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Heritage settlers: Yair Agmon, Memory and Destruction: Heritage Colonialism in East Jerusalem, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2025

15Jun25

Abstract: This research addresses how societies use heritage and the commemoration of past violence to the ruination and domination of Others. It examines cultural memory as integral to the settler-colonial desire for land and logic of elimination, and its findings offer a corrective to scholarship that views memory and destruction as ontologically distinct. They lead me to argue that commemorating loss imagines a past that is recoverable in the present and provides the administrative tools of heritage-making to construct sites of memory by displacing and dispossessing present-day communities—a process I term heritage colonialism. The research involved nearly five years of photo-ethnographic fieldwork at the City of David National Park, located in the heart of the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in East Jerusalem. Using data gathered over dozens of tours, over fifty interviews, photography, and endless hours of observation, I trace two key transformations. The transformation of the archaeological excavation of the city’s multicultural origins into a highly popular tourist attraction centered exclusively on cycles of destruction, exile, and triumphant return to Jerusalem by its Jewish inhabitants. At the same time, I trace how Jewish settlers have utilized the development of tourism, heritage, and archaeology at the City of David to capture a substantial portion of the lands and homes in Silwan, resulting in the ruination of its Palestinian community. Examining these twin destructions, I demonstrate that the construction of Jewish heritage is not merely a guise for a colonial project, nor a form of erasure or denial of its violence. Rather, I find that constructing the memory of the ancient past at the national park is integral to territorial expansion and colonial domination in several ways. Cultural memory envisions and produces an affective and intimate attachment to the ancient Jewish past while devaluing Palestinian life in the present. Israeli authorities have also utilized heritage development as a bureaucratic tool to slowly clear Silwan of its Palestinian houses and residents and to unearth the ancient City of David from beneath the surface. Yet, the valorization of the Jewish past does not conceal or obscure the violence. Instead, it has provided a way to live with it comfortably and has framed it as necessary to protect the past. Building on these findings, I argue that the ethnonationalist and territorial relationship between memory and destruction observed in the City of David has profoundly shaped Israeli memory culture and created the conditions for the increase in land seizure and settler violence we observe today across East Jerusalem and the West Bank, as well as the upstream precondition for ethnic cleansing.


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White collar settlers and their global networks: Hannah Forsyth, Virtue Capitalists: The Rise and Fall of the Professional Class in the Anglophone World, 1870-2008, Cambridge University Press, 2023

15Jun25

Description: Virtue Capitalists explores the rise of the professional middle class across the Anglophone world from c. 1870 to 2008. With a focus on British settler colonies – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States – Hannah Forsyth argues that the British middle class structured old forms of virtue into rapidly expanding white-collar professional work, needed to drive both economic and civilizational expansion across their settler colonies. They invested that virtue to produce social and economic profit. This virtue became embedded in the networked Anglophone economy so that, by the mid twentieth century, the professional class ruled the world in alliance with managers whose resources enabled the implementation of virtuous strategies. Since morality and capital had become materially entangled, the 1970s economic crisis also presented a moral crisis for all professions, beginning a process whereby the interests of expert and managerial workers separated and began to actively compete.


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Faith in the settler weapons: Matthew Rowley, Godly Violence in the Puritan Atlantic World, 1636-1676: A Study of Military Providentialism’, Boydell Press, 2024

14Jun25

Description: This book recounts Puritan struggles for military dominance and for an authoritative interpretation of God’s agency in war. It asks: What did Puritans say was God’s will in warfare; and how did they claim to know? It applies the term ‘military providentialism’ to this attempt to understand God’s will and agency in war; and the term ‘godly violence’ to an act of killing that was deemed to be both just and holy. The book explores these themes by examining Puritan warfare against four groups: Native Americans, royalist Episcopalians, Irish Catholics and Scottish Presbyterians. It employs a wide range of printed and archival sources: sermons, treatises, official documents, newsbooks, letters, diaries, poems and objects related to material culture; and considers private providential interpretations written by obscure individuals alongside published works by more prominent people. Overall, the book provides a rich analysis of the mindset which sustained Puritan political theology and military action at the time when Puritans were at the height of their power on both sides of the Atlantic.


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The fiction of ending settler colonialism: J. Jesse Ramírez, Un-American Dreams: Apocalyptic Science Fiction, Disimagined Community, and Bad Hope in the American Century, University of Liverpool Press, 2022

14Jun25

Description: After the end, the world will be un-American. This speculation forms the nucleus of Un-American Dreams, a study of US apocalyptic science fiction and the cultural politics of disimagined community in the short century of American superpower, 1945–2001. Between the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which helped to transform the United States into a superpower and initiated the Cold War, and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which spelled the Cold War’s second death and inaugurated the War on Terror, apocalyptic science fiction returned again and again to the scene of America’s negation. During the American Century, to imagine yourself as American and as a participant in a shared national culture meant disimagining the most powerful nation on the planet. Un-American Dreams illuminates how George R. Stewart, Philip K. Dick, George A. Romero, Octavia Butler, and Roland Emmerich represented the impossibility of reforming American society and used figures of the end of the world as speculative pretexts to imagine the utopian possibilities of an un-American world. The American Century was simultaneously a closure of the path to utopia and an escape route into apocalyptic science fiction, the underground into which figures of an alternative future could be smuggled.


