Bordering Natures
My research into political ecologies of borders emerges from a deep commitment to a particular place – the heritage Bialowieza Forest, a unique nature protected area that boasts the status of a UNESCO natural heritage site and is located on the border of Poland and Belarus.
The forest is a site of manifold trans-species and transboundary encounters that span eleven thousand years. Simultaneously, it is the easternmost frontier of the European Union, a securitized borderland crisscrossed by clandestine and illegalized migrations into Europe. As biopolitical ways of bordering and organizing mobility (both human and nonhuman) violently clash with the principles of nature conservation, the forest affords questions about the boundaries and borders that run between the human, the nonhuman, and the inhumane. With the forest as my thinking companion, my book focuses on the question of what – or who – is considered worth protecting in a world shaped by interrelated political and environmental crises.
Click here to watch my lecture on border eco-ontologies for the Posthumanities Hub webinar series.
Recently published
Abstract
This article aims to be what Jasbir Puar referred to as ‘an unfolding archive’. It makes a critical intervention at a historical crisis point as it is unfolding. It sets out to examine the logic that writes the relations between bodies, borders and kin during the political crisis that transpired at the border of Belarus and Poland in 2021. I think of this logic in terms of a ‘grammar’, drawing on the idea articulated by Hortense J. Spillers, where ‘American grammar’ fleshes out the connection between slavery, kinship, nation-building and the processes of gendering. I examine the rubrics of the hegemonic national grammatics in contemporary Poland, which establishes who counts as kin and who belongs to the nation in the context of the border crisis. I offer the concept of ‘declining’ kinship to seek generative (im)possibilities to articulate affinities and solidarities running against the dominant system of reproductive nationalism.