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The reconciliation laboratory? Joseph Gazing Wolf, Ellen Simmons, Paulette Blanchard, Lydia L Jennings, Danielle D Ignace, Dominique M David-Chavez, Deondre Smiles, Michelle Montgomery, Ruth Plenty Sweetgrass-She Kills, Melissa K Nelson, Diana Doan-Crider, Linda Black Elk, Luke Black Elk, Gwen Bridge, Ann Marie Chischilly, Kevin Deer, Kathy DeerinWater, Trudy Ecoffey, Judith Vergun, Daniel Wildcat, James Rattling Leaf, ‘A path to reconciliation between Indigenous and settler–colonial epistemologies’, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 2025

29Apr25

Abstract: There is a movement across settler–colonial institutions of education and research to engage with Indigenous Peoples and Knowledges. Many settler and Indigenous governments are pursuing pathways to move forward together to address global problems such as climate change. However, given the pervasive history of exploitation and displacement of Indigenous communities, this development has caused some concern among Indigenous leaders and scholars. At the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America (ESA) in Montreal, Canada, the Traditional Ecological Knowledge Section of the ESA hosted a 2-day workshop. This gathering of 21 Indigenous environmental scientists included scholars from across the career and professional spectrum. By consensus, workshop participants identified three emergent themes—Engage, Heal, and Reconcile—that provide a pathway toward reconciliation between Indigenous and settler–colonial ways of knowing. This path allows for an ever-greater sharing of institutional resources and power toward a co-equal interfacing of Indigenous Knowledges and settler science.


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The laboratory of settler colonialism: Anna Johnston, The Antipodean Laboratory: Making Colonial Knowledge, 1770–1870, Cambridge University Press, 2023

29Apr25

Description: In this compelling study, Anna Johnston shows how colonial knowledge from Australia influenced global thinking about convicts, natural history and humanitarian concerns about Indigenous peoples. These were fascinating topics for British readers, and influenced government policies in fields such as prison reform, the history of science, and humanitarian and religious campaigns. Using a rich variety of sources including natural history and botanical illustrations, voyage accounts, language studies, Victorian literature and convict memoirs, this multi-disciplinary account charts how new ways of identifying, classifying, analysing and controlling ideas, populations, and environments were forged and circulated between colonies and through metropolitan centres. They were also underpinned by cultural exchanges between European and Indigenous interlocutors and knowledge systems. Johnston shows how colonial ideas were disseminated through a global network of correspondence and print culture.


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A settler colonial outer space: Carla Ibled, ‘Star Wars: Why the Left Should Protect the Status of Space as Humanity’s Commons’, Common-Wealth.org, 24/04/25

28Apr25

Excerpt: Space is one of the few remaining commons of humanity protected by international law, thanks to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Outer space is a rare case where a legal and institutional infrastructure of common ownership and commoning of resources already exists. Today, this status of space is under threat. It is increasingly eroded by the pressure of lobbying corporate powers and their institutional and ideological supports, who are pushing to export the structures of ownership that currently exist on Earth to outer space. Why should the left fight to protect the common ownership status of space? This scene-setting report goes back to the New Space lobby’s attack on international space legislation to open a larger debate on how space can be developed in ways that guarantee shared prosperity and the flourishing of all people and future generations.  


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Settler colonialism embedded: Hung-Peng Lin,Emiko Tajima, Karina Walters, Marilee Sherry, ‘“Erased in Translation”: Decoding Settler Colonialism Embedded in Cultural Adaptations to Family Group Conferencing (FGC)’, Social Sciences, 2025

28Apr25

Abstract: Māori wisdom revolutionized the child welfare system through the now manualized Family Group Conferencing method. The global trend of adopting and adapting this culturally grounded child welfare practice has been well documented. However, as this service model is adapted and imported to other countries, so is its legacy of settler colonialism. This qualitative case study applies Settler Colonialism Theory to unpack the settler colonialism embedded in the process of adopting an adapted Indigenist family engagement program in Taiwan. Research findings indicate that cultural adaptation reproduces settler colonialism. To implement family engagement within a paternalistic CPS system, program implementers struggled between authoritative decision making and building meaningful state–family partnerships. Although adhering to a model that ostensibly involves family decision making may ease settler anxiety among program implementers, settler colonialism remains the elephant in the room. It frequently undergirds the cultural adaptation process. Liberatory social work practice calls for unpacking settler anxiety, systems of power, and cultural imperialism embedded in program implementation.


