Search Results (149)

White Christian nationalism presents itself as restoration—of a Christian nation, a moral order, a rightful hierarchy. This article argues that what it restores is the world-making rhetoric of the Doctrine of Christian Discovery (DoCD). Reading the fifteenth-century papal bulls, their sedimentation into United States law, culture, religion, and contemporary dominionist discourse as a single rhetorical formation, we show that the bulls’ vocabulary of discovery, vacancy, and civilization did not describe a world but constituted one: a moral-legal order in which Christian identity conferred sovereignty and racialized peoples appeared as obstacles to salvation and property. That order persists as hegemonic common sense, carried by legal precedent, curricula, and popular culture, and it is re-performed today in the territorial rhetoric of the New Apostolic Reformation and white Christian nationalism. Following Steven T. Newcomb (Shawnee/Lenape), repudiating the doctrine’s documents without dismantling its embeddedness within language and cognition leaves religious nationalism’s deepest resource intact. Against the discovery template, we set three counter-rhetorics—Indigenous theologies, Black theology, and womanism—and argue that desanctifying dominion requires conciliation, not reconciliation. Full article

The authoritarianism of the Modern/colonial (Western) one-world ontology includes an insistence on the nature of time, and this dogmatism persists in the face of other temporalities. The normative status of coloniality is evident in the ways trans and takatāpui communities are compelled to operate on straight, Settler time, from research ethics and sexualities education to medical wait times and parliamentary submissions. To begin, we outline the research on which this claim is based, which employed wānanga as a mode of co-designing decolonising, gender-affirming (sexualities) education, and how deviations from the intended approach allowed the study to centre what was important to the participants. Next, we unpack the predicaments of resistance as we sought to embrace temporal multiplicity and the need for an alternate strategy for holding spacetime. This strategy emerged through Waitī’s whaikōrero and poem, which construe the participants’ contributions as seeds to be cultivated in their own time. Across the three wānanga, three seeds emerged. Whakataukī and pūrākau are employed to unpack these seeds from the wānanga, illustrating the importance of valuing all contributions, both absent and present, and how whanaungatanga offers a strategy for meeting participants on their own terms and in their own time, kanohi ki te kanohi. Full article

In the 2020 screen-based performance Extraterritorial صوت, artists Dena Al-Adeeb, Sholeh Asgary, Leyya Mona Tawil, and Daiane Lopes da Silva develop a feminist refugee praxis through video, sound, and choreography to reclaim “post-apocalyptic landscapes … where ghosts reside at the end of the world.” Filmed along the San Francisco Bay shoreline, the work brings bodies, rocky terrain, synthetic material, and the spectral into relation with layered histories of displacement, settler colonialism, and (neo)colonial violence. Through an analysis of choreography, cinematic form, and material interaction, the essay develops “steadfastness” as an analytic for examining how performance cultivates practices of remaining within the ongoing coloniality of the postapocalypse. The analysis proceeds across three interrelated dimensions. First, it examines material persistence through the dancers’ sustained contact with shifting ground and Mylar emergency blankets, foregrounding how histories of extraction, Indigenous dispossession, and humanitarian governance endure through embodied and environmental relations. Second, it examines temporal duration, showing how delay and recurrence interrupt accelerative temporalities and cultivate an unfinished present by rendering slow violence discernible as an ongoing condition. Third, it turns to spectral persistence, where ancestral relations and colonial violence continue to inhabit bodies and landscapes while unsettling dominant regimes of visibility. Working within the incommensurable frictions between Indigenous sovereignty and SWANA (Southwest Asian and North African) displacement, these dimensions establish steadfastness as a choreographic analytic that foregrounds the labor through which livability is sustained within the postapocalypse. Full article

