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Indigenous sovereign engagements: Aleksandr Korobeinikov, ‘Questioning Russian settler colonialism: resettlement strategies and indigenous agency in the post-imperial Sakha (Yakut) region’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2024

22Dec24

Abstract: This article explores how indigenous Sakha intellectuals responded to Russian colonialism during a period of transformation in the Sakha (Yakut) region. It examines the impact of penal and resource colonialism in the late nineteenth century, the response of local intellectuals to potential settler colonialism in the early twentieth century, and their efforts to transition the Sakha population from nomadism to more sedentary or mixed lifestyles. Sakha intellectuals not only challenged Russian settler colonialism, but also appropriated its discourse, arguing for the designation of the Sakha as a sedentary community in the early Soviet period. They sought to counter imperialist representations of the Sakha as ‘backward’ while asserting indigenous agency in shaping regional development. By resisting and reframing colonial practices, these intellectuals became key actors in the socio-political transformation of Yakutia during the late Russian Empire and early Soviet Union. The article focuses on how sedentarization facilitated this transformation, revealing the complexity of colonial dynamics in early Soviet Yakutia.


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Resettler diasporas: Anna Flack, Jan Musekamp, Jannis Panagiotidis, Hans-Christian Petersen (eds), Russian Germans on Four Continents: Histories of a Global Diaspora, Nomos, 2024

22Dec24

Description: The history of Russian Germans (Russlanddeutsche) is one of intensive mobility across space and time. Today, the descendants of eighteenth-century German-speaking settlers in the Russian Empire live on four continents: Europe, Asia, and North and South America. In this volume, authors from the fields of history, sociology, cultural studies, and sociolinguistics analyze key issues of the history and present of this globally connected diaspora group from an interdisciplinary angle. Contributions address the institutional regimes and networks that shaped—and continue to shape—the mobility of Russian Germans on a global scale, the impact of war and violence on the history of this group during the “Age of Extremes,” and the language shifts that accompanied their multiple global moves. Its interdisciplinary and geographic diversity makes this volume a unique contribution to research on migration, global diaspora, transnationalism, and practices of belonging. By analyzing the multiple pathways of migration, entanglement, and belonging of people designated as “Russian Germans” in past and present, its chapters provide fresh insight into the making and unmaking of a global diaspora.


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Indigenous placemaking now: Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, ‘Indigenous placemaking amidst settler colonial leisure: A tale of Hawaiʻi’s living parks’, Political Geography, 2024, #103226

22Dec24

Abstract: What does the production of public leisure space tell us about the 20th century mechanics of settler colonial dispossession? In the second half of the twentieth century, the nascent State of Hawaii expanded and developed its state parks system in an effort to enhance public leisure and natural resource conservation. In turn, several sites acquired for park facilities also catalyzed evictions and removals of the local and Indigenous people who lived there. This essay tracks the emergence of a compromise (attempted and in one case, successfully) to create a ‘living park’ in which residents would remain so that they might educate the public on traditional Native Hawaiian lifeways. This essay describes how midcentury park development did the work of Indigenous removal and erasure by neutralizing and democratizing park space: state-funded leisure space for all radically precluded Indigenous placemaking at a time when Kanaka Maoli communities felt the generational effects of American assimilation most acutely. Ultimately, this essay builds upon scholarly critiques leveraged against conservation politics in order to reveal the dispossessive logics bound up in the envisioning of settler colonial leisure space. Such an understanding offers fresh insight into the violences that occur when space is rendered ‘natural’ and ‘neutral’ and explores the decolonial possibilities embedded in Indigenous placemaking beyond leisure.


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Antisettler Comics? Sophie McCall, ‘Framing, Reframing, and Deframing: Disclosure in Indigenous Comics’, Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society, 8, 3, 2024 pp. 337-357

22Dec24

Abstract: This article demonstrates how Indigenous comic creators disrupt or reclaim the conventions of comics in four works: The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book by Gord Hill (Kwakwaka’wakw), 7 Generations: A Plains Cree Saga by David Alexander Robertson (Cree), Deer Woman: A Vignette by Elizabeth LaPensée (Anishinaabe, Métis), and Dakwäkãda Warriors by Cole Pauls (Tahltan). These comics use innovative paneling to expose silence and denial in settler-colonial societies, to disrupt linear concepts of time, and to assert Indigenous presence expansively across settler-colonial borders. American comic book theorist Scott McCloud, author of several celebrated books on the “vocabulary of comics,” argues that comics create a “dance of the visible and invisible” in the production of “closure” across panels (McCloud 92). In the context of reading comics, McCloud defines closure as “observing the parts but perceiving the whole,” which he further glosses as the reader’s act of silently filling in the gaps between panels, allowing that reader to comprehend the action even between two seemingly unrelated panels. However, without critical self-awareness, a reader risks imposing closure in ways that maintain settler-colonial norms. The comic books that I discuss mobilize strategies of disclosure to contest a reader’s assumptions about the production of meaning across panels. I argue that disclosure interrupts readers’ unconscious mobilization of established narratives that invisibly guide interpretation, and turns the mirror back on the readers themselves. These comic books’ insurgent acts of disclosure challenge settler-colonial impositions of closure and powerfully activate narratives of Indigenous resistance, cultural continuance, empowerment, and resurgence.


