Emily M. Wanderer

This project is an account of the place of the biological in Mexico. Mexican nationhood and identity are, in many ways, founded upon conceptions of the biological, from notions of citizenship and belonging to ideas about plants and landscape. The dissertation shows how biologists are now key to the way Mexicans imagine their national community, and how the scientific practices, social logics, and institutional forms associated with biosecurity transform earlier ideas of Mexican national biologies and the linkages between people, ecology, and place. In Mexico, scientists are formulating new practices of human and ecological biosecurity as they produce knowledge about what life forms are considered natively Mexican and which are dangerous, alien species that put local ecologies at risk.