, to decolonise it. This section will bring together scholars studying settler colonial movements/states, to discuss the ways in which knowledge production becomes ambiguous, resilient and incontestable, in order to work towards its decolonisation.

We welcome individual paper proposals that can fit one of the following panel themes:

1) The Contemporary Settler Colonial State 
This will include two panels that explore the past and present machinations of settler-colonialism, the different movements and agents that territorialise settler logics in contemporary states, and the multiple interstices with other current projects of erasure and replacement (i.e. capitalism). They unravel intersecting repressive and productive practices that interact to entrench the settler-colonial present.

2) Colonial ‘Unknowing’ – Knowledge production of/in settler societies
These two panels will explore the significant role ‘knowledge’ plays in the production and sustainment of settler-colonial relations. Contributors will examine the different sites, agents and material nodes that render settler knowledge normal, hidden and unchallengeable. 

3) Decolonising Knowledge – Modes of resistance and change
This panel/roundtable will explore the different ways in which knowledge is/can be decolonised through indigenous and anti-colonial resistance movements; discussing their modes of negating, rejecting and de-normalising settler relations, and their capacity to construct alternative knowledge.

Proposals (with abstracts of 200 words maximum) must be submitted via the online submission system: https://www.conftool.pro/paneuropean2017/

For any questions please email sp46@soas.ac.uk or deputydirector@kenyon-institute.org.uk

Abstract: There is growing evidence that Aboriginal peoples often experience healthcare inequalities due to racism. However, research exploring the healthcare experiences of Aboriginal peoples who use illicit substances is limited, and research rarely accounts for how multiple accounts of stigma intersect and contribute to the experiences of marginalized populations. Our research aimed to explore the healthcare experiences of Aboriginal peoples who use illicit drugs and or illicit alcohol (APWUID/A) living in Vancouver’s inner city. Using Indigenous methodologies, a community research team comprised of APWUID/A led the study design, data collection and analysis. Peer-facilitated talking circles explored community members’ experiences accessing healthcare services and patient-provider encounters. Using an intersectionality framework, our research demonstrated how healthcare inequalities among Aboriginal peoples are perpetuated by systemic racism and discrimination. Stigmatizing racial stereotypes were perceived to negatively influence individual attitudes and clinical practice. Participants’ experiences of medical dismissal often resulted in disengagement from care or delay in care. The findings suggest healthcare providers must understand the structural and historical forces that influence racial disparities in healthcare and personal attitudes in clinical practice. Adequate clinical protocols for pain management within the context of illicit substance use are urgently needed. The valuation of Aboriginal peoples and cultures within healthcare is paramount to addressing the health gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians.

Abstract: The purpose of this thesis is to explore how Indigenous men understand Indigenous identity, how they experience Indigenous-specific programming while in prison, and how these experiences intersect. Through a number of qualitative semi-structured interviews, Indigenous men described their experiences of participating in Indigenous-specific programming while incarcerated; the data is then understood within an historical context of colonialism and assimilation policy. The key findings of these interviews highlight the importance and necessity of Indigenous-specific prison programming to incarcerated Indigenous men, as well as the healing potential of Indigenous culture and spirituality. However, systemic barriers in provincial prison systems prevent Indigenous men from being able to access such programming. This thesis also finds that Canada’s history of colonialism has affected the Indigenous identities of many of the research participants. Some spoke about culture and language loss as a direct result of colonization (the residential school system, the sixties-scoop, and the child welfare system) while others spoke about the indirect outcomes of colonization, such as marginalization and fragmented identities. Based on these findings the main conclusion is that while Canada is attempting to appear postcolonial in light of talks of renewed relationships and reconciliation, colonization of Indigenous men continues within the Canadian prison system. As incarcerated Indigenous men are denied access to culture and spirituality the prison itself is serving to further disconnect Indigenous people from being Indigenous and fostering the erasure of Indigenous identity from the Canadian settler state as a means of continuing what can be termed as the ‘civilizing’ project.

Excerpt: There is a timelessness to this form of American evocation of a longed-for past from which the nation has fallen. It serves to both redeem the nation’s deeper purpose and critique those who deviate from it. In that dialectical relation of unifiers and deviants we see another timeless form of American narrative, which is the countersubversive one that evokes a mythical unity in order to draw out and demarcate deviance. While this is a narrative one can locate in the politics of nations around the world, in the contemporary moment this narrative particularly defined the terms of the 2016 US political context. Before speaking to the contemporary US context, we must pay homage to and make connections with the past, even if it is but a decades-old past in this case.

Abstract: In recent years there has been a powerful resurgence of settler colonialism as an interpretive framework through which to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Attached to the burgeoning field of settler colonial studies, this so-called ‘turn’ to settler colonialism has seen Israel-Palestine increasingly compared alongside New World white settler societies like Australia, Canada and the United States. In seeking to undercut the lens of exceptionalism through which the conflict has conventionally been viewed, the settler colonial paradigm has some important counter-hegemonic implications for reframing Israel-Palestine, not least of which is its prescription for decolonization. However, it is paradoxically in the context of decolonization that the limits of the settler colonial paradigm become most apparent. I argue that these limitations are connected to the dominance of Patrick Wolfe’s structural account of settler colonialism, which leaves very little room for transformation, and to the particular connotations settler colonial studies has acquired from the New World contexts in which it is most often articulated. This is particularly the case in Israel-Palestine, where these connotations preclude engagement with the national aspects of the conflict and leave under-examined the unique resonances of the settler/native distinction, which need reckoning with in any serious account of decolonization.