Settler Colonial State Research Articles

Anticolonial co-design: a methodology for including agricultural workers in the development of new AgTech

ABSTRACT Collaborative design (co-design) is becoming a popular method for including end-users in the design process of technologies which may affect them. The research in this paper emerges from an agricultural technology (AgTech) co-design project located in settler colonial state of Aotearoa New Zealand. Inspired by methodological insights from anticolonial science and technology studies (STS), the paper details the authors’ experiences with attempting to include local and migrant agricultural workers within the AgTech co-design project in a way that did not perpetuate colonialism (i.e. was anticolonial). Based on these experiences, the authors identify four practices that can support other researchers wanting to engage in anticolonial co-design: (1) understand the historical context of your research; (2) create a place –and community-based guidelines for technology development; (3) build and maintain strong relationships with collaborators; and (4) be prepared to slow-down or to stop innovation. These practices offer methodological insights into how to do anticolonial co-design within the uneven power relations of settler colonialism and within projects not necessarily designed to engage in anticolonial co-design.

Cabecitas Blancas: settler colonialism, racial capitalism and the (im)mobility of borders for Yucatecan migrant families

In this paper, I analyse the intersection of settler colonialism, racial capitalism and border violence by examining Cabecitas Blancas a project run by the Yucatecan government to reunite families divided by the US-Mexican border. A unique program in Mexico, Cabecitas Blancas helps elders who have not seen their children living in the United States for at least 10 years, due to their children’s precarious immigration status, reunite for a short period of time. I have developed the term tramitología to show the way the settler colonial state monitors and restrict Indigenous mobility by designating who is “worthy” of government support. I demonstrate how the flow of mostly Maya elders via Cabecitas Blancas between borders is facilitated only because they become state commodities that sustain racial capitalism via tourism and multicultural policies. Ultimately, I argue that reform programs such as Cabecitas Blancas enable and (re)produce exploitation, settler colonialism and border violence. This paper draws on semi-structured interviews with government officials as well as YouTube videos and online news articles depicting different stages of the program.

The coloniality of internationalization: towards a power-conscious framework for studying the experiences of international students in Western contexts

ABSTRACT While existing scholarship has demonstrated that the experiences of international students in Western contexts are shaped by colonial power relations undergirding higher education internationalization, there remains a dearth of a comprehensive and nuanced perspective on international students’ relationships to colonial forms of power. To address the research gap in question, this paper proposes the development of a power-conscious framework to elucidate the international student–colonial power entanglement. Developed through a systematic literature review, the framework foregrounds three interrelated themes – subjugation, submission, and subversion – capturing the multifaceted interplay between international students and colonial forms of power. By emphasizing the complexities of the interplay, the framework challenges static portrayals of international students vis-à-vis colonial forms of power, highlighting the dynamics among the students’ vulnerability to, complicity in, and potential to resist the paradigm of otherness rooted in colonial forms of power. The framework also underscores the importance of situating inquiries on international students within the broader context of the lived realities of marginalized communities in settler colonial states, emphasizing the need to critically examine the responsibilities and agency of international students in unsettling ongoing colonial legacies of domination and oppression. Based on the development of the power-conscious framework, this paper contributes to advancing a transformative understanding of international student experiences and the (im)possibilities of engaging with internationalization in a more equitable and inclusive manner.

Apartheid in the Twenty-first Century: Racial Capitalism and the Struggles in Palestine

Apartheid has become an increasingly important framework for understanding and challenging Israeli rule in Palestine. The Apartheid Convention states apartheid is a crime against humanity. We contend what is missing from this definition of apartheid is an economic and ontological link. Although the current legal definition focuses solely on the political regime, it does not provide a strong basis for critiquing the economic aspects of a settler colonial state embedded in apartheid. To address this concern, we propose a more comprehensive definition of apartheid which grew out of the struggle in South Africa during the 1970s that gained support among revolutionaries due to the limits of decolonisation in South Africa after 1994 — highlighting the reality(ies) that apartheid is intimately connected to capitalism. This conceptualisation was termed racial capitalism. This article argues that racial capitalism provides a more thorough understanding of the destructive dynamics of the Israeli settler colonial project, one that insists that the struggle against Israeli domination must confront both the apartheid state and the racial capitalist system if Palestinians ever hope to achieve liberation.