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Elimination on display: Hannah Willmann, Rehearsing Settler Colonialism: Music, Visuals, and Text in the Spectacle of Canadian National Identity at Vancouver 2010, PhD dissertation, University of Ottawa, 2024

22Dec24

Abstract: In this dissertation, I argue that settler colonial practices of “elimination” (A. Simpson 2014) and “extraction” (L. Simpson 2013) are present throughout the artistic choices in the “cultural portion” of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony. Within expressions of white settler Canadian nationalism, elimination is seen in the representation of the landscape as vast and empty, and extraction is evident through a settler positionality on the land and a multiculturalism that treats diversity as a resource to be mined (Lowman and Barker 2015, Robinson 2020). In response to the work of Dylan Robinson (2020), Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2021) and others, I undertake this study as part of settler responsibility within the co-intentional (Huygens 2011) work of anti-colonialism between settlers and Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island and further afield. While national spectacles such as the Olympics tend to distract observers from the reality of social injustices (MacAloon 1984), using a multimodal discourse analysis (Machin 2010, Goodwin 1992), I closely examine each multimodal element (music, visuals, and text) to discuss how the scenes reveal an underlying settler colonial mindset (Wolfe 2006, Veracini 2010). By combining the anti-colonial perspectives of Coulthard, Robinson, and Mignolo with the multimodal analysis, I propose an analytic framework which aims to reveal whether spectacles actively engage decolonial content, or whether they leave settler colonial terms unchanged (Coulthard 2011, Mignolo 2020). Studies such as this one, which serve to unveil the underlying logic of settler colonialism and its operation within constructions of Canadian national identity, are a continuing step towards a decolonized future. I offer this work as my small contribution to helping settler Canadians recognize and relinquish their settler positionality in favor of listening and living as guests and neighbors on Indigenous territory.


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Settler colonial development? Kate Meagher, ‘Does the Nobel Prize in Economics 2024 Signal a Reversal of Fortunes for Settler Colonialism?’, LSE Nobel Prize in Economics 2024 Series, 29/10/24

22Dec24

Abstract: Professor Kate Meagher questions whether the Nobel Prize awarded to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson reignites debate over whether settler colonialism fostered development through “inclusive” institutions or perpetuated exploitation and exclusion of indigenous populations. This is as part of our Nobel Prize in Economics 2024 series.


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Settlers against settler colonialism? Dani Pickering, Settlers against colonialism? Education, organising and the Tiriti workers’ movement, PhD dissertation, Te Herenga Waka / Victoria University of Wellington, 2024

