Format/Structure

With Juanita Sundberg (UBC) as commentator, we welcome research, activist, artistic, or methodological contributions.

Long Abstract

How do we account for the environment as an active force in shaping cross-border im/mobilities? This panel examines the entangled relationships between ecological systems and border-making practices, highlighting how landscapes and more-than-human life mobilize are mobilized in the production of borderlands. It also considers how landscapes and more-than-humans actively shape relations of care, resistance, defiance against power and the coloniality of borders.

Borders are not only political or legal constructs—they are also ecological boundaries used as states’ interventions. Landscapes, species, and infrastructures are increasingly used to surveil, deter, and contain. From deserts and rivers employed as “natural” barriers to conservation zones that obscure exclusionary agendas, border ecologies both shape and are shaped by settler-state power and transnational extractive economies (Davies et al. 2024; Pallister-Wilkins 2022; Van Isacker 2020). In parallel, a growing body of literature on care highlights how more-than-human care and generosity serve to promote and sustain life beyond, and despite these border projects (Cabnal 2016; Gonzalez-Duarte & Sundberg 2025; Rico Rodriguez et al. 2024). What forms of kinship, solidarity, and resistance emerge from multispecies entanglements disrupted by national and colonial borders (Aguilar Gil 2020; Diagle 2023)?

We seek interdisciplinary contributions that examine the political ecology of borderlands through environmental violence, climate displacement, ecological surveillance and more-than-human care. We aim to advance scholarship that: (1) moves beyond methodological nationalism (Wimmer & Schiller 2022); (2) politicizes border ecologies (Greiner & Sakdapolrak 2016); and (3) offers complex, multitemporal understandings of care within migratory and border contexts.

We particularly welcome contributions that:

Analyze relational materialities linking humans and more-than-human entities across borders.

Apply feminist and transboundary methodologies to unsettle settler-state logics.

Address how border enforcement strategies mediate, disrupt, or are subverted by more-than-human relations.

Explore how care, kinship, and resistance exceed border regimes.

This Panel has 13 pending paper proposals.
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