From Securing the Border to Securing Nature: Homeland Security as an Emerging Environmental Actor in the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands

Hundreds of miles of barriers span the U.S.–Mexico border, not only blocking the migration of people, but also crisscrossing National Parks and Wildlife Refuges and bifurcating important wildlife corridors in the process. Despite their location within federally protected places, the past and present construction of these barriers has progressed unencumbered by federal oversight given the waiver of dozens of environmental regulations. This shift in regulation amid increased border militarization has not been fully evaluated for its environmental effects, as federal conservation agencies tasked with managing public borderlands are increasingly prohibited from studying how barriers will affect the landscape in the long term. This research examines how the state is shaping environmental governance and knowledge politics in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, an environmentally significant and hyperpoliticized region integral to the maintenance of the United States as an imperial border-making institution. Bringing together theories on political ecologies of the settler colonial state with the racialization of nature, this article demonstrates how (1) the Department of Homeland Security has emerged as an environmental actor produced through a reconfiguration of settler state power; (2) knowledge claims about the environment are produced in ways that elide the ecological consequences of border barriers; and (3) racialized discourses of migrants are codified in environmental governing documents that support increased border militarization. I conclude with a discussion of how settler colonial technologies of environmental governance create new geographies of militarization and conservation in federally protected places along the U.S.–Mexico border.

Reclaiming Narratives - Muslim Women Navigating Activism in Educational Research Implications and Recommendations for Educators

This chapter delves into the intricate dynamics of activism within educational research within the context of resistance and justice within settler-colonial states from Turtle Island and beyond. Drawing inspiration from Eve Tuck's (2010) concept of shifting from damage-centered research to desire-based research and Sara Ahmed's (2010) work on embodying what it means to be a killjoy, we endeavour to confront and address prevailing tensions we face as visibly identified Muslim women researchers and educators. We position ourselves to navigate the complexities of our lived experiences and advocate for justice in the current climate. We come together from Pakistani and Palestinian familial lineages to share our lived experiences and specific testimonies of ‘othering’ in educational research and activism. Using an anti-colonial and desire-based framework, we explore the framing and tensions of Orientalism and the struggle against it. We also contemplate our identities, positionalities and stances within educational research. Drawing strength from Indigenous cultures and Islamic philosophies, we seek to advocate for disruption, refusal and subversion, essential to activist research. We conclude with implications for educators, universities, researchers, schools, communities, and beyond. We aim to illuminate the paths we navigate as activist researchers, harnessing our collective experiences and reframing the research approach through a desire-based approach.

The Black Lives Matter Movement, Jewish Allies, and the Long Legacy of Black Anti-Zionism

Abstract: From the emergence of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, massive numbers of Jews, committed to resuming the Black-Jewish coalition of the civil rights era, became its avid allies. They failed to recognize that this alliance, which foundered and was sundered by the late 1970s, had increasingly been replaced by Blacks' identification with "their Brown Palestinian siblings," which rendered the conflict with Israel in stark racial terms. After the Six Day War, Black militants promoted a narrative that replaced Jews as a fellow oppressed group with Jews as iniquitous Zionists, who had established an illegitimate settler-colonial state that ethnically cleansed and victimized indigenous people of color—a narrative upon which their successors in the BLM movement drew heavily. With the rise of the BLM movement, the Black-Palestinian alliance was solidified—their wide divide on issues of race, gender, and homosexuality overridden by their shared anti-Zionism. In 2016, when the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a constituent partner of the BLM umbrella organization, issued a policy platform identifying Israel as "an apartheid state," committing "genocide against the Palestinian people," leading Jewish organizations appeared confounded and dismissed these views as a minority position. Spokespersons of secular and religious Jewish associations condemned what they labeled BLM's "anti-Israel rhetoric," which they insisted was "totally unrelated" to the movement's "social justice work." They appeared to be unaware that far from mere "rhetoric," the denigration and delegitimization of the Jewish state had long been at or near the core of the anti-racist ideology propounded by the Black militants revered by BLM leaders and activists. Thus, in 2020, organizations allegedly "representing over half of Jewish people in America" published a statement that endorsed the BLM movement "unequivocally," while several of the signatories released additional statements condemning those Jews who had rejected the movement once it posted the policy platform. The Jewish community fractured over the issue of Black antisemitism, but unlike in earlier periods, far more Jews, identifying as "progressives," continued to support a movement whose leaders and activists espoused or tolerated antisemitism, albeit lightly cloaked in anti-Zionist garb.

