Presentation short abstract

Elephant translocation in Peninsular Malaysia becomes a bordering apparatus whose effects exceed state conservation’s intent. As the “government’s elephants” disturb Jahai multispecies ecologies, they act as rogue infrastructures that reveal the volatility of governing wildness.

Presentation long abstract

When state conservation attempts to territorialize wildness, what bordering practices emerge—and how do more-than-human actors unsettle the very ecologies these practices aim to stabilize? In Peninsular Malaysia, elephants and other “rogue” megafauna that stray into human-designated zones are tranquilized and moved to protected habitat where they ostensibly “belong”–territories also home to the Jahai indigenous people of the Thai-Malaysian borderland. In the wake of these translocations, Jahai report being increasingly menaced by gajah kerajaan—“the government’s elephants”—which raid gardens and unsettle village life. Some speculate these elephants come from zoos, noting their strange ease around humans, unlike familiar local herds that can be spoken to and warded off. This boundary-making distinction frames translocated elephants as extensions of the state whose actions render them careless intrusions into enduring multispecies relations.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Jahai communities, I approach wildlife translocation as a bordering apparatus aimed at enclosing and mediating wildness. Trucks, tranquilizers, GPS collars, and bureaucratic classifications redistribute animal bodies to render landscapes legible and manageable through distinctions between nature and culture, human and animal. In the process, the government’s elephants animate the forest in unsettling ways for the Jahai. Yet their movements continually transgress the political-ecological boundaries conservation seeks to secure. In this unpredictable mobility, they become “rogue infrastructures” (Kim 2016)—animate extensions of a state apparatus whose effects exceed its design. Wildness thus emerges not as a condition to be stabilized but as a volatile effect of the apparatuses meant to govern it, exposing the ecological limits of conservation’s border regimes.

Presentation short abstract

The paper enhances feminist theorizing on care by tracing more-than-human relationalities grounded in place but stretching across México, the United States, and Canada.

Presentation long abstract

In this paper, we enrich feminist theorizing of care in science studies by tracing more-than-human relationalities across borders. Building on recent Indigenous theorizing, we further criticize methodological nationalism (Wimmer and Schiller 2003) by also considering the coloniality and anthropocentrism of geopolitical bordering (Aguilar Gil 2020; Cabnal 2016; Daigle 2023; A. Simpson 2014; L. Simpson 2017). As Ayuuk linguist Yásnaya Aguilar Gil (2020) suggests, “state borders were not established instantaneously, but, once they were, they colonized even our imagination. A country’s silhouette marks a boundary on the map of the world, but what it really signifies today is the separation of families, death, human trafficking, and torture.” Indeed, the intensified militarization and surveillance of borders work to repress and erase Indigenous people’s sovereignty while also preventing certain humans and animals from freely and safely moving across. As politicians push hyper-nationalist geopolitical imaginaries tinged with white supremacy and human exceptionalism, we call for methodologies oriented to following mobile materialities relationally across space without reifying settler-state borders. Specifically, we present three vignettes from our individual research sites in locations connected by monarch butterflies as they migrate between their wintering grounds in México and summering grounds in the US and Canada. At each site, we attend to the ways geopolitical conditions of im/mobility intersect with specific material, semiotic, and affective relations of care enacted by humans and other-than-humans, including Sonoran Desert soils, berries, toxins, and human bodies.

Presentation short abstract

Using embroidery as research method, this paper examines how women in contexts of undocumented migration living in New York City navigate transboundary more-than-human ties shaped by care and solidarity in the face of environmental dispossession and forced (im)mobility.

Presentation long abstract

Increased global flows and interconnectedness are intertwined with growing restrictions, forced immobility, and unequal access to freedom of movement (Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013; Tošić and Palmberger, 2016). People in contexts of undocumented migration navigate daily life as “impossible subjects” through continuous checkpoints and bordering dynamics. Simultaneously “welcome and unwelcome”, they face a political economic system that both relies on them as cheap disposable labor and criminalises and deports them (Ngai, 2014, p.2).

