This panel reflects upon the fluid geographies across the US-Mexico border, Guatemala City, the state of Yucatán, the Chacahua-Pastoría Lagoons, the State of Maharashtra, and Dominican Republic to examine different forms of engaging with space and politics. The presentations in this panel examine experiences of violence, old forms of exclusion, and new efforts to place the human and more-than-human in a given locale. Presenters interrogate new ways of conceptualizing place and space bringing to life different understanding of socio-natural entanglements. By carefully analyzing body maps, aquifer photographs, groundwater cartographies, the architecture of landforms, new body landscapes and contested borders, this panel considers the ways in which particular categories, typologies and topologies of the natural are embedded in race-making and other forms of social difference that continue to structure social life across sites.  

Keywords: Waterscapes, Toxicity, Cartography, Race, Geology, Fluidity, Liminality,

Talks & Panelists:

• Body-Maps: Racialization, Territorialization, and Counter-Archives to a Mestizo Geography in Mexico, Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera (she/they), The University of Texas at Austin

• Moral Geology: Making Model Villages and Model Aquifers in Western India, Karan Misquitta (he/him), The Pennsylvania State University

•  Privileged Perspectives of Terrain and the Disaggregation of Landform in Guatemala City, Melanie Ford Lemus (she/her), Rice University

• At the Limit of the Aquifer: Flooding and the Political Affordances of Water Excess in Yucatán, Pablo Aguilera Del Castillo (he/him), University of Pennsylvania

• Place-making Beyond Borders and Binaries: Emerging Multispecies Futures in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, Meg Perret (she/her), Harvard University

Discussant: Dr. Marisol de la Cadena (she/her), UC Davis
Moderated by Pablo Aguilera Del Castillo (he/him)