Seeking environmental justice through the state: Insider allies in U.S. state and federal government agencies

Geographers and political ecologists have demonstrated settler-colonial states’ longstanding key roles in producing environmental injustice through colonialism, racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and other mechanisms. Such studies tend to conclude, implicitly or explicitly, that environmental justice (EJ) movements’ pursuits of more sustainable and just futures must therefore antagonistically confront the state or work beyond it entirely to create alternative futures that do not reinforce state hegemony and violence. However, other scholars in recent years have critiqued such characterizations of the state as unilaterally and fundamentally oppressive, arguing instead that states are terrains of struggle whose contradictory programs and practices reflect not only the interests of capital but also actions of movements. They demonstrate that movements pursuing more just and sustainable futures find purchase working both through and beyond the state. Here, we follow these scholars but depart from them in one respect – namely, they frame movements as pressuring the state only from outside of it. We argue that conceptualizing the state and movements as ontologically overlapping and permeable realms in which some actors move back and forth illuminates additional movement influence on state practice and additional factors that mediate their efforts. We make this case by following a group of U.S. EJ activists who pursue EJ movements’ goals by taking formal positions inside the government agencies they seek to change. We show that they accomplish meaningful change in these roles and that their work is mediated not only by industry power over state agencies, as other scholars have rightly identified, but also by elements of regulatory workplace culture, insider allies’ skills honed in external EJ advocacy, and solidarity among EJ advocates within and beyond the state. By more fully identifying such mediating factors and showing how they shape insider allies’ work, we hope to highlight new fronts of struggle as former EJ movement activists use their insider ally positions to wrest more control over the state from capital and for liberatory ends.

Theorising Māori Health and Wellbeing in a Whakapapa Paradigm: Voices from the Margins

ABSTRACT Whakapapa is an Indigenous metatheoretical framework; a phenomenon of metaphysical and social connections embedded in Indigenous epistemology unique to Aotearoa New Zealand (Aotearoa NZ). This research foregrounds the innate connection between Māori, land, health, and wellbeing as an expression of Whakapapa, nuanced through the layering of lived experience and sensemaking of 30 Māori participants, situated in dialogue with the culture-centered approach (CCA). Noting the erasure of Māori voices from the hegemonic frame of health communication in the settler colonial state, we sought to understand health and wellbeing meanings, challenges and solutions as articulated by Māori participants at the margins of Indigeneity. Drawing on the CCA approach to health communication, the manuscript highlights the relationship between Whakapapa and voice. The dialogs emergent from in-depth interviews place the CCA in dialogue with the Whakapapa paradigm, foregrounding the role of voice democracy in creating anchors to health and wellbeing among Māori, rooted in tino rangatiratanga (sovereignty). The articulations of Māori health voiced from/at the margins are offered as interventions into the large-scale health inequities experienced by Māori in Aotearoa NZ.

Living in Relation

This essay proposes collaborative Hawaiian design thinking as a model for innovative housing architectures based on ʻike honua, a sense of place determined through knowledge of the land. We examine community-led (re)building efforts in Hawai‘i as relational acts between human and non-human forms, acknowledging sustainability as an embedded practice. Engaging with kūpuna (elders, ancestors) as a decolonial praxis transforms environmental management through co-created futures in a settler colonial state. This ethic contrasts with technocratic planning decisions that depend on foreign resources and energy imports to mitigate a low-inventory housing market exacerbated, in part, by climate-related disasters.

Protecting National Sovereignty: The ‘Australian Model’ and the Exclusion of Asylum Seekers

Increasingly, the ‘Australian model’ of offshore detention is promoted to restrict asylum seeker migration and preserve national sovereignty. This article analyses metaphor usage within press coverage of immigration to examine the origins of this discourse. Focusing on two high points of asylum seeker arrivals (2001–2002, 2012–2013), I demonstrate how negative metaphor use constructed asylum seekers as racialized, illegitimate, illegal Others, who breached Australian sovereignty. I argue that this was a response to a crisis of settler-colonial legitimacy, exacerbated by calls for Indigenous sovereignty, with anti-asylum discourse utilized as a tool to negate and neutralize Indigenous sovereignty claims and legitimate settler-colonial state power. I further argue that sovereignty claims were employed to reinforce Australia’s positioning within regional hierarchies of power, through the enactment of offshore processing agreements with less powerful, ostensibly ‘sovereign’ nations, thereby reaffirming and legitimating a racialized, neo-colonial ordering of the world.

Access to and Health Outcomes of Pediatric Solid Organ Transplantation for Indigenous Children in 4 Settler-colonial Countries: A Scoping Review.

