Shaylih Muehlmann’s 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. Dr. Muehlmann brings to her scholarship a strong commitment to an ethnographic analysis of contemporary social issues, which in her first book she applied to understanding how a group of Cucapá people in northern Mexico have experienced a trans-national water conflict at the end of the Colorado River. “Where the River Ends” is forthcoming with Duke University Press (May 2013). Her second book manuscript entitled “When I Wear My Alligator Boots” is the winner of the 2009 Public Anthropology Publishing Prize and forthcoming with the University of California Press. This project analyzes the effects of the so called “war on drugs” on the rural under-classes of the US-Mexico border region.