This presentation emerges from my doctoral research project working with people from rural towns in Mexico and Central America now living in contexts of undocumented migration in New York City. The research focuses on how more-than-human entanglements are lived, transformed and negotiated in response to environmental dispossession and forced (im)mobility across borders and through rural to urban migration.

The proposed paper discusses the findings and conversations that emerged from a series of embroidery workshops co-designed with a group of 25 women in both Corona, Queens, and the South Bronx. The workshops were created with the objective of holding a space in which participants could engage, through embroidery, with more-than-human nature in their places of origin, and how their relationship with it has been affected and responsive to migration journeys to New York City.

Moreover, the presentation will reflect on the methodological insights that emerged from exploring embroidery as a feminist, care-centred research method that contributes to political ecology at the intersection of urban migration and environmental justice in contexts of displacement and restrictive bordering regimes.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores the striking contrast between the celebrated mobility of red crabs and the enforced immobility of detained migrants on Christmas Island. It questions how infrastructures of care for more-than-human life coexist with carceral regimes that limit human movement and dignity.

Presentation long abstract

Each year, millions of red land crabs migrate across Christmas Island in a spectacular display of synchronized movement, prompting road closures, protective barriers, and specially constructed crab bridges and underpasses. These elaborate infrastructures highlight an island-wide commitment to supporting more-than-human mobility. Yet, just beyond this scene lies a stark contrast: the North West Point immigration detention center, where human movement is tightly controlled and constrained.

This paper interrogates the disjuncture between the celebrated, facilitated movement of crabs and the restricted, often punitive immobility imposed on migrants—many of whom have lived in Australia for decades before being detained and deported. The talk examines how infrastructures of care for crabs coexist with carceral architectures for humans. It considers how conservation efforts, while vital for biodiversity, can inadvertently mask or support systems of exclusion and control—creating an ecology of contradiction where compassion is unevenly distributed across species lines.

By situating Christmas Island at the intersection of environmental stewardship and border securitization, the talk explores how mobility is managed, mediated, and moralized. It ultimately asks: Who is granted care and protection, and who is rendered immobile, invisible, or expendable? And what does this tell us about the broader politics of compassion in a world increasingly defined by both ecological crisis and border enforcement?

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines rewilding at Anklamer Heath in the Oder Delta, where peatland rewetting, wildlife resurgence, and ecological self-governance reconnect landscapes once split by the German–Polish border, revealing multispecies futures beyond nationalist and human-centered histories.

Presentation long abstract

This paper analyzes rewilding at Anklamer Heath (Anklamer Torfmoor), a peatland on the Szczecin Lagoon whose modern form began with an unplanned 1995 dyke breach that allowed long-drained land to re-flood. Now a core site within the cross-border Rewilding Oder Delta (ROD) initiative—supported by Rewilding Europe and funded by the Deutsche Postcode Lottery—Anklamer Heath epitomizes efforts to restore natural hydrology, rewet peatlands, revive migratory routes for fish, birds, and mammals, and allow ecosystems to self-organize with minimal human intervention.

The ROD reconnects ecologies that have been repeatedly reshaped by the German–Polish border, which was contested after World War II, hardened during the East German era, and reopened with EU integration. This paper contrasts European rewilding with American traditions exemplified by national parks, where human stewardship underwrites preservationist ideals. In the Oder Delta, by contrast, rewilding projects cultivate spaces where humans are meant to recede: where ecological processes, not human management, appear to guide the landscape. These landscapes operate doubly—as sites of ecological repair and as stages for imagining posthuman futures, inviting visitors to sense the agency of nonhuman actors and the capacities of ecosystems to thrive without human intervention.

Yet their cultural legitimacy still relies on human desire: for recreation, for moral narratives of repair, and for marketable visions of “wild nature” within a capitalist conservation economy. By tracing these tensions, the paper shows how rewilded borderlands bind deep pasts and speculative futures, revealing how more-than-human relations unsettle, exceed, and occasionally reaffirm the political ecologies of borders.

