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Abstract
In this dissertation, I interrogate environmental knowledge production in the hyper-political, racialized, and settler colonial landscape of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Based on fieldwork in the Arizona borderlands using ethnographic interviews, archival research, and participant observation, this research investigates how environmental knowledge is produced, understood, and contested by an array of state and non-state actors and how this knowledge ameliorates or perpetuates socio-environmental harms. Broadly, the primary objectives of this dissertation are to 1) investigate the role of technoscientific practices in shaping environmental governance and practices; 2) understand the roles science and expertise play in the environmental review processes for border barrier construction; and 3) integrate natural and social science perspectives in ways that center the socio-political landscape in which ecological interventions and research take place. The dissertation is divided into three articles that speak to each of these findings. In the first paper, I argue that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has emerged as an environmental actor produced through a reconfiguration of settler state power. This was achieved through the creation of new environmental knowledges about the borderlands’ environment and via racialized discourses of migrants that support increased border militarization. The second paper critically interrogates the socio-environmental claims made during the NEPA process for early border barriers. I argue that the science as conducted through NEPA produces an accounting of the borderlands’ environment that fails to acknowledge true environmental harms created through border barriers and construction projects. I further argue that the surrogate environmental planning process, in the form of Environmental Stewardship Plans, instead produces an alternative understanding of the borderlands’ environment that must be taken seriously by those challenging the border wall system. The third and final paper presents findings on the converging and diverging perceptions of the social-ecological-political landscape of the Arizona borderlands held among three constituencies, demonstrating a need for integration across all three for future borderlands’ research and advocacy. Ultimately, this research argues that scholars of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands must move out of epistemological silos, and that ecological research along the border will benefit from a deeper engagement with the socio-political history and present of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands– a region devastated by decades’ long presence of border barriers and policies.