Columba Gonzalez-Duarte, The New School of Social Research
The ‘Other’-than-human and Justice Beyond Borders
In my ethnographic practice, I follow the migration of monarch butterflies to interrogate North America’s environmental ethics and border politics. In this presentation, I delve into the concept of more-than-human mobility justice by discussing the convergent migrations of humans and monarchs. Insect metaphors often represent either the repulsive or virtuous aspects of humanity. This association affects how societies imagine and construct ‘the human’ and the ‘other’-than-human. The virtuous anthropomorphized insect or the pestilent entomologized human are powerful examples of how metaphors and ideology work to trace boundaries. In producing ‘the pest’ or the noble symbol of humanity, soft and hard infrastructures are mobilized that reinforce national borders. In this intervention, I push back against the traditional Western justice framework, which assumes that individuals are isolated and sedentary, and which equates mobility rights with residency status. In its place, I propose a more inclusive ontology of mobility justice that includes both humans and more-than-human entities. This approach highlights how border justice can be served by recognizing multispecies interconnectedness.
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Columba González Duarte, Ph.D., is a Mexican socio-cultural anthropologist who studies the interaction between monarch butterflies and the human populations they encounter on their yearly migration across North America. Her main interest is in building environmental ethics beyond borders, and her project called “Convergent Migrations” has an activist dimension through which she hopes to foster “eco-social justice” for humans and other animals in migration. As a scholar born and raised in Mexico but working in Canada, she calls attention to the coloniality present in research and academic practices across North America. She also collaborates with the EMIGRA research team, funded by the American National Science Foundation (NSF), and a UNAM-funded project on Ecofeminist Latin-American Epistemologies.
Columba is an assistant professor at The New School for Social Research in the Anthropology department. She publishes in academic and non-academic venues regularly. She is currently writing a book supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation provisionally titled Entangled Mobilities: An Ethnography of Human-Butterfly Migration in North America".
Click here to learn more about Columba's research, teaching philosophy, and other projects.
Click here to see a recent piece of Columba's work related to this talk: https://roadsides.net/gonzalez-010/