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Settler pole dancers: Shira Lurie, The American Liberty Pole: Popular Politics and the Struggle for Democracy in the Early Republic, University of Virginia Press, 2023

14Jun25

Description: During the American Revolution and into the early republic, Americans fought with one another over the kinds of political expression and activity that independence legitimized. Liberty poles—tall wooden poles bearing political flags and signs—were a central fixture of the popular debates of the late eighteenth century. Revolutionary patriots had raised liberty poles to symbolize their resistance to British rule. In response, redcoats often tore them down, sparking conflicts with patriot pole-raisers. In the 1790s, grassroots Republicans revived the practice of raising liberty poles, casting the Washington and Adams administrations as monarchists and tyrants. Echoing the British response, Federalist supporters of the government destroyed the poles, leading to vicious confrontations between the two sides in person, in print, and at the ballot box. This elegantly written book is the first comprehensive study of this revealing phenomenon, highlighting the influence of ordinary citizens on the development of American political culture. Shira Lurie demonstrates how, in raising and destroying liberty poles, Americans put into practice the types of popular participation they envisioned in the new republic.


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What the settlers cannot see: Emma C. Tovey Crutchfield et al, ‘Inherited retinal disease in global Indigenous populations: A scoping review’, Survey of Ophthalmology, 2025

14Jun25

Abstract: Accurate diagnosis is essential for accessing emerging gene-targeted treatments for inherited retinal diseases (IRDs), but many minoritised communities face additional barriers to diagnosis. This scoping review synthesised clinical studies on the prevalence and diagnosis of IRDs among Indigenous Peoples worldwide. Medline, Embase, Global Health, Informit and CINAHL were searched on December 4, 2023. We included articles reporting Indigenous Peoples with IRDs from all global regions. Published between 1974 and 2023, 73 studies (581 cases) of IRDs in Indigenous Peoples from 24 countries were included, mostly reporting participants Indigenous to the Middle East (34%), Oceania (27%) and North America (23%). Studies of specific IRD cases showed geographical or cultural group associations, such as rod-cone dystrophy among the Diné (Navajo Nation) or Bardet-Biedl syndrome in Bedouin populations of the Middle East. With dedicated programs, population-specific IRD gene variants in the Middle Eastern Bedouin populations, New Zealand Māori and other Pacific peoples are the most well-characterised, and this has enabled improved diagnostic approaches. There is limited knowledge of the relative prevalence and support needs for IRDs among most other global Indigenous groups. Engagement, co-designed approaches and collective efforts, including raising awareness, may address challenges limiting equitable access to IRD diagnosis for Indigenous Peoples, facilitating access to emerging treatments.


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The housing of settlers: Jessica Parish, Dawn Hoogeveen, ‘Gold is not a metaphor*: locating financialisation and housing injustice in settler colonial property regimes in Canada’, International Journal of Housing Policy, 2025

14Jun25

Abstract: Settler colonial urbanisms and financialisation are two well cultivated areas of thought; however, both have been underutilised to explain the state of housing precarity in contemporary Canada. To address this gap this paper reframes financialisation and assetization through the lens of the settler colonial city and its racialised labour and property regimes. Through analysis of current literature and data on specific practices and outcomes of financialisation and assetization in major Canadian cities, we show how extractive techniques reproduce colonial, gendered, and racialised inequalities and precarities in the housing system. Our intervention demonstrates how settler colonial urbanism and processes of financialisation extend and transform longstanding colonial processes in relation to property, unhoming, and land. We draw on research into homelessness, rental, and owner-occupied housing to expose extraction and precarity as broad structural features of the settler colonial housing system. Ultimately, we argue that financialisation on its own does not explain the multifaceted nature of contemporary housing crisis in Canada. The extractive nature of housing financialisation is situated within an analysis of the specifically settler colonial nature of property and labour in Canadian urbanism.


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A faithful move against settler colonialism: Emile Badarin, ‘Decolonising faith: Palestinian Liberation Theology in the context of settler-colonialism’, Third World Quarterly, 2025

14Jun25

Abstract: This article explores the decolonial potential of the Palestinian Liberation Theology (PLT). It does so by examining the PLT’s attempt at establishing a decolonial Indigenous theology in pursuit of inclusive justice and liberation for both the colonised and the coloniser. While PLT offers a compelling spiritual resistance and contextual hermeneutics contesting Western and Zionist colonial theology, it suffers from inconsistencies. Specifically, the article argues that PLT’s reliance on the occupation paradigm and progress narrative has led to an incoherent assessment of Israeli violence within the broader settler-colonial context. These assumptions have limited PLT’s vision, aligning it with the dominant colonial discourse and solutions, such as the partition of Palestine in favour of settlers. As a result, PLT’s conclusions appear disconnected from its otherwise compelling theological framework. However, a recent shift in PLT’s discourse and literature that engages theological analysis with the paradigm of settler-colonial marks a crucial development, offering new space for a more critical decolonial theology and practice in Palestine and beyond.


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The whole story: Roger Nichols, Surviving Invasion: American Indians and Settler Colonialism, Ethics International Press, 2025

14Jun25

Description: This book focuses primarily on American Indians’ experiences with the invading Anglo-Americans from the 19th century to the present. It looks briefly at Canadian experiences for comparison. The author’s collected essays examine the impacts of treaties and policies related to native sovereignty, property, culture, and religion; and review modern protests to protect tribal sacred sites and long-held treaty rights, showing how indigenous societies have successfully resisted repeated governmental policies seeking to erase their cultures and force them into the general society. Essentially, these readings chronical Indians’ survival as they overcame the policies of settler colonialism which sought to destroy their societies. The book supports the many university and college courses in American Indian Studies, Indigenous Studies, and Ethnic Studies.


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Really, Tim? Tim Duncan, ‘An unsettling Marxist ideology’, Institute of Public Affairs Review, 77, 1 2025, pp. 54-61

13Jun25

Abstract: ‘Settler colonial theory is yet another bizarre ploy by Marxists to unfairly discredit and destabilise Western democracies‘.


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