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.