Biography: Philosopher with a BA and an MA in Philosophy from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), complemented by training in socio-environmental studies, urban sustainability, spatial methodologies, and transdisciplinary arts-based research. She is currently pursuing a PhD at Technische Universität Berlin and is affiliated with ÉLAN – Designing Landscapes in the Anthropocene. Her doctoral research examines multispecies relationships between birds and humans at the urban edges of Mexico City and Berlin.
Her academic work explores contemporary philosophy, embodiment, territory, technology, urbanisation, and socio-environmental crises, drawing on urban political ecology, multispecies ethnography, critical mapping, and collaborative artistic practices. Alongside her academic work, she has participated in environmental conservation, education, birdwatching, and socio-ecological initiatives in Mexico City, including activities at the Reserva Ecológica del Pedregal de San Ángel (REPSA), an ecological reserve at UNAM in Mexico City. Her research investigates how birds reveal ecological and political conflicts surrounding urban expansion, biodiversity loss, and the porous boundaries between urban and natural environments.
PhD Thesis Working Title: Thinking with birds, multispecies entanglements at Urban Edges in Mexico City and Berlin
Abstract: Throughout evolutionary history, birds have shaped human existence through ecological roles such as seed dispersal, population regulation, pollination, and even pathogens transmission; their interactions with us have co-produced the spaces we inhabit. In cities—relatively new and still-forming habitats—this interdependence generates unique dynamics. Species such as the Harris’s Hawk and Berylline Hummingbird in Mexico City, and crows in Berlin, have adapted to urban opportunities and pressures, altering behaviors and diets, and forming unexpected entanglements with our waste systems, infrastructures, and everyday practices. These survival strategies reveal broader urban conflicts—waste management, urban sprawl, real estate speculation, and violence in conservation areas—that exacerbate social inequalities and undermine ecological resilience on city peripheries. The life-and-death dynamics of these birds expose the fragile and constantly negotiated boundaries between the natural and the urban. Despite growing awareness of socioecological breakdown, the more-than-human viewpoint remains underexplored in institutional discourses on urban futures and public policies, which tend to adopt an anthropocentric, technical approach, overlooking that urban problems affect not only humans but the entire web of life that sustains the city. This research addresses that gap by reflecting on the unsustainable separation between nature and culture, emphasizing the mutual transformations between nonhuman animals and human knowledge. It frames birds as active agents in wicked urban problems—complex, multi-causal issues with no clear solutions— especially the degradation of ecological frontiers at city edges, influencing our lives, imaginaries, behaviors, and environments. From a multispecies perspective, it maps the complex links between urban growth, ecological degradation, and socio-environmental struggles in Mexico City and Berlin. Drawing on participatory action research through the arts—including mapping, diagramming, workshops, and fieldwork—it examines how nature appears and resists urban logics of capture and domestication, particularly in liminal spaces. Guided by the question of how spaces are co-produced and negotiated between birds and humans, the study combines qualitative, participatory, and arts-based methods to generate comparative insights into multispecies coexistence, governance, and care. Expected outcomes include a typology of bird–infrastructure entanglements and a framework for human and more-than-human urban-environmental justice. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to debates on transdisciplinary spatial research on the right to a just and biodiverse city, aligning with SDG #11 by fostering resilient, inclusive, and ecologically interconnected urban futures.