Melissa W. Wright

Professional Bio

Melissa W. Wright is a scholar of social justice movements within Mexico and the Mexico-U.S. borderlands, and in the southern Americas. As a critical geographic scholar with foundations in interdisciplinary feminist, critical race, solidarity, and political economic studies, Wright examines how social movements that articulate human rights, social justice, and landscape stewardship subvert the necropolitical convergence of anti-immigrant, extractive economies, and racist governance systems that threaten the well-being of the borderlands beyond the human domain. She has authored foundational pieces in studies of feminicidio and the social movements against it in Mexico and beyond, of social justice campaigns against state terror and labor exploitation, and of the formation of solidarity in support of social and ecological diversity in the Mexico-U.S. borderlands. Her current research examines how critical race, ecological, and indigenous movements throughout the borderlands have gained steam through “border thinking” combined with solidarity movements that prioritize the merging of social justice with ecological well-being.

While Wright has no preference regarding pronoun assignments to her, she refers to herself with feminized pronouns in solidarity with women-identified and feminized peoples around the world.