Solid organ transplantation (SOT) is considered the optimal treatment for children with end-stage organ failure; however, increased efforts are needed to understand the gap surrounding equitable access to and health outcomes of SOT for Indigenous children. This scoping review summarizes the literature on the characteristics of access to and health outcomes of pediatric SOT among Indigenous children in the settler-colonial states of Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia, and the United States. A search was performed on MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, and CINAHL for studies matching preestablished eligibility criteria from inception to November 2021. A preliminary gray literature search was also conducted. Twenty-four studies published between 1996 and 2021 were included. Studies addressed Indigenous pediatric populations within the United States (n = 7), Canada (n = 6), Aotearoa New Zealand (n = 5), Australia (n = 5), and Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia combined (n = 1). Findings showed that Indigenous children experienced longer time on dialysis, lower rates of preemptive and living donor kidney transplantation, and disparities in patient and graft outcomes after kidney transplantation. There were mixed findings about access to liver transplantation for Indigenous children and comparable findings for graft and patient outcomes after liver transplantation. Social determinants of health, such as geographic remoteness, lack of living donors, and traditional spiritual beliefs, may affect SOT access and outcomes for Indigenous children. Evidence gaps emphasize the need for action-based initiatives within SOT that prioritize research with and for Indigenous pediatric populations. Future research should include community-engaged methodologies, situated within local community contexts, to inform culturally safe care for Indigenous children.

Australian Reconciliation and the Enduring Invisibility of Whiteness

ABSTRACT ∞Reconciliation has emerged as one of the key goals of transitional justice and a favoured policy approach to address the racism, inequality and historical injustices experienced by Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial states. This article focuses on Australian reconciliation and argues that it has failed to critically engage with whiteness, limiting the potential of reconciliation to address the root causes of these issues. Drawing on critical whiteness studies and Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s concept of patriarchal white sovereignty, the article analyses the federal government’s push for constitutional recognition and demonstrates why reconciliation perpetuates the dispossession of Indigenous lands. The article also engages Michael Rothberg’s figure of the implicated subject to complicate the concept of whiteness and overcome the Indigenous/settler or victim/perpetrator binary. This article contributes to the field of transitional justice by advocating for a more explicit and critical examination of whiteness to advance justice in settler colonial contexts.

Racial Realities

AbstractHow should we conceive of conflicts that seem intractable? Is there any hope of a resolution? We observe impasses between various groups concerning the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, the Movement for Black Lives and racial conservatives, and Indigenous voices versus settler colonial states. Some aspects of these impasses can surely be explained by an unwillingness by one or more parties to the conflict to yield any ground. Might there also be room for misunderstanding generated by radically different ways of conceiving the world? According to the different worlds thesis, people come to radically different understandings of the world because they inhabit incompatible conceptual realities. In this article, I endeavor to explore possible ways of understanding the thesis and its potential impact on certain normative practices we tend to take for granted.

Revolutionary Enclosures (Until the Apricots)

Jasbir K. Puar and Dima Srouji build upon their respective work in architecture, visual art and decolonial theory to produce a collaborative examination of colonial pathologies for Sharjah Art Biennial 15, 2023. Srouji’s architecture and art practice encompass a variety of mediums that allow her to explore notions of heritage and public space in Palestine and the region. Puar is a writer and scholar whose current work focuses on settler colonial violence, disability and debility in Palestine. Their collaborative installations integrate understandings of space and planning with the contemporary politics of resistance in the context of Palestine and the surrounding region. At Sharjah Art Biennial 15, Puar and Srouji present ‘Revolutionary Enclosures (Until the Apricots)’ (2023), a series of household items that respond to the material conditions of lockdown, interweaving the artists’ experiences of COVID-19 quarantine in Palestine and their memories of the Second Intifada (2000–2005), a major Palestinian uprising against Israel. The project reframes everyday objects emblematic of the trauma of enclosure for Palestinians as transformative matter and reservoirs of affective practices of resilience, community and caregiving: hoarded cans of tuna form the constituent parts of a radiator signifying warmth; resin apricots evoke the exchange of sustenance among neighbours; shrapnel becomes decorative wallpaper motifs; a stairwell used as shelter from air raids transforms into a communal reading space. Exploring the collective rhythms and materialities of these conditions, Srouji and Puar conjure the everyday making and remaking of the commons through and against the constraints of siege and containment. The conversation published here took place between March and September 2023, and thus predates the latest phase in the catastrophic violence that has historically defined Israel’s relationship to Palestine and the Palestinians. Triggered by an unprecedented and shocking attack by Hamas on 7 October, Israel’s genocidal military campaign in Gaza is not an anomaly, but in line with and part and parcel of the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the Apartheid system that the settler colonial state of Israel has relied on for its sustenance since 1948. The questions asked here by Maasri and Toukan, as well as the artworks discussed by Jasbir and Srouji, probe aspects of this very condition that has brought us to the unabashed genocidal violence we are now all witness to today.

