Bordering nature
Globally, the number of border barriers has been increasing dramatically in the past decades. According to Achille Mbembe, border technologies partition and redistribute the earth to “define to whom the world belongs”.
I think of bordering in terms of a bio-political “cut,” which, via Karen Barad, is an onto-political boundary-making operation that allows articulating the otherwise interconnected reality in terms of separation. The border cut divides the living ecosystem (in this case, the old-growth forest) disturbing animal migrations and habitats. The cut is not a metaphor. It is a political technology and a mark on the body—the skin cut by the barbed wire, and injuries from jumping off the wall.
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As a Borders, Mobilities, and Cultural Encounters postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Eastern Finland I'm working on a project 'Fencing the green border. A case study of the Polish-Belarusian frontier'. The border fence built by Poland along its frontier with Belarus in 2021 cuts through a nature-protected area of the heritage Bialowieza Forest, or, what people on the move call the 'Polish jungle'.
Click here to watch my lecture on border eco-ontologies for the Posthumanities Hub webinar series.
Recently published
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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.