settler colonial studies blog
  • about
  • definition
  • books
  • journal

« Older posts
Newer posts »

Touring settler colonialism: Sandro Carnicelli, Sarah Marroni Minasi, Vander Valduga, Alessandro Manzoni, ‘Settler colonialism and tourism routes in Southern Brazil’, Tourism Management Perspectives, 56, 2025, #101347

23Feb25

Abstract: Debates regarding the silencing of minorities and the marginalisation of those colonised is not new. The process of perpetuating colonialism is seen in the narratives regarding immigration of those from the global North who occupied places and spaces in the global South. To critically analyse the discursive reality of tourist routes in the three states forming the Southern region of Brazil, we conducted documentary research on the 50 tourism routes in Southern Brazil. The Critical Discourse Analysis reveals that colonial narratives used in the promotion of tourism routes are contributing to silencing non-European voices and perpetuating a systemic marginalisation of Indigenous and Quilombola groups.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler colonialism at the end of settler colonialism: Takuya Maeda, ‘The Closing of the Japanese Frontier: Settler Technocracy and Postwar Japanese Infrastructure’, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, 11, 1, 2025, pp. 227-251

23Feb25

Abstract: For a cadre of influential figures in politics, business, urban planning, and architecture, the Japanese surrender in August 1945 marked the “closing of the Japanese frontier.” With overseas expansion no longer an option due to the loss of the colonies and global decolonization, political and business elites turned to investments in industrial technology and the intensification of land use. Techno-utopian discourses about the potential of postwar science and technology replaced settler colonial discourses about terra nullius as the engine of economic growth and as a leveling force in Japanese society. Through critical reappraisals of major development projects in postwar Japan, this article develops the concept of “settler technocracy” to capture how settler colonial epistemologies and technocratic governance were in dynamic interrelationship in postwar Japan.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Guilt or fury in the face of settler colonialism: Samuel Hayim Brody, ‘The Reality of Settler Colonialism’, Boston Review, 19/02/25

20Feb25

Excerpt: Settler colonialism falls into the category of concepts that may provoke guilt in a certain type of liberal and fury in a certain type of conservative

But even if “settler colonialism” goes the way of “critical race theory,” becoming the new pet hate of liberal pundits’ anti-academic screeds and conservative politicians’ draconian legislation, the phenomenon itself will remain. Getting rid of “settler colonialism” will not stop people from seeking to address the ongoing and enduring injustices of colonization, any more than getting rid of “critical race theory” will make everyone unaware of the vast differences in life outcomes across differently racialized populations.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Even more unhealthy settler colonialism: Sarah A. Whitt, Bad Medicine: Settler Colonialism and the Institutionalization of American Indians, Duke University Press, 2025

17Feb25

Description: In Bad Medicine, Sarah A. Whitt exposes how Native American boarding schools and other settler institutions like asylums, factories, and hospitals during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries worked together as a part of an interconnected system of settler domination. In so doing, Whitt centers the experiences of Indigenous youth and adults alike at the Carlisle Indian School, Canton Asylum for Insane Indians, Ford Motor Company Factory, House of the Good Shepherd, and other Progressive Era facilities. She demonstrates that in the administration of these institutions, which involved moving Indigenous people from one location to another, everyday white Americans became deputized as agents of the settler order. Bringing together Native American history, settler colonial studies, and the history of medicine, Whitt breaks new ground by showing how the confinement of Indigenous people across interlocking institutional sites helped concretize networks of white racial power—a regime that Native nations and communities continue to negotiate and actively resist today.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Unhealthy settler colonialism: Darrel Manitowabi, ‘Colonialism and Indigenous peoples’, in Toba Bryant (ed.), Handbook on the Social Determinants of Health, Elgar Online, 2025

17Feb25

Abstract: Indigenous peoples worldwide face significant health disparities rooted in colonial legacies, including displacement, socioeconomic marginalization, and discrimination. The focus of this chapter is colonialism as a determinant of Indigenous health, emphasizing its structural impact on social, cultural, and economic well-being. It compares global case studies to demonstrate how colonialism continues to impact Indigenous health outcomes, including high rates of chronic diseases, mental health issues, infant mortality, and overall lower life expectancy. There is attention to the importance of understanding Indigenous conceptions of health and strengths-based analyses that emphasize holistic well-being and community harmony. While recent studies emphasize decolonization and reconciliation as pathways to address Indigenous health disparities, it is critical to recognize that a failure to address structural injustices is ultimately colonialism in disguise. This chapter highlights a requirement to recognize rights to land, culture, and sovereignty to address colonialism as a determinant of Indigenous peoples’ health.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

A debate on the question of settler colonialism: Zahi Zalloua, ‘The Problem with Empathy: A Reply to Martin Jay’, Journal of Genocide Research, 2025

17Feb25

Excerpt: It is hard to be critical of Martin Jay’s desire to recentre Jewish empathy amidst the ongoing genocide, and I sympathize with his impulse to focus on this. But I think Jay’s argument for empathy needs to reckon with Israel’s settler colonialism, and the state terrorism that upholds it. 