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On the political economy of settler colonialism: Jacopo Bonasera, ‘The Empire as a Social Machine: Robert Wilmot-Horton on Emigration, Population and Capital Accumulation’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2025

25Apr25

Abstract: This article examines the activities of Robert Wilmot-Horton as Under-Secretary in the Colonial Office (1821–1828). His support for emigration policies has been the subject of classic scholarship in the history of economic ideas and policy-making. By emphasising the relevance of Thomas Robert Malthus’s intellectual achievements on the relationship between poverty, emigration and capital accumulation – on which Wilmot-Horton relied – this work aims to illuminate the motives that led him to seek intellectual and legislative support for a plan that would allow the Irish and British poor to emigrate to the settler colony of Upper Canada with State assistance. To fully appreciate Wilmot-Horton’s contribution to the history of British imperial administration, it is thus crucial to link the emigration debate with the Colonial Office’s contemporary attempt to reform land administration in settler colonies. This proves the centrality that Wilmot-Horton ascribed to artificial legislative intervention in promoting the affirmation of market relations throughout the empire, thereby ensuring social and political stability in the motherland. Finally, this paper assesses key points of Wilmot-Horton’s emigration schemes and Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s later theories of ‘systematic colonization,’ shedding light on the ways in which the former considered emigration a meeting point between scientific principles and practical administration.


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The poetics of settler genocide: Mark LeVine, Eric Cheyfitz, ‘Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide Revisited’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2025

25Apr25

Abstract: In “Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide Updated,” Mark Levine and Eric Cheyfitz, taking into account the Post October 7th Israeli invasion of Gaza, revisit their 2017 essay “Israel, Palestine, and the Poetics of Genocide,” to focus on the question of the limits of the definition of genocide in the1948 Convention. While recognizing that Israel’s latest war on Gaza meets the definition of the 1948 Convention, dependent on scale and intent, the authors argue that an expanded, broader definition would better and more fully account for the incremental and structural genocides characteristic of settler colonialism, including Israel’s long-term rule over the territory of pre-1948 Palestine. Establishing a poetics that accounts for the longue durée structure and effects of Israeli policies in Gaza and across the Occupied Territories, their expanded definition builds on the eliminationist logic Patrick Wolfe’s idea of “structural genocide.” While recognizing that “frontier homicide” is a component of structural genocide, they discuss additional, often non-lethal, components that work to eliminate Indigenous peoples as a group.


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The stigma of settler colonialism: Liam Rourke, Ronald Damant, Janice Y. Kung, Chantell Widney, ‘Health-related stigma among Indigenous Peoples in Canada: A scoping review’, Plos One, 2025

25Apr25

Abstract: Background: Indigenous communities in Canada are disproportionately affected by health conditions linked to stigma, warranting the attention of researchers seeking to understand this culturally-determined phenomenon. This study explores the scope of research on health-related stigma conducted with the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Peoples. Method: We conducted a scoping review using the method described by Arksey and O’Malley. We searched health and social science databases from 1963 to present using the subject headings Stigma and Health delimited by terms indexing over 600 Indigenous groups in Canada. Within the 1,852 results, we searched for reports in which the construct stigma was used to describe some facet of the participants’ experience of a health condition. We excluded studies in which stigma derived from the participants’ sexual orientation, occupation, or cultural identity. We extracted information about the participants’ health condition, Indigenous affiliation, forms of stigma experienced, and their responses. Results: 25 studies involving 1,187 participants met our inclusion criteria. Inuit, First Nation, and Métis participants were drawn from communities in Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Nunavut, Ontario, Quebec, and Saskatchewan. Stigma was reported by people living with HIV, mental health concerns, tuberculosis, STIs, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, physical disabilities, asthma, arthritis, substance use disorders, and FASD. Most frequently they reported enacted stigma expressed as social and physical distancing by perpetrators who interpret the diagnoses and symptoms as marks of social deviance or disease contagion. The primary response to stigma was to conceal one’s condition in ways that increased the disease burden. Interpretation: Canada’s Indigenous communities have escaped the attention, or perhaps interest, of researchers investigating health-related stigma. In five decades of research, the subject surfaces only tangentially in reports designed to explore other aspects of their health. In the absence of research, pressing questions remain, some about stigma as a construct of social science and some about the health of Indigenous Peoples in Canada.


