Unsettling Refuge: Multispecies Mobilities in Troubled Times

About This Event

This talk addresses how shifting animal mobilities challenge existing forms of human governance (from national border fortifications to existing practices of conservation) across cities and beyond. It engages with several animal case studies—wild boars rummaging in the German-Polish borderlands, migratory birds traversing the Mississippi flyway over the Chicago skyline, and orcas breaching in the Salish Sea of the Pacific Northwest—that have incited public, scientific, and political debate about animal/pathogen movements across urban/rural/national borders. Drawing on ethnographic research with actors that engage and care for these animals’ movements, including wildlife ecologists, conservationists, foresters, hunters, fishers, farmers, Indigenous groups, and environmental stewards, Stoetzer will show how wildlife mobility becomes political: they unsettle public, scientific, and everyday practices of ecological care and our understanding of community, nature, the nation, and justice.

Featured Guests

• Bettina Stoetzer, Department of Anthropology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Co-sponsors

• RIT Department of Sociology and Anthropology