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Metereological settler colonialism: Nadezhda Mamontova, ‘Governing the unstable: Colonial atmospheres, ‘weathering’ Indigenous, and the colonisation of polar air in the Soviet Arctic’, Political Geography, 119, 2025, #103331

29Apr25

Abstract: This paper explores the role of polar meteorological stations in Soviet colonial ambitions during the Arctic geopolitical competition of the 1920s and 1930s, examining their enduring legacies in contemporary Russian Arctic policy. Amidst growing geopolitical interest in the Arctic, these stations became essential tools for asserting territorial sovereignty, collecting data crucial to the development of the Northern Sea Route, and consolidating Soviet control over Arctic frontiers. This research argues that these stations, functioning as instruments of state power, enabled the Soviet regime to extend its territorial claims and political reach over land, resources, and Indigenous populations in this remote region. The paper also investigates how Soviet racialised ideas about Indigenous resilience to harsh Arctic conditions were exploited to justify settler-colonial policies and control over the Arctic environment. In particular, it examines how Soviet authorities framed Indigenous peoples as naturally adaptable to extreme climates, exploiting their perceived resilience to support state-led territorial consolidation and the expansion of state control. The research situates Soviet meteorological governance within the broader context of Soviet settler-colonial policies, which sought to transform nomadic Indigenous lifestyles into permanent settlements aligned with Soviet visions of a ‘fixed’ Arctic, characterised by a stable and predictable atmosphere. Finally, the paper demonstrates how Soviet meteorological governance played a crucial role in conceptualising the Arctic as a space not only to be physically occupied but also to be weathered and controlled, highlighting the continuity between the Soviet Arctic doctrine of the 1930s and contemporary Russian Arctic policy, in which Indigenous peoples are once again perceived as particularly well-suited to climate change.


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Picturing settler landscapes: Christabel Devadoss, ‘Landscape Photography, National Parks, and Settler Colonial Nationalism’, GeoHumanities, 2025

29Apr25

Abstract: Research has been critical of photography as a patriarchal and colonial tool while also focusing on representation of outdoor spaces as white. While research has examined patriarchy and colonialism in visual historical practice, it has not explicitly addressed the connections between US landscape photography and the foundations of national parks and public lands. This paper discusses how photography, not just as art but as a representational practice, intersects with nationalism in settler colonial spaces and subsequently impacts public imagination and participation in such places. Framing of national lands concurrently impacts the field of landscape photography and shapes societal expectations of visual ownership in the US. Drawing from public sources like the National Park Service (NPS) signage and websites, historical representation, and visual public media on the US National Parks (like PBS), I demonstrate how national park visual discourses, past and present, intricately intertwine with (white) nationalist imaginings that intersect with settler colonial ideologies, impacting the historical and current practice of US landscape photography.


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The pain of settler colonialism: David K Jones, Rebecca M. Mowat, Gwyn N. Lewis, Catherine M, Cook, ‘Improving outcomes from pain management programmes in Aotearoa New Zealand: listening to the voices of Māori’, AlterNative, 2025

29Apr25

Abstract: There are inequities for Māori (Indigenous peoples of New Zealand) in relation to chronic pain, including a disproportionate prevalence of chronic pain, a greater impact of pain, and reduced long-term benefit from chronic pain services. This likely arises from impacts of colonisation and racism within health services. The study aimed to determine the experience of Māori who had attended a 3-week pain management programme in Aotearoa New Zealand. Six participants were interviewed regarding their experiences of attending the programme, and the data analysed using thematic analysis. Five themes were developed: Lost and alienated, Manaakitanga (kindness, respect, care) created a supportive environment; Education enables mana āhua ake (personal autonomy); Whanaungatanga (relationship) is valued; and Where is the tikanga (Māori protocols)? The programme provided respectful care that facilitated participants to make their own health care choices. However, the lack of tikanga and Māori health views meant the programme was experienced as medical and Western-oriented.


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The Paine of settler colonialism: Anthony Dean Rizzuto, ‘Paine and Race: Ideologies of Racial Liberalism and Settler Colonialism in the Founding of the United States’, Early American Studies, 23, 2, 2025, pp. 177-214

29Apr25

Abstract: Thomas Paine has long been heralded as a voice of universal egalitarianism. That representation proceeds from wishful misattributions of antislavery writings and concerted misreadings of the existing archive that continue to this day. Building on insights from critical race theory, Black Marxism, settler colonial theory, and Indigenous studies, this article reveals a consistent pattern of white supremacy in Paine’s published writings. It argues that the emerging Republic defined itself as foundationally white against Black and Indigenous others, and that Thomas Paine was instrumental in this process. The article begins by delineating the systematic scholarly misrepresentation of Paine on the subject of race. It then provides a brief overview of his career in a transatlantic eighteenth-century frame, and proceeds to a radically new reading of Common Sense. It culminates with a reinterpretation of the racial ideology of Paine’s archive. A coda considers the significance of this argument in the current conjuncture.