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Settler colonizing Kashmir? Hafsa Kanjwal, Colonizing Kashmir: State-building under Indian Occupation, Stanford University Press, 2023

25Apr25

Description: The Indian government, touted as the world’s largest democracy, often repeats that Jammu and Kashmir—its only Muslim-majority state—is “an integral part of India.” The region, which is disputed between India and Pakistan, and is considered the world’s most militarized zone, has been occupied by India for over seventy-five years. In this book, Hafsa Kanjwal interrogates how Kashmir was made “integral” to India through a study of the decade long rule (1953-1963) of Bakshi Ghulam Mohammad, the second Prime Minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Drawing upon a wide array of bureaucratic documents, propaganda materials, memoirs, literary sources, and oral interviews in English, Urdu, and Kashmiri, Kanjwal examines the intentions, tensions, and unintended consequences of Bakshi’s state-building policies in the context of India’s colonial occupation. She reveals how the Kashmir government tailored its policies to integrate Kashmir’s Muslims while also showing how these policies were marked by inter-religious tension, corruption, and political repression. Challenging the binaries of colonial and postcolonial, Kanjwal historicizes India’s occupation of Kashmir through processes of emotional integration, development, normalization, and empowerment to highlight the new hierarchies of power and domination that emerged in the aftermath of decolonization. In doing so, she urges us to question triumphalist narratives of India’s state-formation, as well as the sovereignty claims of the modern nation-state.


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The cartography of settler self-fashioning: Jamie Ashworth, ‘Cartographic Traces of Cultural Change: Land Surveying and Environmental Imperialism in the Wairarapa, 1842-1853’, New Zealand Journal of History, 59, 1, 2025, pp. 50-78

22Apr25

Abstract: This article presents an analysis of three cartographic depictions of land in Wairarapa and its immediate surroundings, portraying how these maps effected cultural change in the region from initial surveys until the first official purchases of land. Grounded in the historiography of British colonial cartography, the article observes the textual representations of resources that would have proved significant to colonist groups, and how European settlers interpreted and shaped New Zealand’s environments within these texts to suit their intentions of exploiting land resources. Significantly, this article presents a new perspective on activities executed by settler groups that invariably furthered imperialism and subjected Māori to significant social, political, and environmental changes within a shifting colonial milieu, using names and terms to ‘indigenize’ colonists in this ‘new land’. The surveying work of these groups displays the use of maps as dedicated instruments in asserting land ownership and environmental control in early colonial Wairarapa.


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The poetics of settler self-fashioning: Sarah Sharp, ‘The Settler Colonial Cotter: Situating “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” in Post-Revolutionary America’, Burns Chronicle, 134, 1, 2025, pp. 3-24

22Apr25

Abstract: This article examines the afterlives of Robert Burns’s ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ in the United States of America over the long nineteenth century. It examines three ‘American cots’: the two poems, Gavin Turnbull’s ‘The Cottage’ (1790) and John Greenleaf Whittier’s ‘Snow-bound’ (1866); plus the reconstructed Burns’s cottage erected in Atlanta (1910). It argues that through them we can trace both the USA’s first century of self-fashioning and the more global process of rooting anglophone settler identity.


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