« Older posts
Newer posts »

Property! Rust Belt space! Settler colonialism … Claire W. Herbert, Michael Brown, ‘Colonial Logics in Rust Belt Revitalization: Rethinking State-led Gentrification’, City & Community, 2025

03May25

Abstract: Scholars have questioned the analytic utility of gentrification theories when applied to declining Rust Belt cities. In these contexts, scholars suggest the state may play a more significant role in instigating gentrification. This article builds on recent scholarship at the intersection of colonialism, race, and urban studies to examine eight regulatory changes aimed at quelling decline and promoting revitalization in Detroit, Michigan that were rolled out during a pivotal period in the city’s recent history. We argue that these state interventions reflect and reproduce a settler colonial replacement logic: they threaten marginalized, primarily Black residents’ informal and legal relations to the city and its resources, while simultaneously striving to attract newcomers and expand their legal ownership of city land and property. These findings illustrate another way settler colonialism continues to shape contemporary dynamics in the United States and implicates city and state regulations as key instigators of urban revitalization in declining cities struggling with segregation and hypervacancy.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Property! Space! Settler Colonialism … Ishaaon Sivanish, ‘Viewing the Future of Space Property Through the Lens of Colonialism’, Global Studies Law Review, 23, 1 , 2025, 226-249

03May25

Abstract: In this note, I will first introduce the Space Race, its lasting impact, and the implications it places on our understanding of property law. I will then discuss common law colonial legal doctrines and their potential impact on space property law. I will also analyze the development of international treaties and agreements in the field of space law and evaluate the effectiveness of treaties compared to common law colonial doctrines. From there, I will discuss how current and future changes in technology and space exploration, including the role of private individuals and companies, will impact the current space law framework and discuss which aspects of international law and colonial law are suited or unsuited to meeting those challenges. Finally, I will gauge the important factors in developing a space property framework and introduce an alternative form of property governance that shares the values of past international agreements while simultaneously safeguarding the common interest in space in the future.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler colonialism and its current conjuncture: Dan Tout, ‘Settler colonialism in the twenty-first century’, Arena Quarterly, 21, 2025

02May25

Excerpt: A political approach informed by the settler-colonial analytic has in recent years become influential within left and radical activist circles in countries such as Australia, some years after it rose to prominence in the academy. More recently, it has spilled beyond the academy and attracted more mainstream attention in the wake of the violent explosion of Zionist Israel’s occupation and genocide in Palestine, as articles and debates in mainstream outlets such as Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, The New York Times and The New Yorker attest. It seems safe now to say that ‘settler-colonial theory’ has become an established frame of thought, of understanding and engaging with the present.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Surfing against settler colonialism: Emily Robleza, ‘Resistance through surfing by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities’, Journal of Occupational Science, 2025

02May25

Abstract: Evidence of resistance using occupation exists in the occupational science literature. However, the experiences of the communities who resist can be further explored to extend understandings of decolonial efforts and reasons for doing so. This qualitative study examined the concept and practice of resistance by centering the experiences of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color in the occupation of surfing. Decolonial epistemologies were applied to explain why and how current grassroots efforts of communities marginalized from a meaningful occupation engaged in it to resist dominant cultures. Eight participants were interviewed to gain insight into their surfing experiences in Southern California and how they have reclaimed the practice. Three identified themes were localism, dynamics of resistance, and coalescing of land, water, and body. The findings provide occupational scientists with an understanding of how the acts and forms in which communities resist aim to enable liberation in response to oppressive forces.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

The settlers’ imaginary friends: Alexander Peacock, ‘”An Indian of Considerable Consequence”: British Travellers, “Big Chiefs”, and Settler Colonialism in 1790s’ Upper Canada’, Journal of Canadian Studies Volume, 59, 1, 2025

02May25

Abstract: This article examines the travelogues of two late eighteenth-century British travellers: Patrick Campbell and Isaac Weld. Travel writing was a pursuit intimately tied to promoting empire, and by endorsing Upper Canada as an attractive destination for British settlers, both travellers encouraged the dispossession of Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee peoples. As tourists, Campbell and Weld were also fascinated by the idea of “Indian” chiefs. Realizing that Upper Canada was as much an Indigenous world as a British one, and recognizing the role played by the Haudenosaunee in imperial defence, they turned their fascination with chiefs to rhetorical advantage. Ignorant of actual Haudenosaunee governance, Campbell and Weld instead invested sovereignty in select Kanyen’kehaka men who conformed to their pre-conceived notions of what chiefs ought to be like. Friendship between these men and the British proved useful in travel writing, justifying British acts of settler colonialism on the basis that, unlike the Americans who waged wars to dispossess the Northwest Confederacy, the British were welcome and the moral power on the continent. The importance given to chiefs to secure this friendship reminds scholars that what Susan Hill called the “Big Chief” school of analysis has a long literary past that has historically justified empire.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Termination as the end of settler colonialism: Matthew Scully, ‘Between Two Emancipations: Louise Erdrich and the Politics of Disavowal’, MELUS, 2025 #mlaf010

