Description
This piece is a part of my overall PhD project, in which I interrogate how attending to the practices of La Búsqueda (the search for the disappeared in Mexico) through the lens of cosmopraxis can open paths to reconfigure the very coordinates of knowledge-making and political possibility in International Relations. In this chapter, I argue that La Búsqueda enacts a porous form of worlding: an ontology of interdependence in which humans, spirits, the earth, and artifacts co-constitute political life. This relational world-making unsettles the sovereign/subject binary that organizes much IR theory.
Empirically and methodologically, I combine narrated autoethnography from my own political education with rich fieldwork among women searchers; I animate those encounters through a semi-fictional composite, distilled from many stories, to preserve relational detail while protecting interlocutors. Through narrative threading, I show how tactile techniques, affective labor, and embodied practices are not merely forensic methods but modes of knowing and caring that produce political subjectivities.
A semi-fictional character (Vega) illustrates how the land becomes a language of grief and possibility: digging is simultaneously recovery and maternal offering, each fragment a spoken name. From these practices, I draw theoretical lessons: cosmopraxis surfaces alternative epistemologies and political imaginaries that make space for interdependence, complicate sovereignty, and expand what counts as legitimate political action in IR.
