Editors’ note

Abstract

This is a statement of fresh starts and vibrancy. Taking up the editorship of an academic journal is arguably both a privilege and a responsibility. It calls for knowledge, energy and passion even. It allows a scholar to serve the profession, observe and scout for the latest exciting scholarship in a particular field, and network with scholars around the world. It garners an exceptional vantage point into the latest of scholarly trends and possibilities. But it also comes with expectations, a premise of delivering, of building and nurturing a community and advancing the reputation of your journal. In many ways serving as an editor is about taking care of the journal and its field. It is about encouraging all potential scholars to join in and contributing, especially those younger to the profession, but also the seasoned veterans. It is about providing a dynamic and safe environment for lively debates, varied opinions and different theoretical orientations and epistemologies. In the end, people matter, all those already working on settler colonial topics and themes, and those contemplating doing so in the future. Without the contributors, reviewers and readers there would be no Settler Colonial Studies. Taking on the editorship of this journal, we envision Settler Colonial Studies to develop further as a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary endeavor, attracting interest and submissions from multiple different academic disciplines, including, but not limited to, history, literature, Indigenous studies, areaand cultural studies, archeology, anthropology, environmental humanities, genocide studies and memory studies. We hope for engagements and entanglements. And we try to steer the journal toward exciting and more inclusive futures. Settler Colonial Studies navigates and addresses a fundamentally intersected and networked global reality, past and present, seeking to reflect and respond to it. It strives to be a global forum for nuanced and varied discussions, welcoming submissions from scholars regardless of their nationality, creed, race, ethnicity and gender. The articles in this issue reveal a vibrant field, of research operating on varying analytical scales from the local to the global. Demonstrating the geographical reach of settler colonialism, in this issue we track settler colonialism in the Middle-East, Northern Europe, South America, North America and Australia. We learn of infrastructures as sites of contest between empire and settlers in British Palestine before heading into more modern-day Israel/Palestine. There we have studies on labor and dispossession through incorporation as well as on the relationship of historical narratives and current activism. We also get to read about the use of language as a form of elimination in Chile and on the connections between immigrant material conditions and Indigenous dispossession in Canadian media. Then there is also an examination of settler colonial dynamics in the Swedish state’s relation to the Sámi through the expansion of hydropower and a study of attempts to school unprivileged children into colonial farmers in Australia. We feel that these articles also showcase a