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler extraction: María Belén Noroña, Marcia Aguinda,’Settler extractive governmentality, Kichwa storytelling, and Indigenous environmental justice in the Ecuadorian Amazon’, Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies, 2025

15Feb25

Abstract: This study brings Kichwa epistemology into conversation with extractive governmentality, settler colonialism, and Indigenous environmental justice to demonstrate that extractive governmental frameworks in the Ecuadorian Amazon engage with settler colonial logic. Settler logics found in territorial legal frameworks are intended to displace and destroy practices of Indigenous-forest relations and replace them with “productivity” at the service of extractive enclaves and larger markets. Indigenous-forest relationships are reproduced through interaction with the forest and storytelling, a form of embodied textuality. The settler logic seeks to dismiss, marginalize, and displace storytelling and relational thinking, as the presence of the state and corporate power rearranges the region’s territory, people, and livelihoods. By documenting female Kichwa storytelling in the communities of Pañacocha and Tzawata, we illustrate how Kichwa epistemology based on Indigenous-forest relations becomes a tool of environmental justice. Women insist on upholding human forest relations, storytelling, and dreaming as legitimate avenues for understanding mining conflicts, for informing grassroots organizing, and for suggesting adequate Amazonian territorial governance.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Settler Rocks: Sophia Olivia Sanan, ‘Rock art at the Iziko Museums of South Africa and its settler colonial imprint’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2025

15Feb25

Abstract: Rock art, as it was framed by formal South African cultural institutions, held an enduring appeal to the white publics of the apartheid era. In the post-apartheid era, this category of art occupies a prominent and contested space in South African museological discourse. Drawn from the authors’ doctoral research, this article examines some of the ways in which the Iziko South African Museums engaged the category of rock art over a 70- year timespan. It locates a tension between the institution’s need to acknowledge the deep roots of settler coloniality imprinted in the category of rock art, and the need to reframe the category in a way that makes space for indigenous ways of knowing. The latter concern is a project that extends far beyond the institution itself, as it requires a re- configuration of knowledge hierarchies to make space for new interpretive possibilities, and processes of dis-entanglement from problematic inheritances (cultural, political, governmental, epistemic). This paper makes a case for ongoing attentiveness the reproduction of settler colonial logics in contemporary cultural contexts and their role in shaping cultural institutions in order to continue working towards possibilities of unlearning and dismantling of such logics.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Responsive settlers? Tim Delany, Sophie Rudolph, Lisa McKay-Brown, ‘Cultural responsiveness, Positive Behaviour Interventions and Supports, and the settler colonial state’, The Australian Educational Researcher, 2025

15Feb25

Abstract: Positive Behaviour Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is a whole school change framework and approach to learning and engagement that originated in the United States (US) and is now implemented around the world. Such a framework requires consideration of cultural responsiveness, particularly in settler colonial states such as the US and Australia. This article examines guidance for improving culturally responsive practice in the PBIS Cultural Responsiveness Field Guide: Resources for Trainers and Coaches (the Guide), a key resource for educators working with students from culturally diverse backgrounds. We employ critical policy analysis and Decolonising Race Theory (DRT) to analyse and discuss the possibilities and consequences of the Guide for educators who are working with Indigenous students in settings that inherit and uphold structural racisms endemic to colonisation. We identify possible intended and unintended effects of the Guide in settler colonial contexts, particularly Australia. Our critical analysis using DRT highlighted some silences and erasures within the PBIS cultural responsiveness advice. The tendency towards othering, binary thinking, and maintenance of the cultural status quo was also apparent. Through this analysis we show how DRT offers rich opportunities for unsettling settler colonial hegemonies in PBIS and in education more broadly.