Conservation governance frameworks assess equity through recognition, procedure, and distribution. These dimensions give limited attention to Indigenous authority over land and conservation decisions in settler-colonial contexts, including the relationships, responsibilities, and governance conditions that shape equitable conservation. This study develops and pilots the Conservation with Equity framework across three UNESCO-designated Biosphere Reserves in Canada: Clayoquot Sound, Mount Arrowsmith, and Redberry Lake. Using document analysis of UNESCO governance documents, complemented by semi-structured interviews with Biosphere Reserve managers, we examined how equity is reflected in conservation governance practices. The pilot application identified ecological reconciliation as a fourth and foundational dimension of equitable conservation governance, extending existing equity frameworks. Results show that the Biosphere Reserves incorporate Indigenous knowledge into conservation activities, involve communities in decision-making through governance processes, and support local livelihoods and restoration initiatives. However, these practices improve participation and benefit sharing without consistently shifting decision-making authority over land and conservation. Indigenous-led initiatives, including Tribal Parks, land-based education, healing initiatives, and food production systems, demonstrate pathways where Indigenous communities direct land use and conservation decisions. The Conservation with Equity framework provides a basis for assessing conservation governance with greater attention to Indigenous authority, governance, and relationships with land. Full article

This essay complicates the distinction between of “North” and “South” as spaces of knowledge production—which usually entails the privileging of the South as an emancipatory space—by directing attention to Southern actors’ imbrication with forms of colonialism. It calls for situating both Northern and Southern actors within networks of global knowledge exchanges by critically examining their positionality vis-à-vis colonial relations domestically and internationally. More specifically, it asks how interstitial colonial positions gave rise to new centers of knowledge production and expertise in the postcolonial world. It considers these positions not as static identities but as strategic, adaptative, dynamic, relational, and contingent upon geopolitically determined itineraries of global exchange. Full article

Globally, school meals have formed a social safety net for improving children’s nutrition, health, and educational attainment. In Aotearoa New Zealand, government funded lunches for children attending schools in low-income neighbourhoods were introduced in 2020, amidst rising poverty levels and consequent household food insecurity. The aspirations encapsulated within the scheme’s indigenous Māori name, ‘Ka Ora, Ka Ako’ (‘to be well, healthy and safe; to be ready to learn’) have lost focus since reforms to the lunches in 2024 prioritised cost savings, resulting in widely publicised quality issues. This present study draws from a critical multi-level investigation into the issue of hungry children in New Zealand schools, prior to the introduction of ‘Ka Ora, Ka Ako’. Narrative analysis identified how food in schools has been conceptualised within the context of a settler colonial charity model and neoliberal austerity. Applying a critical community psychology lens highlights how burnt and meagre lunches offered to children from food insecure households are a concrete product of historically grounded, unequal relations between groups. A community psychology approach reimagines state-funded food in schools as a public good, arguing for equitable rights to nutrition, including recognition of Māori rights to food sovereignty. Full article

This article situates school leadership in the Canadian Prairies within a socio-spatial context and ongoing impact of coloniality. It draws on Black geographies to position Black school leaders as occupying diasporic spaces in white settler contexts of the Prairies, exploring how spatial relations are constituted in contemporary social arrangements characterized by longstanding institutional oppression. This spatial gaze exposed four themes for deeper analysis, namely Black school leadership as spatially situated power; the production of “visible difference” in leadership space; navigating whiteness as spatial norm; and loneliness, spatial isolation, and the cost of being “the only one”. The article demonstrates how Black school leadership in the Canadian Prairies cannot be relegated to simply an individual experience nor made reducible to interpersonal discrimination but rather is constituted through historically produced spatial arrangements that regulate belonging, authority, and legitimacy. Full article

Whānau (family) is a foundational unit of Māori social organisation, and the replacement of Māori family structures with Western nuclear models is widely regarded as among the most significant tools of colonisation. As Māori move toward decolonisation and re-Indigenisation, approaches to family and identity are shifting from imported structures. However, takatāpui and irahuhua (LGBTQ+ and gender-diverse Māori) are rarely explicitly included in these movements. Contemporary framings of whānau within Māori discourse can inadvertently reiterate colonial talking points, particularly regarding binary gender roles, divisions of labour, and the boundaries of what constitutes whānau. Building on takatāpui scholarship and the findings from three separate wānanga (targeted collective conversations) across a 1.5-year period with 18 irahuhua participants, the article examines the contrasts and connections between “coming out” and “coming in” to tradition and whānau. These conversations revealed that when participants enact self-determination and “come in” to their whānau, they demonstrate pathways to strengthen and restore Māori understandings of whānau and challenge the role of historic inquiry in modern Māori politics. Grounded in one wānanga participant’s understanding that “family pressures that make you feel divided [are] just what the coloniser wanted,” this article explores how takatāpui and irahuhua strengthen their communities and demonstrate sovereignty in settler contexts. Full article

