Claire Galloni d’Istria has published the article “When the Mountain Acts Up: Experiencing Vertical Bordering and More-than-Human Relations in the Alps” in Humans 2026, 6,14.
This article examines how bordering is experienced in alpine environments undergoing rapid ecological change. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2024 and 2025 in the transboundary region of the Aosta Valley (Italy), Haute-Savoie (France), and the Canton of Valais (Switzerland), it explores how more-than-human relations become strained, suspended, or reconfigured through infrastructural instability, environmental rupture, and sanitary regulation.
The article shows that alpine spaces are continuously co-produced by more-than-human assemblages through dynamics, in which bordering emerges not as fixed spatial line but as a conditional relational process unfolding across elevations and over time. It contributes to posthuman border studies by approaching bordering as a relational dynamic grounded in the material and temporal conditions under which more-than-human relations become practicable or impracticable.
https://doi.org/10.3390/humans6020014