Dr. Shaylih Muehlmann


Associate Professor

Anthropology

Faculty of Arts

Research Themes:  Language, Sustainability and Transnationalism

Shaylih Muehlmann is Canada Research Chair in Language, Culture and the Enviornment. Her work work examines the intersections between environmental conflict, language and identity, with a specific focus on how social processes coalesce in the construction of inequality and the formation of social subjects. She is the author of two books – 2013’s Where The River Ends: Contested Indigeneity in the Mexican Colorado Delta (Duke University Press) and 2015’s When I Wear My Alligator Boots: Narco-Culture in the US-Mexico Borderlands (University of California Press) – as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. She is a Wall Scholar in the Peter Wall Institute, and in 2012 was awarded both the Junior Scholar Prize from the Anthropology and Environment Society and the Ton Vallen Award from the Babylon Institute (Tilburg University).

Research Interests

Environmental politics; linguistic anthropology; drug trafficking; indigeneity; water scarcity; the anthropology of the awkward; US-Mexico borderlands; Mexico.

First Nations land acknowledegement

We acknowledge that UBC’s campuses are situated within the traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh, and in the traditional, ancestral, unceded territory of the Syilx Okanagan Nation and their peoples.


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