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.