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The settler art of anthropology: Martin Crevier, ‘Anthropology and Settler Nationalisms in the Art of Emily Carr, Irma Stern, and Margaret Preston’, The Journao of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 2025

29Apr25

Abstract: South African Irma Stern (1894–1966), Canadian Emily Carr (1871–1945), and Australian Margaret Preston (1875–1963) all attained iconic status as artists in their respective countries. Early appraisers commended their incorporation of Indigenous and Black peoples in a national modernist canon through the use of post-impressionistic sensibilities. Despite notable similarities in biography, vision and oeuvre, these three artists have yet to be considered together in a comparative and connected mode. This article links their careers, ideas and concomitant emergence by focusing on their common and concurrent engagement with the science of Anthropology. All three absorbed and shared anthropologically-inflected conceptions of the ‘Other’. By distilling Anthropology’s discourses for popular audiences, they served as transmission belts between science and the public. They spread theories of racial typologies, of degeneration, of culture and of Indigenous disappearance. Modern art, via Anthropology, thus served as an interface through which Indigenous populations were appropriated and incorporated within nationalisms across Britain’s empire of settlement.


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Capitalising on settler colonialism in Palestine: Amir Reicher, ‘The settler-colonial ethical outlook in the West Bank settlement project: Or, how a settler-colony fell apart when money entered the frontier’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 15, 1, 2025, pp. 146-160

29Apr25

Abstract: Applying an anthropology of ethics approach to the study of settler-colonialism, this article discloses the settler-colonial ethical outlook that animates the most activist circles in West Bank settlement society. By “settler-colonial ethical outlook” I mean the set of proper and improper motivations for appropriating land (according to the settlers). Such an analysis reveals how in the West Bank settlement project, making a profit from the land is taboo—a taboo that, against the backdrop of the rise in land value, came to haunt a community of settlers and eventually led to its implosion when settlers holding two distinct ethical frameworks (deontological vs. ethics of the “good life”) turned against each other. Tracing this case of “moral breakdown” within the ethical outlook of settler-colonizers, this article shows how in the case of the West Bank settlement project, for-profit imaginations and capitalism more broadly sit in an uneasy relationship with settler colonial expansion.


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On the racing of settler colonialism in Palestine: Shaira Vadasaria, ‘The Racial Question of Palestine and the Question of Anti-Racism in Palestine’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 2025

29Apr25

Abstract: The persistence of race thinking and racial violence toward Palestinians is inextricably linked to a century-long imperial and settler-colonial project. Yet, state-centered conceptions of anti-racism have seldom been the formative grammar upon which Palestinian sovereignty struggles are waged. Inspired by pedagogical encounters teaching critical race studies in Palestine, the author asks: What do divergent traditions of racial critique open to analytically, and what do they foreclose, in our understandings of decolonial liberation struggles in and for Palestine? What does Palestine’s decolonial liberation struggle and anti-racist legacy instruct scholars of race to center in our understanding of anti-racism? Thinking through her former students’ ambivalence around liberal conceptions of anti-racism as the vehicle toward achieving anti-colonial justice within a settler state, she argues that paying attention to how ideas about racism and anti-racism get registered and stacked within the wider legacy of anti-imperial and anti-colonial critique from Palestine invites a rethinking of the relevance of state-centered liberal approaches to anti-racism for Palestine’s land-based liberation struggle.


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North of settler colonialism: Julia Christensen, Rebecca Hall, ‘Welfare Colonialism and Resource Colonialism in Northern Canada’, in Daniel Béland et al (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Social Policy in Canada, Oxford University Press, in progress

29Apr25

Abstract: Northern Canada, like the rest of Canada, is a space established and reproduced through processes of settler colonialism. With a focus on the Northwest Territories, this piece examines the relationship between two arenas of dispossession: welfare colonialism and resource colonialism. While these two branches of colonialism are often articulated as distinct, we ask, how has welfare—in its colonial form—been both shaped by and shaped for resource colonialism? In other words, how does welfare colonialism create the conditions for resource colonialism, and how, in turn, does resource colonialism reproduce processes of dispossession and differentiation that create the “need” for settler welfare? This relationship is illustrated through an analysis of northern housing policy. Through an examination of settler housing policy, first, in historical context, and second, in relation to contemporary resource extraction, this chapter traces its impact on Indigenous homemaking and, indeed, Indigenous lifemaking. By framing homemaking as Indigenous lifemaking, this piece situates homespaces in the context of Indigenous struggles for self-determination.


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The racing of settler colonialism: Laura Pulido, ‘Geographies of Race and Ethnicity III: Settler Colonialism and Nonnative People of Color’, in Lori Gallegos, Manuel Vargas, Francisco Gallegos (eds), The Latinx Philosophy Reader, Routledge, 2025

29Apr25

Abstract: Settler colonialism has become an increasingly important concept over the past decade, and while geographers typically think about it from a white/native perspective, I explore how ethnic studies, specifically, Chicana/o studies, has responded to it. For different reasons both disciplines have hesitated to fully interrogate the significance of the concept. In the case of geography, the whiteness of the discipline has caused it to overlook vibrant debates within ethnic studies. Chicana/o studies has not directly engaged with settler colonialism because, I argue, it has the potential to disrupt core elements of Chicana/o political subjectivity. Specifically, it unsettles Chicanas/os’ conception of themselves as colonized people by highlighting their role as colonizers. Acknowledging such a role is difficult not only because it challenges key dimensions of Chicana/o identity, as seen in Aztlán, Chicanas/os’ mythical homeland, but also because of the precarious nature of Chicana/o indigeneity. Examining Chicana/o studies’ muted response to settler colonialism illustrates the impoverished nature of geography’s study of race.


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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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