Presentation short abstract

Reading across scholarship on geopolitical economies of borders and cuerpo-territorio epistemologies of bodies and lands as intertwined territories to be cared for and centering works of Mujeres, Organización y Territorios, this paper explores border ecologies in extractive zones in southern Mexico.

Presentation long abstract

In this paper, I read across scholarship on geopolitical economies of borders (Coddington et al., 2020; Vogt, 2020) and Cuerpo-territorio onto-epistemologies to reconceptualize ecologies in the Mexico-Guatemala borderlands. Cuerpo-territorio approaches understand violence inflicted on bodies and lands—especially in contexts of extractivism—as interdependent (Cabnal, 2010; Ulloa, 2021; Zaragocin, 2020). At the same time, bodies and lands (living and dead) are seen as intertwined territories that feel and remember, fostering communities of livingness and compassion. Amid the current political climate of intensified externalized border practices by the United States, and with increasing foreign investment in “green” mega-development projects and export production processes in southern Mexico, a “new” resource frontier (Morris, 2024) is emerging. Two recent train projects, el Tren Maya and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec Interoceanic Corridor, both rely on capital extraction from ancestral lands and precarious bodies to connect the Gulf and Pacific coasts, featuring key stations strategically placed near critical industrial zones. The Mexican government assures these infrastructures, heavily dependent on cheap, often undocumented, labour, will act as ‘curtains’ to divert northbound migratory flows (Paley, 2020). The resistance and re-politicization in the face of this violence are not merely acts of indignation or a pursuit of justice but also acts of love and living. The paper draws on learnings from Mujeres, Organización y Territorios (MOOTS), an activist group engaging Mexican and migrant women’s radical care practices for the body and land, including dialogues about how this frontier feels in their bodies and in the places they call home.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how reindeer, dust, noise, and roads participate in bordering the Swedish–Finnish iron frontier. By analysing two mining cases, it shows how legal rulings differently interpret more-than-human entanglements, producing uneven outcomes for Sámi herding and cross-border ecologies.

Presentation long abstract

How do more-than-human entanglements shape the iron borderlands of Sápmi? This paper investigates the shifting borderscape of the Swedish–Finnish frontier through two interlinked mining projects—Kaunisvaara in Sweden and Hannukainen in Finland—both situated within the transnational Indigenous territory of Sápmi. Here, borders are not only geopolitical lines but relational and contested zones, involving mining concessions, reindeer grazing territories, ecological corridors, and state infrastructures. Reindeer, dust, runoff, noise, and roads emerge as border agents—material participants in the making and disruption of territorial claims and extractive regimes.

Through close analysis of two contrasting court rulings, the paper examines how these more-than-human dynamics shape legal interpretations of harm. In 2025, Finland’s Supreme Administrative Court annulled the Hannukainen zoning plan, citing uncertainties around blasting, dust, and seasonal variability. In contrast, Sweden’s Environmental Court approved Kaunis Iron’s expansion, despite objections from Gabna sameby and others, and without addressing cumulative or cross-border effects on reindeer migration and transnational waters.

Rather than reducing these rulings to national difference, the paper situates them within a fragmented but entangled legal-ecological borderscape, documenting how different legal regimes selectively recognise or dismiss Sámi rights and ecological relations as part of broader bordering processes. Drawing on emerging work on border ecologies and fugitive landscapes, the paper foregrounds more-than-human border agencies—from roads and embankments to dust and reindeer—and shows how extractive frontiers are not only imposed, but also contested and unsettled through multispecies movement, infrastructural disruption, and claims to territorial continuity, relational care, and ecological resistance.

Presentation short abstract

A multispecies ethnography of Flensborg Fjord shows how ecological crisis and haunting absences blur borders. Murky waters, species decline, and cross-border care unsettle state logics and reveal watery, more-than-human border ecologies.

