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The race against settler colonialism: Stine Mark Rasmussen: ‘We Run to Tell a Different Story’: Exercising with the Right to Movement Community in a Militarised, Settler-Colonial Context, MA dissertation, Tampere University, 2025

21Jun25

Abstract: This thesis explores how the embodied everyday experience of living in a militarised, settler-colonial context can be understood through exercise practices, and how the effects of living in such a context may be navigated through exercise. It explores this objective through interviews with six Palestinians who exercise and participate in the Right to Movement community in Bethlehem, to understand their lived, everyday experiences. Using a Feminist Peace Research methodology and applying reflexive thematic analysis to the interview data, this research finds that exercising as an everyday practice gains value beyond the ordinary when carried out in this extraordinary setting. Furthermore, this thesis engages with decolonial feminist ideas to argue why lived, everyday experiences of war and violence matter and proposes ways to challenge and transform the existing Western-dominated systems and structures that sustain violence and suppression. The analysis concludes that exercising in this setting is a complex, multilayered, powerful practice of agency and control. Their experiences reveal that exercising operates between the everyday and the extraordinary, highlighting its flexibility and how its significance and symbolic value vary according to the socio-political and specific spatio-temporal settings in which it is practised. As the participants insist on preserving and caring for their bodies, as well as displaying Palestinian identity through their exercise practices, it is used as a creative mode of expression and transformation. Despite the occupation, exercising helps them achieve a sense of freedom, altering feelings of worry and anger into joy and empowerment. This demonstrates the powerful role of exercise as a means of taking control of one’s body and agency regarding how they encounter the militarised, settler-colonial context they live in. Furthermore, the Right to Movement community utilises exercise to take control of and change the narrative, to tell a different story. This thesis argues that we need such stories to understand war and violence as corporeal, lived experiences, and that these experiences should be at the centre of how we analyse, discuss, and formulate foreign policy on war and conflicts. However, this fundamental change requires not just a change of approach but a shift in paradigm and a radical change in how we understand our interconnectedness and responsibility toward one another. I argue that decolonial feminist ideas of collective responsibility, ethics of care, and solidarity are needed to make this shift and break the ongoing cycle of violence.


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The wellness of settlers: Timothy Willem Jones, Nadia Rhook, ‘Returning to the sacred spring? Spa treatments, mineral springs and spirituality in settler Australia since 1852’, Journal of Beliefs & Values, 2025

21Jun25

Abstract: Spas and mineral springs constitute major sectors of the global wellness economy, which now exceeds the size of the global biomedical economy. The industry, media and its critics emphasise ‘wellness’ as both holistic health care and pampering self-care. Wellness culture has been critiqued as neoliberal exploitation, particularly of middle-class, white women. Its spiritual dimensions are often figured as window dressing, gestural, or more substantively as the spirituality of neoliberalism. The history of mineral springs and spa treatments in Australia tells a different story. Spas, water cures and mineral springs in Australia have not typically been an elite enterprise. They have been accessible across class divisions, focussed on meeting neglected health needs, and instrumental in the development of environmental protections. Spa culture in Australia has been relatively free of spiritual tokenism, instead emphasising its scientific rationales. When spirituality started to be associated with the conceptualisation and marketing of aquatic wellness in the 1990s, it was preoccupied with a nonreligious settler colonial spiritual condition, addressing settlers’ experiences of spiritual alienation in the colonised environment. We suggest that recent public engagements with spirituality in aquatic wellness practices have been enabled by the public acknowledgement of Aboriginal sovereignty facilitated by the Mabo judgement.


