Carlos Alonso Nugent will discuss his Imagined Environments: The Making of the Borderlands (American Crossroads Series, UC Press, 2026). Ranging from the US-Mexico War to the present, this book reveals the borderlands’ “imagined environments”—the frameworks through which its human groups have represented, related to, and resided in their more-than-human worlds. Although these imagined environments can feel immersive and even immutable, Nugent explains how they have in fact emerged in everything from Apache pictographs to US and Mexican laws to novels, poems, paintings, and photographs.
By showing how the larger imagined environments have shaped and been shaped by such cultural constituents, he revises accepted accounts of relational racialization, demonstrating that whiteness has coevolved with western water infrastructures, that Latinidades have developed through divergent forms of land tenure, and that Native nations have thrived not only by staying in specific places but also by migrating across vast spaces. With such stories, he complicates the environmental humanities: even as he argues that media have naturalized our use and abuse of the planet, he still explores how they have helped us love places we have never been and care for creatures we have never met.
Event Speaker
Carlos Alonso Nugent, Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University
Event Information
Free and open to the public; registration required. Contact [email protected] with any questions.
Hosted by the Center for Science and Society. This event is part of the Faculty Spotlight Event Series. This series highlights the work of Advisory Committee members.