The writing scene in East Africa has witnessed a rise in the emergence of contemporary literature. One example is Dust, a 2014 novel by the Kenyan Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, who, in 2003, was awarded the Caine prize for African writing. The novel Dust has been reviewed from various angles. Dust introduces two female characters, Akai and Ajany, who are both connected to a key character in the novel: Odidi Oganda. How do the characters Akai and Ajany exemplify forms of hybrid identity shaped by colonial and diasporic contexts? This essay is about these two female characters who provide adequate material with which to explore hybrid identities during the colonial period and in the diaspora. Both experience trauma, which impacts their associations in their local communities and in the diaspora. Akai is tremendously affected by colonialism. She is a contract laborer impregnated by a British colonial settler who later attempts to kill her. Ajany moves in with an abusive man, whom she stabs to death in self-defense right before fleeing Brazil as a fugitive. This essay uses a Postcolonial Feminist lens to explore how these two characters propagate cultural resilience, challenge nationalist narratives, and demonstrate resistance. It employs the method of Narratological Text Analysis in order to present Akai and Ajany in their particular contexts. For analysis, the essay adopts a dialectical type of literary theorising. Full article

The inception of Jamaica’s education system was built based on European settler colonial ideologies and White supremacist logic. Almost two centuries after the abolition of slavery and over six decades after independence from British rule, colonial vestiges pervade Jamaican education policy and practice, resulting in the continued marginalisation of Black students from low-income backgrounds. Despite the commissioning of multiple reports on the state of the education system, these racist and classist injustices persist. In this article, we examine social justice issues at the nexus of national education policy and school leadership practice in Jamaican public schools based on our reflexive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted with two Jamaican education policymakers, five education researchers and four public school leaders, alongside Jamaica’s National Student Dress and Grooming Policy Guidelines 2018. Our findings highlight a hierarchical relationship among stakeholder groups in the creation and implementation of Jamaican education policy. Our findings also highlight four themes suggesting that this results from deeply ingrained valorisation of Eurocentric values in policy design that leads to heightened tensions between the Ministry of Education and Youth (MOEY) and school administrators at the level of policy implementation, distraction of school staff from teaching and learning, and disproportionate exclusion of Black students from low-income backgrounds. Implications from our study are the need for stronger cohesion among education policy stakeholders, the incorporation of social justice in teacher and leader preparation and the integration of critical pedagogies at all levels of the Jamaican education system. Full article

While concepts of remoteness have long conditioned the fabulation of alterity, remoteness is not a quality ascribable to distant places and strange peoples “out there”. No one is by nature “remote”. Building from this proposition, this article argues that a heritage of European aestheticization of the “far” north grew out of European ways of imagining the world and contributed to settler social imaginaries of remoteness. Through historical analysis of travelling accounts, colonial exhibitions, and the settler art theorical work of Francis Sparshott about the “cold and remote art” of “far” northerly Inuit peoples, the concept of an aesthetics of remoteness—modes of appreciation and taste that produce a “darkness” not inherent to the Arctic itself but projected by the settler-colonial milieu, which maintains control through the creation of distance. The study shows how Indigenous Arctic art becomes aestheticized through settler sensoria of faraway and incomprehensible forms of beauty that mask histories of colonial extraction and dispossession. The article further contextualises a close, critical reading of Sparshott into relation with the wider history of trade and colonisation, to consider how colonial markets for art objects interface with both European narration of remote peoples and European markets for art from remote parts of the world. The work ultimately argues for a reorientation that refuses this projection of an aesthetics of remoteness and proposes an ethics of recognition that confronts the colonial histories embedded in art circulation and appreciation within Canada and beyond. Full article