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The settler and the wolf: Kristina Beggen, Richard York, ‘Colonizing Canis lupus: Wolf Management as a Settler Colonial Project’, Rural Sociology, 2025

21Jun25

Abstract: The hostility to wolves by segments of agribusiness and the general public in the United States is a puzzle, given that wolf predation is not responsible for a large number of cattle and sheep losses and has only a very modest economic effect on the livestock industry. Thus, the logic of profit-seeking in capitalism, although playing a role, is insufficient to explain the outsized and partisan opposition to wolf recovery. We argue that the logics of settler colonialism are a foundational force that shapes the politics and management of wolves in the United States. We explain how settler colonialism seeks to eliminate both Indigenous people and wolves to appropriate and reshape landscapes for settler use. Contemporary wolf policy and management at the state and federal levels continue to reflect settler colonial logics. Our general aim is to show how theories of settler colonialism complement other prominent sociological theories and enhance our understanding of the forces leading to ecological crises. We conclude by highlighting examples of more just approaches to wolf management that include Indigenous kinship and relational values.


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Settler colonising Old Britain: Dimitri Mitrovic, Settler Colonization and Language Contact: How they Shaped Old English, MA dissertation, University of Chicago, 2025

21Jun25

Excerpt: The traditional story of the Adventus Saxonum, or the arrival of the Germanic-speaking populations in Britain, is one of invasion, genocidal violence and conquest. Following the withdrawal of the Roman troops in the fifth century, Germanic tribes washed up on the southern and eastern shores of the island and proceeded to plunder their way inland, forcing the native Britons to the northern and western frontiers, into areas which were to become Wales, Cornwall, Cumbria, and Southern Scotland. This characterization of the events is heavily influenced by De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, a sermon written by the sixth-century British monk Gildas, who depicted the coming of the Germanic-speakers as a harrowing time in which any Britons who remained in the occupied regions were massacred or reduced to servitude. Archaeologists, however, came to doubt this view, partly as a result of an anti-migrationist trend in the field that sought to decouple material culture from tribal identities, and instead emphasized that artifacts could be spread through peaceful or semi-peaceful diffusion, rather than violent invasions and migrations. Through this lens, it was argued that a relatively small elite of male Germanic warriors had arrived in Britain, and their cultural and political dominance resulted in the bulk of the pre-existing population, which remained in place, adopting Anglo-Saxon culture until they began to conceive of themselves as English, rather than British. Though it originated in archaeological circles, this “elite dominance” model eventually came to be endorsed by historians such as Wood (2010). English historical linguists have tended to have difficulties accepting the viewpoint that the spread of Germanic languages in Britain was merely the result of an elite dominance scenario. Old English, which emerged by the seventh century from contact between the various Germanic dialects brought to Britain, contains very little obvious influence from the Celtic languages, and toponymic evidence suggests an almost total replacement of Celtic and Latin place names with Germanic ones during the transition between late antiquity and the early medieval period. Celticists, on the other hand, have seized upon the acculturation model, and have pushed back against the notion that Old English is devoid of Celtic influence. While the number of English words derived from British Celtic is widely accepted to be extremely small, it has been suggested that various English grammatical features bear the mark of a Celtic substrate, but only manifested themselves in writing once the Norman Conquest had extinguished the dominance of the West Saxon literary form, which had supposedly preserved a conservative and more purely Germanic structure than the Celtic-influenced dialects spoken by the commoners. This idea has become known as the “Celtic hypothesis.” In this paper, I will begin by deconstructing the Celtic hypothesis on linguistic grounds. I will then investigate the Adventus Saxonum utilizing archaeological, toponymic, and above all recently-published archaeogenetic data, in order to argue that the evidence in favor of a model of settler colonization via mass migration, rather than elite dominance, is insurmountable in the south and east of Britain. Following this, using theories of language contact and creolization, and analyzing analogous scenarios for which there is more historical evidence, I will explain why Celtic was unable to strongly affect early insular Germanic, despite the fact that some Britons did in fact live alongside the settlers and even started families with them. To conclude, I will examine the reasons for why the linguistic fates of Britain and Gaul differed from one another so drastically, despite the fact that both places experienced colonization by Latin-speakers and Germanic-speakers.


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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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