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The workshop series is open to PhD students and early-career researchers based in the UK whose work engages with settler colonial contexts. More specifically, our focus is on exploring critical, materialist, comparative and/or transhistorical approaches to the study of settler colonialism.

What do we mean by this? At present, much UK-based research in the field of settler colonial and Native/Indigenous studies centres literary and cultural production. These approaches are of enormous value; however, our focus is on unpacking how the material objects, ideologies and regimes of power are both forged and transformed as they circulate between Britain and its settler colonial empire. This includes, but is not limited to, some of the following themes:

• Power – What forms have colonial, military, capitalist, theological, national and other forms of power taken in different parts of the British Empire? How have these been transformed and entangled, and what landscapes, social relations, bodies and new forms of power have been created in the process?

• Land – how are conceptions of place and belonging (re)produced and articulated between Britain and its settler colonies? What happens when different cosmologies of place clash, layer, resonate or converge? 

• Property – how do 'logics of propriation' (property ownership, propriety, self-possession, (dis)possession, appropriation, theft) emerge and transform through settler colonial conquest and Indigenous resistance? 

• Infrastructure – how is settler colonial power constituted and resisted through the built environment, resource management and material governance? 

• Law – how do imperial and Indigenous legal systems interact? How does jurisprudence travel across empire, and what impact does it have on conceptions of property, personhood, sovereignty and citizenship? 

• Enclosure – what forms of resonance and rupture exist between carceral geographies across the metropole and settler colonies? How are racialised forms of enclosure, capture, containment, bordering and displacement articulated between sites of empire? 

• Relationality – how are political projects, subjectivities strategies and worldviews formed in daily struggles against settler colonial occupation? What possibilities and limitations emerge in efforts? ​​

• Time - how has the settler colonial project configured time? How are historical narratives, present conjunctures and potential futures produced and erased?

We encourage people from any disciplinary background to participate. Some fields and methods that may be particularly relevant include:

• Postcolonial, Native/Indigenous and settler colonial studies

• Black, ethnic, diaspora and migrationstudies

• Geography

• Anthropology

• Environmental studies

• Social movement studies

• Critical legal studies

• Conjunctural analysis

• Ethnography

• Urbanism, planning and archaeology

• Queer, trans, gender and feminist studies

• Informatics and computer science