Filed under: Uncategorized   |  Closed

Zombie settlers: James Rose, ‘The Blood Running Through the Water: Decoding the White Settler Zombie in Jeff Barnaby’s Blood Quantum’, in S. Bacon (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie, Palgrave, 2025

15Feb25

Excerpt: Released in 2019, Jeff Barnaby’s (Mi’gMaq) Blood Quantum takes the established tropes of North American Zombie Cinema—the unexplained viral outbreak, the infectious bite, and the violent conflict between factions of survivors, the young, pregnant survivor and the symbolic potential of the zombie itself—and deftly reworks them through a First Nations perspective.


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

  • Settler colonialism is a global and transnational phenomenon, and as much a thing of the past as a thing of the present. Settlers 'come to stay': they are founders of political orders who carry with them a distinct sovereign capacity.
  • If you're a scholar, and you find some of your work featured on the blog, then chances are that we want it for our journal.
  • what’s new

    • Prisoners of the sim colony: Allie Thek, ‘Pay for Your Lack of Vision: The Naturalization of Imperialist Epistemology in Science Fiction Colony Sims’, Utopian Studies, 37, 1, 2026, pp. 106-125
    • Decolonisation from deep down: Sara Chitsaz, Taylor Behn-Tsakoza, John R. Parkins, ‘Indigenous-Led Energy Transition: Exploring the Tu Deh-Kah Geothermal Project as a Path to Reconciliation’, in Bram Noble, Greg Poelzer, Gwen Holdmann, Saurabh Biswas, Diane Hirshberg (eds), Routledge Handbook of Arctic Energy Transition, Routledge, 2026
    • Settlers out there: Scott Solomon, ‘Will Settling Space Lead to the Evolution of a New Human Species?’ in Chris Carberry, Rick Zucker (eds), A Future Spacefaring Society: Establishing Human Life Beyond Earth, Springer, 2026, pp. 321–331
    • Indigenous peoples here: Sangaralingam Ramesh, The Political Economy of the Indigenous Peoples of the World: Land, Sovereignty, and the Foundations of Indigenous Economies, Palgrave, 2026
    • Settler killing more Country: Jacob Tropp, ‘Globalizing Diné (Navajo) Stories of Radioactive Injustice: Transnational and Settler Colonial Politics of Uranium Mining in the Late 1970s and Early 1980s’, Regeneration: Environment, Art, Culture, 2, 3, 2026
    • Settler killing Country: Juan De Lara, ‘Who killed the Salton Sea? Settler infrastructures and ecological violence in the Southern Californian Desert’, EPD: Society and Space, 2026
    • Analogous history and settler identifications (it’s not just the lobby): Samir Abed-Rabbo, ‘The Colonial Foundations Linking the US and Israel: Settler Colonial Projects from 1492 to Gaza’, Arab Studies Quarterly, 2026
    • Settler moves to worthiness: Yukiko Tanaka, ‘Racialized settler moves to worthiness’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2026
    • Still settler colonial Hollywood: Yining Zhou, ‘The American Western and Native Americans: Revisiting Hollywood’s Representation of the “Indian Wars” in Geronimo: An American Legend (1993)’, The Journal of Popular Culture, 2026
    • Dynamite settlers! Takahiro Yamamoto, ‘Japanese Settlers’ Introduction of Dynamite to Truk in the 1890s’, Itinerario, 2026
    • A history of Indigenous lawfare in Brazil: Alexandre Pelegrino, ‘Fighting Against Land Dispossession: Indigenous Power, Legal Activism, and Race in Brazil (Maranhão, c. 1750–1830)’, The Journal of the Civil War Era, 16, 2, 2026, pp. 267-293
    • The good press of settlers: Shelisa Klassen, Imprinting Empire: Land and Settler Colonialism in Manitoba Newspapers, University of Manitoba Press, 2026
    • A new take on settler colonialism: Charles Menzies, ‘Settler colonialism’, Dialectical Anthropology, 2026
    • The settler army does not need Indigenous peoples: Daniel Stridh, Peter Johansson, ‘Conscription and Colonialism: Tracing the Origins of the Sámi Exemption in the 1885 Swedish Conscription Act’, Scandinavian Journal of History, 2026
    • The heritage of reconciliation? Andrea M. Cuéllar, Ross Kilgour, Perry Stein, ‘Reconciliation and heritage policy making in a Canadian settler-colonial city’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2026
  • contribute

    email the editor


Blog at WordPress.com.
  • Subscribe Subscribed
    • settler colonial studies blog
    • Join 282 other subscribers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • settler colonial studies blog
    • Subscribe Subscribed
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar

Loading Comments...