The Thin Green Line: Coast Salish and Indigenous Resistance to Energy Transmission Projects

ABSTRACT Indigenous alliances have been central in stopping the export and transmission of fossil fuel products from Alberta through the west coast. This article compares two pipeline projects, the Enbridge Northern Gateway and Trans Mountain pipelines, to examine the ways that Indigenous activism works to counter the settler colonial state. The Trans Mountain case objected to by many Coast Salish nations on both sides of the international border is a unique case because the Coast Salish assert a unified nationality as a part of their environmental activism. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Coast Salish nations, this article argues that the Coast Salish reject the structures of a settler colonial state despite continuing to encounter obstacles. While the Enbridge pipeline was defeated, the Trans Mountain project is ongoing and uncertain. Both cases show the impacts of Indigenous and non-native alliance making. The Coast Salish case adds an important transnational component to theorizing alliance making that shows innovative strategies used by Indigenous nations to confront the settler colonial state.

Settler Antisemitism, Israeli Mass Violence, and the Crisis of Holocaust and Genocide Studies

This article examines the depiction of Israel as a nation-state like any other as a mechanism of disavowing Israeli settler colonialism. It is a depiction that also brings into focus the antisemitic marginalization and violence against Jews in nation-states. In this framework, the article shows that since modern antisemitism emerged at the intersection of the nation-state system and European imperialism and colonialism, Israel as a settler nation-state also functions according to the logic of what the author calls settler antisemitism. While the racialization of Jews in the frame of White supremacy in other settler-colonial states could include Jews as immigrant settlers but never more, White supremacy in Israel has manifested itself as Jewish supremacy, which defined the project of creating a White Jewish settler society. The article concludes with a discussion of the crisis in Holocaust and genocide studies that this situation has exposed, especially in the midst of the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Mobilising a Decolonial–Islamic Praxis: Covenants in Islam and Muslim–Indigenous Relations

Islam was an important factor in the decolonisation of Muslim countries from European colonial rule during the 19th and 20th centuries. However, Muslims are among the migrant-settler populations of Australia, Canada, the United States, and other British colonial states that continue to dispossess and disenfranchise Indigenous populations. This article contributes to the debate on “decolonising Islam”. It contends that covenants with God and between people in Islam’s pre-eminent sources, the Qur’an and sunnah, are antithetical to colonialism and reinforce a praxis-orientated decolonial–Islamic agenda. This article focuses on three aspects of decolonisation, addressing: (1) supremacist ideology; (2) human existence and coexistence; and (3) claims of entitlement. Using Australia as the primary case study, it examines Islamic obligations towards Indigenous peoples in settler-colonial states, emphasising the potential of covenants to promote mutual recognition and dialogue towards redressing injustices and building respectful coexistence.

Local Fabric: Mid-Century Modernisms, Textile and Fashion Design, and the Northwest Coast, 1940–1967

In the mid-twentieth century, growing North American textile and ready-to-wear industries vigorously appropriated Native American aesthetics to cultivate a commercial and design identity apart from Europe. Most studies of the circulation of Indigenous idioms in these industries focus on Southwestern or South Pacific regionalisms, and scholarship on studio and commercial fabric and fashion design from the Northwest Coast in the twentieth century is limited. This paper contributes by raising Indigenous and non-Indigenous use of Northwest Coast design forms during the politically turbulent 1940s–1960s and analyzing the impact of this aesthetic vocabulary within broader North American textiles and fashion. Throughout, I engage with the approaches of critical fashion theory and multiple modernisms, considering the frictions of property and power relations within settler-colonial states, then and now. Drawing from study of objects, periodicals, and archival materials as well as first-person perspectives, I contextualize these representations within entangled art, museum, and design worlds in the Northwest Coast, New York City, and the Southwest. My examination illustrates that Northwest Coast artists and art ideas asserted a peripheral but locatable role in mid-century textiles and fashion, facilitating the development of today’s robust Indigenous fashion network on the Northwest Coast and its cultural politics.

An opportunity to transform Australia's neo-colonial health system.

The 'modern' value-based healthcare (VBHC) movement provides an opportunity to not only reform health care towards a more equitable, community-centred system, but to also acknowledge, honour and learn from global Indigenous knowledge, systems, and ways of valuing knowing, being and doing. For Australia as a settler-colonial state, efforts to implement VBHC here are doomed to fail until the continued legacy of settler-colonial violence and systemic racism pervading Australia's healthcare system is acknowledged, addressed and ameliorated.