Shaylih Muehlmann

The combination of ever less accessible migration pathways in the wake of global systems of immigration enforcement, together with ever stronger drivers pushing individuals out of their homes, has resulted in the increasing prevalence of non-Western Hemispheric migrants moving along Latin American migration pathways. Split between a remote jungle on the Colombia-Panama border and a sprawling urban metropolis at the gateway to the United States, in the dissertation that follows, I chronicle the active mobility experiences of individuals who originate in dozens of countries, speak countless languages, and operate with distinct systems of living. To examine their mobility experiences, and the challenges that ensue therein, I meet travelers where they find themselves: in tents in the jungle, prosecutors’ offices, local NGOs, mosques, soccer fields next to the ocean, and border crossings throughout. In meeting travelers where they found themselves, I demonstrate how multi-continental travelers – as I have come to call their journeys – are on the one hand, highly visibilized as potential security threats, aberrations, or simply mobile others. At the same time, the relative novelty of their journeys results in their specific mobility needs being deprioritized, and therefore structurally invisibilized. Their journeys are subsequently seen and unseen – invisizibilized and hyper-visibilized – depending on the space, person, or activity they are encountering at that moment. These (in)visibilization practices profoundly impact the mobility experiences of multi-continental travelers on the move though often in paradoxical, inconsistent, and even counterintuitively positive ways. As such, in the chapters that follow, I work to disentangle the full range of grit, mundanity, sociality, grief, and creativity of those journeys, ultimately arguing that perhaps it is simply how they managed the challenges they encountered during the migration projects that actually makes these journeys extraordinary.

View record

By “thinking with trees” – a theoretical and methodological orientation – this dissertation explores which kinds of social relations with land, timber, trees, seeds and forests are enabled and enacted through environmental governance in San Martín, Peru. Based on ethnographic research carried out in 2019 and 2021, this dissertation foregrounds the implications of unequal knowledge-making and decision-making practices in forest governance and in environmental development initiatives. Drawing on political ecology, science and technology studies, and scholarly approaches to the nonhuman, this thesis offers a nuanced analysis of the complexities of Amazonian Indigenous Kichwa and Amazonian non-Indigenous mestizo approaches to tree and forest relations, including how people cause, monitor, and mitigate tropical deforestation. This thesis contributes to growing plant scholarship in the social sciences, bringing it into conversation with critical development theories to foreground the politics of how people relate with plants in Amazonia.

View record

By many metrics, the state of Florida is “ground zero” for climate change in continental North America. The reasons for this are manifold: stifling heat, stronger hurricanes, and the swelling ocean combine with ambitious development policies and conservative state leadership that obscure environmental risk in service to capital. In urban centers like Miami, seemingly countless organizations and committees are working to confront the climate crisis head on. Five hours away, in Florida’s whiter, more rural zones, what can seem like extreme environmental risk doesn’t necessarily translate into a fear of – or even a belief in – global climate change. The end result in Florida is a morbidly fascinating cultural-epistemological dissonance, a contradiction in culture and risk perception that’s reaching a fever pitch as the waters rise. In this dissertation, which draws on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in Miami and along Florida’s Gulf Coast, I analyze how the stark realities of environmental shift are felt, integrated, and resisted by people on the front lines of the climate crisis. Specifically, I explore how seemingly different responses to the climate crisis in Florida are steeped in parallel habits of denialism and instincts of environmental mastery that have been ingrained in settler bodies over centuries of brutal domination. I argue that looking away from climate change – whether it’s denied outright or manifests in climate change dissonance – might be thought of as subsumed within a much vaster culture of denial and disregard that finds roots in the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism more broadly construed. Responsibly mitigating the climate crisis requires reckoning with this culture, lest people and policymakers end up thinking the horrors of climate change are “just part of the thing,” the white noise we all adjust to without even thinking.

View record