Hilary Cunningham

Biography

Hilary’s academic work centers on boundary-making as itself a multi-faceted encounter with “nature”—one which ultimately generates certain types of human-nature interactions while excluding or marginalizing other kinds. Because “borders” can encompass geophysical spaces, metaphysical categories, ecological zones, as well as human and non-human actors, Hilary focuses on “nature” itself as a kind of borderscape. To probe notions of “nature” and the “natural,” then—whether at an international security fence, in municipal policies regulating human-animal interactions or in philosophical discussions of what it means to be human—is to critically question acts of enclosure, crossings and restricted mobilities. Hilary’s current research explores “gated ecologies,” i.e., those nature-borderscapes in which human and nonhuman marginalization (and destruction) unfold as a contingent, interconnected reality.

Research Interest

nature and culture; anthropology of animals; multi-species ethnography; theories of nature, the turn-to-the-nonhuman; critical border studies; social ecology