YUGAN – Killing the Border Life/La Vida Fronteriza: Trump’s Wall

The looming of Donald Trump’s plan to build a “big” and “beautiful” border wall represents an alarming threat for social and environmental well-being across the Mexico-U.S. borderlands. In this talk, Melissa W. Wright will discuss how the border wall, and its surrounding debates, raise multiple issues central to political ecological and human geographic scholarship into governance across the borderlands. Her particular focus is a comparison of the different kinds of “border thinking” that frame these debates and that provide synergy for those coalitions fighting to protect the ecological and social well-being of this endangered landscape.
Melissa W. Wright is a professor and department head of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies and a professor of geography at Pennsylvania State University. Her research investigates the rapidly changing situations in northern Mexico along its border with the United States, focusing on issues of governance, state terror and social movements.