Iona Summerson

Iona Summerson is an ESRC-funded doctoral candidate in the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS University of London. Their interdisciplinary research – across settler colonial studies, political theory and geology – is broadly concerned with resistance to and the reproduction of settler colonialism/capitalism, as articulated through its relations to geological nature. 

Iona is a white settler Australian, who grew up on unceded Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country and in lutruwita. Starting from Indigenous theorisations of how mining works to dispossess their communities, Iona analyses the work that mining does in reproducing the settler colonial project, and challenges to this from Indigenous sovereignties and resistance. They do this through an examination of the question of land (central to the settler colonial project) in its spatial, geological, technical, economic, historical and legal layers. 

This project speaks to broader questions including the dialectics of power, resistance and cooptation, ideologies of repair and the interconnections between (ruined) land and labour in sites of extraction, how capitalism and colonialism constitute one another, and what is changing (if anything) in the era of energy transition discourse and practice. 

Iona has given talks at the Centre for Comparative Political Thought (SOAS), at the British International Studies conference and the Colonialism and Climate Change conference at the University of Melbourne. Iona has co-organised various workshops and conferences, including the 2025 Centre for Comparative Political Thought workshop On Being Political: Theory and Activism. 

They have taught at SOAS at the postgraduate level and worked as a research assistant on the Histories of Capitalism and Race seminar series at SOAS. They also have a professional background in research and advocacy in civil society organisations, related to international governance and human rights issues in global commodity chains. They hold an MSc in International Politics from SOAS, and MSc and BSc degrees in Geological Sciences from Freie Universität Berlin (Germany) and Université de Montpellier 2 (France). 

Settler colonialism, colonial capitalism, Indigenous sovereignties, solidarity 

Extraction and extractive frontiers 

The ‘green’ transition 

Politics of recognition - political ecology, politics of science and technology 

Political theory 

Indigenous and critical research methodologies