Presentation long abstract

This paper explores how Flensborg Fjord, a body of water between Denmark and Germany, reshapes border ecologies through more-than-human entanglements. Based on multispecies ethnography and fieldwork above and below the waterline, we attend to how a wide range of actors engage in bordering practices aimed at constraining the effects of what is now widely recognised as an environmental disaster. We show how the fjord’s murky conditions produce a form of bordering that is continually undone by the agencies of water, species, and submerged histories. Divers describe entering “another world,” where visibility collapses into green haze and presence is sensed through absence; anglers speak of a fjord that feels “empty,” haunted by disappearing fish; restoration teams struggle with eelgrass that drifts, uproots, or refuses to survive. War-era remnants, corroding in the sediment, leak toxic traces into the present, further blurring temporal and ecological boundaries. These entanglements reveal a landscape where haunting is not only metaphor but also a sensory and political condition. In this context civil society groups, scientists, and local officials engage in forms of care and repair that cross the border despite fragmented governance. Thus, seeing borders through water - the way that that the human eye sees in water - becomes an uncanny representation of governance itself. We argue that the fjord exemplifies how watery ecologies unsettle static state-based logics of containment, and how more-than-human agencies complicate, disrupt, and exceed the bordering practices meant to manage them.

Presentation short abstract

Alpine ecologies shape transboundary mobilities and multispecies relations. Using photo-ethnography, this paper shows how verticality, climate shifts, and animal geographies reconfigure borders, generating ontological frictions and situated forms of care and resistance.

Presentation long abstract

This paper examines how Alpine ecologies act as political forces shaping transboundary mobilities and multispecies relations across the French–Italian–Swiss borderlands. Building on photo-ethnographic fieldwork in the Val d’Aoste, Haute-Savoie, and Valais, it explores how vertical spatialities—central to pastoral practices—generate forms of bordering that exceed national demarcations. These vertical bordering practices operate across multiple temporalities: seasonal movements between valley floors and high pastures, intergenerational livestock pathways, and the expanding geographies of wild species such as wolves.

Far from being passive landscapes, Alpine mountains emerge as active agents co-shaping alpine spaces. Recent ecological transformations—including glacier collapses, intensified avalanches, and landslides—have reconfigured relations among human communities, domestic animals, wildlife, and the mountains themselves.

These shifting multispecies entanglements reveal ontological frictions at the heart of contemporary environmental governance in the Alps. Policies targeting wildlife and climate change often impose teleological representations of Alpine space that silence alternative modes of knowing and relating.

By mobilizing photo-ethnography as a method for accessing sensory and experiential dimensions of interspecies encounters, this paper contributes to political ecology debates that seek to move beyond politicize border ecologies. It argues that the Alps constitute a vertical borderland where care, kinship, and resistance are continuously negotiated across species and elevations. In doing so, it demonstrates how more-than-human agencies co-produce spatial negotiations that unsettle fixed territorial, ecological, and epistemological boundaries.

Presentation short abstract

This presentation will examine how the emergence of a cross-border territory as a commons can facilitate environmental care. Focusing on a citizen experiment with law, it explores how welfare can be conceived as more-than-human in the context of caring for a transboundary river basin.

Presentation long abstract

Water flows and binds. As it moves, it cuts across boundaries and travels from one body to another. Water connects humans with the more-than-human. As it leaves and enters bodies of all kinds, water facilitates our thinking about how we are in common, how we come together as transboundary hydrocommunities joined by a shared substance, without renouncing our incommensurability and our irreducible plurality. Drawing on literature encouraging us to ‘think with water’, this paper discusses how international river basins, cutting across geopolitical, species, ethnic, and ideological boundaries, constitute potential devices to facilitate environmental care by eliciting imaginaries of commons. I ethnographically explore a citizen experiment with law in Central America that conceived one of the region’s largest transboundary river basins as a commons to promote its care. Beginning in the mid-2000s, this process resulted in a prototype of a transboundary treaty for the management of international waters in 2015. This experiment conjured the transboundary territory of the river basin as a hydrocommunity, bound by its watery connections and comprising the peoples, biodiversity and territories of three contiguous nations that were part of a single polity from precolonial times through to the early years of the postcolonial period. In making a territory visible, the transboundary basin has enabled proposals for how to care for it that place the welfare of water on an equal footing with human welfare.