22Dec24

Abstract: Behind every hypervisible collective action organised by a social movement is an enormous amount of labour cultivating everyday people’s ability and willingness to mobilise—a political education which takes place both inside and outside the classroom. Despite the close relationship this implies between organising and education, however, distinct bodies of research have emerged around them which struggle to engage with each other. Social movement theory concerns itself more with the phenomenon of social movements themselves, with less consideration for the labours which enable them to emerge; critical pedagogy, meanwhile, focuses on developing individuals’ capacity for transformative social action, but often without forging meaningful links to those actions taken by social movements. My research seeks to address this fissure by exploring how it informs decolonial struggle in the case study of the Tiriti workers’ movement in Aotearoa New Zealand. Since the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi) in 1840, Māori, the Indigenous people of Aotearoa, have struggled against European colonisation. These efforts went largely unsupported in any organised capacity by the settler population until the gradual emergence of the Tiriti workers’ movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Following Māori calls for non-Māori to conscientise our own people about the realities of colonisation and the need to support Māori aspirations for self-determination, this movement within the settler population is now known for its educational interventions in settler communities and institutions across the country. Drawing on a scholar-activist praxis which involved working within and through my existing relationships as a participant in the Tiriti workers’ movement, I conducted and analysed a series of interviews with 25 of my Tiriti worker peers for this research. Together, we sought to better understand how and why our knowledge-practices were established; how and why they have changed over time; and how those changes open and/or foreclose new opportunities to advance the movement’s (and by extension Māori) interests. Through analysis of these discussions, I argue that this case study demonstrates the key tensions and overlaps between educating and organising practices that emerge when pursuing transformative social change in settler-colonial contexts. This claim is supported by the data in three ways. First, many participants found that the movement’s primarily educational strategies are now experiencing diminishing returns, as more of the population becomes “Tiriti-educated” but remains unsure as to what happens next. Second, constraints on Pākehā (white European New Zealander) Tiriti education in particular have pushed out a critical analysis of the centrality of race in local settler-colonial structures and systems. This has prevented meaningful Tiriti-based coalition-building from taking place between Pākehā and other settlers, highlighting a continued need for education even amongst the otherwise “Tiriti-educated”. Third, the movement has an unusual positioning within the dominant settler group as part of the object of transformation. This position requires both a careful reconstruction of self-interest and a structural analysis of state and capital, tasks for which critical pedagogy and social movement theoretical traditions, respectively, are better equipped. These findings show that rather than being a linear process within which education results in action, in practice education is deeply intertwined with other forms of collective action, contradicting the divisions evident in the literature. This thesis therefore makes important contributions to the bridging of social movement theory and critical pedagogy by showing how the social change processes they emphasise are in fact mutually dependent in their efforts to establish and sustain effective challenges to the colonial-capitalist status quo.


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Educated settler ignorance: Ella Mattila, Jyri Lindén, Johanna Annala, ‘Reviewing educational conceptualisations of transnational settler ignorance’, Educational Review, 2024

19Dec24

Abstract: This paper investigates how majority societies’ common ignorance about Indigenous peoples and ongoing settler-colonial reality (“settler ignorance”) has been negotiated in the educational sciences literature. Understanding settler ignorance not as a simple “lack of knowledge” but a powerful issue undermining Indigenous rights and decolonial aspirations, this review sets out to gain new understanding of its dimensions in educational settings. The reviewed literature covers 51 peer-reviewed qualitative records from six settler-colonial contexts – Finland, Sweden, Norway, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand. The emerging conceptualisations of the phenomenon of settler ignorance and ways of addressing it were explored through thematic synthesis. The findings suggest that settler ignorance has many faces: it is conceptualised as emotionally and ideologically contested knowledge-making, as wilful avoidance and resistance, and as a structural mechanism that transcends the question of individual cognition. Similarly, the proposed approaches to dismantling ignorance are diverse, emphasising the potential of educational content, building relationality, and critical reflection. Discussing the findings’ implications, the article suggests how harnessing both context-based and transnational understandings about settler ignorance and its many dimensions could benefit reconciliatory processes between settler and Indigenous populations and signpost one approach to decolonising education.


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A sociology of settler colonialism: Johan Heilbron, ‘Algerian Inquiries and Colonial Sociology: A Joint Interview with Amín Pérez and George Steinmetz’, Practical Sense, 1, 2024, pp. 15-27

19Dec24

Excerpt: Two recently published and thoroughly researched books shed new light on the significance of Pierre Bourdieu’s Algerian studies. In Bourdieu and Sayad Against Empire: Forging Sociology in Anticolonial Struggle (2024), Amín Pérez presents an in-depth account of the collaboration between Bourdieu and Sayad. Drawing on unpublished correspondence and other archival material, he vividly details their collaborative efforts, showing how their unlikely encounter produced a new way of practicing sociology. The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Theory. French Sociology and the Overseas Empire (2023) by George Steinmetz offers a broadly conceived historical sociology of “colonial sociology” in France.


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A specter is haunting the settler polity: Brett Nicholls, ‘The communist empty signifier: the Australian League of Rights and the Voice to Parliament referendum, Continuum, 2025

19Dec24

Abstract: In 2023, voters across Australia resoundingly rejected the Constitutional institution of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. Among several claims made by vote no campaigners against this institution, a text published in the 1980s by the notorious extreme right organization, The Australian League of Rights, surfaced. The central claim of this text, titled Red Over Black, is that Aboriginal claims for justice and land rights are a communist conspiracy. In the lead-up to the referendum, the campaign to vote no echoed this claim. Drawing upon the Laclauian Discourse Analysis, this paper considers how this signifier, ‘communist,’ continues to resonate in political campaigns in Australia. My claim is that the foundations for this continued resonance emerge in enduring reactionary organizations such as the Australian League of Rights, which was founded in the 1940s. The paper thus outlines how the League imagines the communist conspiracy and explains how this conspiracy remains embedded in political discourse today.


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