2015 Conference

Full Presentation Panel

Edgeland Futurism

Ash Smith

“Edgeland Futurism” asks its participants to re-imagine the near future of the Southern California borderland region and encourages inter-disciplinary, cross- generational and trans-border collaboration. With strategies and devices from speculative fiction, Surrealist ethnography, and Situationism, students will work across different mediums to create videos, writing, sound recordings, photographs and to design speculative products, technologies, and performative interventions in the everyday. Students will ground their projects in research, films, readings, site visits, and collaborations with students in High Tech High School and students in the Autonomous University of Baja California. Together we will partake in a collective exercise in re- imagining the future of our region. We will simultaneously create an archive of the consensual speculations of a time and a place as well as engage directly with the public through performance, interventions, screenings, workshops and a gallery show.

“Edgeland” is a term that may be used to describe a geographical location where a confluence of tensions between urban, rural, corporate, domestic and militarized zones occur. In this course, we will also think about the term “edgeland” as a container to describe alterity, difference and otherness. Because the edge is proximal to the liminal, the edgeland is a place that is highly inclined to transgressions and re-formulations of ways of knowing. The assigned films and readings will engage critically with the duality of the edgeland as a geo-political place and as a metaphor of difference. We will focus special attention to the strategies used in the works of feminist futurism, afrofuturism, and chicanofuturism. Equal agency may be given to "truth" and "fiction", (the latter often manifests hopes, desires, dreams and sometimes something closer to another kind of "truth"), as potential narrative devices.This trans-imaginary realm allows for an immersive investigation of self and place and how it may be performed, embodied, mythologized.

Trans-border hydrology and sediment budget of Los Laureles Canyon, Tijuana, MX: Towards impact assessment and mitigation 

Kristine T. Taniguchi, M.S.

Several watersheds cross the US-Mexico boundary, resulting in trans-boundary environmental problems.  Erosion in Tijuana, Mexico, increases the rate of sediment deposition in the Tijuana Estuary in the United States, altering the structure and function of the ecosystem.  The well-being of residents in Tijuana is compromised by damage to infrastructure and homes built adjacent to stream channels, gully formation in dirt roads, and deposition of trash. We aim to understand the dominant source of sediment contributing to the sediment budget of the watershed (channel, gully, or rill erosion), where the hotspots of erosion are located, and what the impact of future planned and unplanned land use changes and Best Management Practices (BMPs) will be on sediment and storm flow.  We will be using a mix of field methods, including 3D photo-reconstruction of stream channels, with two models, CONCEPTS and AnnAGNPS to constrain estimates of the sediment budget and impacts of land use change.  Our research provides an example of trans-border collaboration between San Diego State University and CICESE to create a better understanding of the border environment.

Archeology, History and Environment at USIBWC: How All work together through the History of the United States - Mexican Border

Mark Howe

The International Boundary and Water Commission, United States Section (USIBWC) has a long history of preservation of the border and environmental management. The Environmental Management Division (EMD) of the USIBWC reviews, comments and works with Mexico on issues pertaining to Boundary Management, Water Allocations and Environmental problems along the border based on our Treaties with Mexico. This presentation will examine recent work being done along the border in Waste Water Treatment in Nogales, AZ and Imperial Beach (San Diego), California. Additionally, discussion will be on Minute 319 and the Pulse Flow that occurred in 2014 in the Colorado River. The roles Amistad Dam and Falcon Dam have on flood control issues on the Rio Grande River and the archeology of areas in Falcon reservoir. As lake levels have risen and dropped, this has exposed archeological sites and other environmental concerns. Discussion of the environmental impacts from feral pigs, native and non-native plants and public encroachments into the reservoir below the “307 line” will be examined. Aspects on the history of the commission and changes from land issues to water management and waste management along the border in the past, now and in the future along the border are the central focus.

Transborder Movements and Governance on the Tijuana-San Diego Border

Carolina Prado

In 2000, a Tijuana-San Diego social movement network was formed to address a case of toxic contamination in the Tijuana neighborhood of Chilpancingo. Since then, this cross-border network has worked together on three campaigns: the remediation efforts at Metales y Derivados, the fight against air pollution in the Chilpancingo neighborhood, and the Save the Alamar campaign to halt the channelization of a local creek. My dissertation research will explore the events and actors involved in the cross-border network’s 13-years of binational collaboration and their interventions in binational environmental governance in in the Tijuana-San Diego region through the application of a participatory action model and a policy ethnography methodology. Through a participatory research model, my project is working in partnership with this social movement network to contribute to improve border environmental governance through an increased focus on community participation in environmental problem solving. My policy ethnography methodology is equipping me with the tools to reach this policy goal through interviews with social movement and government actors from both sides of the border alongside a rigorous organizational and policy analysis of border environmental governance programs like the EPA’s Border 2020 program. ­­­­