A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Writings that critically engage the distinct form of colonialism that functions through the displacement and elimination of indigenous lands and lives with a settler society, with particular focus on its ongoing spatial presence as a system of power. Entries in this section also attend to engagements with and within Indigenous communities that foreground indigenous resurgence, resistance, and self-determination.
Who is ‘the Settler’? What does this category animate and what does it bely? Despite the vast scholarship on histories of settler colonisation, the complex figure of the settler remains largely taken for granted. This lends itself to a banal decolonial politics that urgently requires critique.
In this essay, I position the logics of settler colonialism and the logics of space exploration dominion over both space on earth, and interplanetary space at the expense of Indigenous peoples. I then look to Indigenous conceptions of space as a potential foil to these colonial logics.
This essay argues that the COVID-19 pandemic simultaneously shapes and is shaped by the interconnected goals of indigenous politics. Thus, it is not possible to address it solely as a health emergency. It is connected to indigenous autonomy and self-determination. It is connected to the exploitation of land and the territory. It is connected to the rights of indigenous peoples to continue to exist and exercise their cultures.
Together, this piece contends that racial capitalist and settler colonial logics are (re)produced through digital mediations of the internet, such that digital geographies are ontologically and epistemologically always oriented around racial capitalism and settler colonialism.
This paper examines the eliminatory speed of Israeli settler colonialism, particularly the ways in which settler organizations aim to accelerate the pace of elimination at the colonial frontiers in Palestine.
Drawing on an analysis of government records obtained using Access to Information and Privacy requests, key informant interviews, and a three-year engagement with land defenders and allies, we demonstrate how property and jurisdiction carved the contested space into distinct spheres of settler governing authority.
Focusing on Canada as a settler colonial liberal democracy, I look at the Indian Act which has supported colonial dispossession and assimilation in Canada for almost 200 years and rely on Brenna Bhandar’s conceptualization of “racial regimes of property” as a means of examining how racial subjects and private property are co-produced.
This article interrogates some of the logics and fundamental assumptions that underpin the arguments of liberal property rights enthusiasts, questioning their applicability to the values and aspirations of the Tŝilhqot’in people and First Nations broadly.
Turning attention to the Jewish settlers in the West Bank and their multiple uses and abuses of organic farming, this article explores epistemic and political spatial operations on the colonial frontier.