Background: Children’s development is dependent on a range of factors influencing their life course outcomes. Protective and challenging social and cultural determinants impact how Indigenous families support their children’s developmental foundations. However, there is a lack of international evidence investigating Indigenous child development interventions. To gain a perspective across nations with comparable settler-colonial histories, this scoping review summarised studies on family and community-centred approaches among Indigenous populations in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States, focusing on outcomes and evidence gaps. Methods: A scoping review followed PRISMA-ScR guidelines. Medline, CINAHL, and PsycINFO (Ovid) were searched from their inception to October 2025, including grey literature sources from Aboriginal HealthInfoNet, the Lowitja Institute and the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care. Empirical studies, including quantitative, mixed-methods, evaluation studies, and descriptive or case-study designs, were included provided they reported empirical data on intervention outcomes. Due to study heterogeneity, data were synthesised narratively. Results: Following screening of 2355 records, eight from 2013 to 2020 met the inclusion criteria. These were mostly small-scale, non-randomising designs evaluating different interventions, with the behavioural and emotional domain being the most frequently assessed outcome, alongside developmental vulnerability and academic/educational areas. There was limited consideration of protective cultural determinants of health in the study design and implementation. Six studies reported positive associations between interventions or programmes and early childhood development outcomes. Conclusions: While the number and rigour of identified interventions were limited, several demonstrated potential benefits for Indigenous children’s early childhood development. However, strengthening the evidence base requires culturally grounded, adequately powered evaluations using rigorous study designs that include culturally co-designed adaptations conducted with Indigenous families and communities. Support is recommended for capacity building and funding. Full article

Humans tend to mark their presence and thus their lands by naming charismatic places such as mountains, canyons, rivers, and lakes. Toponyms is the term for marking places with names. In doing so, cultural groups claim the lands and the recognition of their presence through names in their language and behaviors reflecting their culture. When other cultures occupy these lands, they similarly mark them with their own place names, thus replacing earlier names and evidence of occupation. A conflict of toponyms occurs when one cultural group uses their power to maintain a superior attachment to the land. This chapter uses six toponym ethnographic studies to understand the origins of debates between Native American and settler colonial peoples in North American. Research findings from these studies define both the importance of toponyms to cultural groups and possible resolution of heritage conflicts. All studies have been reviewed and approved for public use for place interpretations, visitor education, and culturally appropriate management by funding agencies and participating Native American tribes and Pueblos. Full article

A reading of the American Revolution and the post-Civil War Reconstruction period through the lens of W.E.B. Du Bois’s early writings provides new insights into his theory of racial monopoly capitalism. Many Americans saw the 1776 revolution as an idealistic fight for liberty, for the slaveholding elite who held disproportionate power within the revolutionary coalition; however, consolidating power and defending their property and expansionist ambitions were primary objectives. For them, the Revolution was a strategic move to establish racial nationalism and preserve slaveholder control over economic growth and national power. A century later, Du Bois’s analysis of the “bargain of 1876” revealed a similar consolidation of power, influencing both his research on the revolutionary period and his writings on Reconstruction. The political deal in 1876 abandoned the promise of Reconstruction’s “abolition democracy,” restoring white supremacist rule. Du Bois saw this as the victory of monopoly capital, which used racism to weaken interracial labor solidarity and enforce a system of super-exploitation. By linking 1776 to 1876, Du Bois demonstrated that U.S. capitalist development had been shaped by racial oppression from its settler-colonial roots through the rise of monopoly capitalism, consistently blocking the achievement of a true, non-racial democracy. Full article

This article explores the media practices of the Karrabing Film Collective through the lens of a materialist model of (colonial, ecological, and digital) unconscious, reconceived as a dynamic interplay of repression, expression, compression, and distension. Drawing on Jean-François Lyotard’s reworking of Freudian operations and Elizabeth Povinelli’s critique of late liberal geontopower, the paper analyzes how Karrabing’s improvisational realism and aesthetic strategies—particularly their use of smartphone filmmaking and digital superimposition—navigate and resist the structural pressures of settler governance. The article equally focuses on their augmented reality archive project, Mapping the Ancestral Present, as a potent example of how digital compression can be refunctioned to enact distension across space and time. Situating the unconscious not only in the psychic or symbolic but also in the infrastructural and technological, the article argues that Karrabing’s practice maps a politics of survivance in the “cramped space” of settler modernity. Full article