Professor Amanda Nettelbeck

Current projects include:

Intimacy and Violence in Anglo Pacific Rim Settler Colonial Societies

Violence and intimacy were both fundamental to the formation of settler colonial societies, yet we know surprisingly little of how they were connected. This project produces the first transnational analysis of intimacy and violence as intertwined vectors in the development of settler societies across the colonial Anglophone Pacific Rim. Drawing out connections between the broad-scale dynamics of colonial rule and the intimate violence of its implementations, the project aims to generate new comparative insight into the development of colonial settler cultures and enhanced understanding of their legacies for western settler democracies.
 

Indigenous Rights and Colonial Subjecthood

The nineteenth-century concept of ‘Aboriginal protection’ has usually been seen as a fleeting initiative of imperial humanitarianism, yet it sat within a larger set of legally empowered policies for regulating new or newly-mobile colonised peoples. This project explores how ‘humanitarian’ policies designed to protect the civil rights of indigenous peoples in the British Empire worked within a larger field of policies to extend the authority of law, manage colonial labour needs and control mobility. Policies of protection sought to mitigate the problems of unregulated colonization, but they also arose from a need to manage colonised peoples in an Empire where the demands of humane governance jostled with colonial growth.