Imagining multispecies mobility justice

ABSTRACT

Throughout the Asia-Pacific, migratory shorebirds are being threatened by human encroachments into their coastal habitats. In this short visual essay, we unravel the entanglements that bind the Far Eastern Curlew with a range of mobilities in one of its key landing sites, Meanjin – Brisbane. These entanglements raise critical questions about how we humans conceptualise and pursue mobility justice. We suggest that paying attention to how mobilities intersect in more-than-human ways demands that our Western, anthropocentric narratives and framings of watery places, multispecies mobilities, and the rights to movement more broadly, must change. These considerations of mobility justice need to account for, and take heed of, the persisting existences with which ‘we’ cohabitate.

KEYWORDS:

• More-than-human
• mobilities
• migratory shorebirds
• wetlands
• ports
• justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

Dr Kaya Barry is a recipient of an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award [project number: DE220100394] funded by the Australian Government.