CHLT 017 CH -Borderlands Tek

Institution: Pitzer College

Description: The current landscape in the U.S.-Mexico border reflects a growing technocapitalist enterprise of control, surveillance, and militarized force, which utilizes technologies that also make their way into our everyday life, becoming readily available and almost necessary in order to move through an overwhelmingly bordered world. These technologies have serious consequences, particularly on the communities they seek to control, and on the natural environments which must bear the impact of their use. Still, the borderlands also become a place from which these technologies are contested, as communities, human and non-human, put into practice transgressive ecological knowledge(s) that challenge the imposition of borders themselves. This course will explore these tensions, challenges, and knowledge(s), centering the borderlands as a site where non-Western futurities can emerge.