02May25

Excerpt: In her 1986 review of Louise Erdrich’s second novel, The Beet Queen (1986), Leslie Marmon Silko seems to praise Erdrich’s “dazzling and sleek” prose only to criticize what she reads as a postmodern aesthetic ideology that prioritizes language “without the tiresome interference of any historical, political or cultural connections the words may have had in the past” (178-79). For Silko, Erdrich’s postmodern aesthetic, by which she means an intensively self-referential style of writing, constructs its beauty at the expense of history and politics, both of which would only “muddy” the demands of “language itself” (179).1 Erdrich’s postmodernist style only works, in other words, by emptying itself of any referential content, by disavowing the connective tissue otherwise signified by its language. Silko’s review has generated a great number of critical responses, including a response from Erdrich that intensified rather than mitigated this dispute with Silko.2 While I have no desire to repeat or adjudicate these debates, I begin with this comment from Silko because she so concisely introduces a fraught relation between aesthetics and politics, especially in Erdrich’s fiction. Erdrich’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Night Watchman (2020), offers an occasion to revisit the question of politics and history in her aesthetic project. The novel seems to foreground the very “muddy” territory—the imbrication of history, politics, and aesthetics—that Silko claims The Beet Queen avoids by presenting itself as an account of Indigenous resistance to the US government’s termination era policies (1940s-1960s), which refer to the ongoing formal and legal attempts to eliminate tribal sovereignty. Yet The Night Watchman’s explicitly political nature also introduces new ambiguities into its aesthetic project. This ambiguity stems in large part from the novel’s engagement with, and production of, disavowal as the structure that at once enables and disables the American political representations and expressions at the center of the narrative and its extratextual history.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settlers easily kill for that one thing: Robert M. Owens, Killing over Land: Murder and Diplomacy on the Early American Frontier, University of Oklahoma Press, 2024

02May25

Description: In early America, interracial homicide—whites killing Native Americans, Native Americans killing whites—might result in a massive war on the frontier; or, if properly mediated, it might actually facilitate diplomatic relations, at least for a time. In Killing over Land, Robert M. Owens explores why and how such murders once played a key role in Indian affairs and how this role changed over time. Though sometimes clearly committed to stoke racial animus and incite war, interracial murder also gave both Native and white leaders an opportunity to improve relations, or at least profit from conflict resolution. In the seventeenth century, most Indigenous people held and used enough leverage to dictate the terms on which such conflicts were resolved; but after the mid-eighteenth century, population and material advantages gave white settlers the upper hand. Owens describes the ways settler colonialism, as practiced by Anglo-Americans, put tremendous pressure on Native peoples, culturally, socially, and politically, forcing them to adapt in the face of violence and overwhelming numbers. By the early nineteenth century, many Native leaders recognized that, with population and power so heavily skewed against them, it was only practical to negotiate for the best possible terms; lex talionis justice—blood for blood—proved an unrealistic goal. Consequently, Indigenous and white leaders alike became all too willing to overlook murder if it led to some kind of gain—if, for instance, justice might be traded for financial compensation or land cessions. Ultimately, what Owens analyzes in Killing over Land is nothing less than the commodification of human life in return for a sense of order—as defined and accepted, however differently, by both Native and white authorities as the contest for land and resources intensified in the European colonization of North America.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Marxism and settler colonialism: Lorenzo Veracini, ‘The Long March To This Place?’ Arena Quarterly, 21, 2025

01May25

Excerpt: This article engages with this critique, outlines a protracted tradition of Marxian, Marxist and communist reflection on settler colonialism, notes that analyses of settler colonialism and class are not mutually exclusive, and argues that settler-colonial studies is ‘indigenous’ to Marxism and socialist traditions.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Teaching against settler colonialism: H. Came, V. Kerrigan, K. Gambrell, T. Simpson, M. Goza, ‘Unravelling colonial education: from Dazzling White to Deliberately Decolonised and supporting the case for Indigenous universities’, Whiteness and Education, 2024

01May25

Abstract: Western universities continue to produce ethnic inequities in educational outcomes within settler colonial contexts. Juxtaposed are Indigenous and tribal universities, producing thousands of graduates despite a challenging environment. This conceptual paper critically examines teaching practices to encourage reflection and action from white and/or racialised teachers. Drawing on the lived experiences of Indigenous and non-Indigenous teachers from Aotearoa, Australia, and the United States, this paper articulates a double spiral of teaching practice drawing on anecdotal and research evidence. The spiral spins, forward and back, from Dazzling White to Off-White Aspirations, Culturally Safe, Intentionally Anti-Racist to Deliberately Decolonised. We use the holistic measurement of what one may feel, hear, and see in these classrooms to illustrate the dimensions. To address educational disparities in Western academia, we encourage non-Indigenous educators to develop their racial literacy. Furthermore, we support the recognition and investment in Indigenous universities where Indigenous peoples are more likely to thrive.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Podcasting against settler colonialism: Vicki Kerrigan, ‘Defining narrative change: a case study of the decolonising podcast Ask the Specialist: Larrakia, Tiwi and Yolŋu stories to inspire better healthcare’, Media Practice and Education, 26, 1, 2025, pp. 58-76

01May25

Abstract: Mainstream media in countries like Australia often perpetuate dominant narratives rooted in settler-coloniser culture, legitimising existing power dynamics and reinforcing inequities. However, in recent decades as the media landscape has fragmented, control over the dominant narrative has loosened and independent podcasters have emerged as powerful agents of narrative change. Narrative change is an emerging field of action research that has grown from social justice activists who believe that personal stories have the power to shift hearts, heads and eventually policies that maintain inequities. However narrative change as a concept is undefined in peer-reviewed literature. Drawing inspiration from Critical Race Theory and Freirean pedagogy, this paper argues key tenets from these two decolonising theories to be considered foundational to narrative change. By examining the utilisation of ‘counterstories’ and ‘problem-posing education’, the paper aims to provide insights into how podcasters can effectively foster intimacy between First Nations peoples and White Australians and change the narrative settler colonisers have perpetuated. To explore these concepts a podcast titled Ask the Specialist: Larrakia, Tiwi and Yolŋu stories to inspire better healthcare will be presented as a case study.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed
« Older posts
Newer posts »