Presentation short abstract

This project identifies settler strategies of humanization, dehumanization, and feralization performed in Gaza through companion, free roaming, and military dogs, especially since October 2023. I write about dogs to reveal how species difference intersects with race to justify extreme atrocities.

Presentation long abstract

Zoometrics—the shifting hierarchies that calibrate value between the more-or-less human and the more-or-less animal—is a core technology of settler colonialism. Such hierarchies govern life and death, authorizing both violence and care. Drawing on the literature on posthumanism, more-than-human geographies, political ecology, Black and decolonial studies, and critical animal studies, this project identifies strategies of humanization, dehumanization, and feralization performed in Gaza through companion, free roaming, and military dogs, especially since October 2023. Most acutely, I trace how conceptual violence through zoometrics precedes, and often precisely predicts, physical violence. I write about dogs not to center their suffering over that of Palestinians, but to reveal how species difference intersects with race to rationalize and justify extreme atrocities. At the same time, the dogs in Gaza are not mere metaphors; they are living beings with relations and capacities that matter and resist.

Presentation short abstract

The paper argues for new concepts and practices that translate alternative borderscape epistemologies into publicly accessible and meaningful formats. To address this need, I introduce Aztec-Mayan dance as a critical lens.

Presentation long abstract

Fortification of the US-Mexico border has irreversibly altered the social and ecological fabric of this once connected landscape. Border architecture fragments habitats, severs ecological corridors, and impedes both natural and social processes. These disruptions undermine the landscape’s resilience and diminish the capacity of its communities to adapt to environmental and socio-political change. The paper argues for new concepts and practices that translate alternative borderscape epistemologies into publicly accessible and meaningful formats. To address this need, I introduce Aztec-Mayan dance as a critical lens. Dance movements, embodied-narrative structures, and indigenous cosmologies offer a powerful medium to reimagine cultural histories and multispecies relationships. Situated within aesthetic and multispecies theory, and grounded in a landscape-scale approach, the research foregrounds entanglement, co-dependence and care as central to resilient futures. By mobilising the arts as a site of critical and creative possibility, the paper demonstrates how Indigenous performance can challenge dominant border imaginaries and cultivate alternative narratives that envision relationality and ecological continuity anew.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines riverine citizenship in Bosnia and Croatia through the Una River, showing how multispecies alliances and watershed-based belonging challenge state-centered politics and foster new forms of ecological and civic engagement rooted in transborder place, proximity, and care.

Presentation long abstract

This paper explores the entangled relationships between people in Bosnia and Croatia and the Una River that flows through both countries. Anchored in long-term ethnographic and archival research, it examines how the Una functions as both a material and symbolic force—animating civic life, ecological awareness, and political mobilization. The 2024 transborder protest at the river’s spring in Croatia serves as a pivotal moment to analyze how multispecies alliances—among humans, rivers, animals, and institutions—can catalyze collective action and reconfigure dominant political grammars.

Central to this inquiry is the concept of riverine citizenship, a form of belonging rooted in unski život, or “the Una style of life.” This mode of inhabiting the world binds people, land, and biota into overlapping civic relations, challenging conventional notions of identity and territory. I theorize riverine citizenship through the lens of watershed, not as a hydrological unit alone, but as a generative topological space—a connective tissue of land, water, and practice. Unlike topography, which implies fixity and borders, topology emphasizes flow, rhythm, and relationality.

Watershed, understood topologically, becomes a site of non-identitarian politics, where proximity and care replace ethnicity and state allegiance. Riverine citizenship constructs territories from below, grounded in ecological interdependence and affective attachment. By foregrounding the Una River’s materiality and sociality, this study challenges dominant models of sovereignty and offers a framework for environmentally attuned political engagement. It ultimately asks how politics might be reimagined to honor multispecies entanglements and respond to the precarity of our ecological present.