Roxana Rodríguez Ortiz is a professor and researcher of Philosophy at the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM) and a member of the National System of Researchers (SNI-I). She holds a PhD in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Her work lies at the intersection of philosophy, literature, and border studies.
Her research focuses on the development of border epistemologies and on what she calls fictional philosophy, a theoretical and methodological approach that articulates epistemological, ontological, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions from a speculative materialist perspective. From this perspective, she conceives of the border not as a fixed boundary, but as a space of intertwining with otherness, which has allowed her to open new lines of research in contemporary philosophy.
She has founded and coordinated academic spaces such as Estudios Fronterizos (2010), focused on writing and theoretical reflection, and Ecología del Afecto (2021), an interdisciplinary project that proposes rethinking borders from peripheral knowledge and non-anthropocentric approaches, incorporating a synthetic ontology to address technological and affective borders.
She is the author of nine individual books and three edited volumes, including Epistemología de la frontera. Modelos de sociedad y políticas públicas (2014), Cartografía de las fronteras. Diario de campo (2016), Migración Cero. Reterritorializar la condición de refugiado en México (2020), and Filosofía orientado a la frontera (2025). She has also published numerous articles and book chapters.
She has conducted research stays at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte and at the Migration and Ethnic Minorities Studies Group (GEDIME) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Her career includes academic management, teaching and dissemination in various philosophical areas, thesis direction and participation in spaces of influence in migration and border policy.
Chapters
15. RE-IMAGING THE CONCEPT OF BORDER
The idea behind the configuration of such a model based on comparative studies lies in the possibility of isolating a formal aesthetics in the border narratives (taking into account the discourses as well as narratives on the social and literary subjects) bringing to the front the ‘social imaginary’ of people on both sides of the border. From a cultural point of view and its 1 relevant concepts (migration, minority, identity, representation, etc.), basing my research principally on power relationships (dominion and exclusion), other aspects of the relationship between borders subjects also come to light.
Rodríguez. R. Re-imaging the concept of border”. In David Gallagher (comp..). Creoles, Diasporas and Cosmopolitianisms: The Creolization of Nations, Cultural Migrations, Global Languages and Literatures. California: Academica press, 2012, pp. 239-254. https://roxanarodriguezortiz.com/2024/01/11/re-imaging-the-concept-of-border/
BEYOND BORDERS AUTOINMUNE PRACTICES IN A STATE OF LAW
To deconstruct the euphemistical policies of certain autoimmune practices at the frontier zones which avoid in the name of sovereignty human mobility between two or more countries in European Union, I will use the metaphor of the triple suicide for three events: a) biopolitics as a symbolic and strategic double suicide; b) the state of law failure as trauma; c) the sovereign exception as the vicious cycle of repression.
Rodríguez. R. 2020. Beyond Borders: Autoimmune Practices in a State of Law (an aporia). Cooper y Tinning (eds.), Debating and Defining Borders. Philosophical and Theoretical Perspectives. Routledge, pp. 220-233. Rodríguez. R. 2020. Beyond Borders: Autoimmune Practices in a State of Law (an aporia). En Cooper y Tinning (eds.), Debating and Defining Borders. Philosophical and Theoretical Perspectives. Routledge, pp. 220 – 233.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781351124881-17/beyond-borders-roxana-rodr%C3%ADguez-ortiz
Articles
From border security to borderization of security in the mapping of global space
International coordination of global confinement during the pandemic is the event that made evident a paradigm shift in global border security, a paradigm that forged from the beginning of the 21st century and which consists of the reterritorialization of public space through the borderization of security in the global space cartography. I use cartography as a methodology for comparative studies to identify the dynamics of the borderization of security by mapping and representing two regions (United States-Mexico and external borders of the Schengen area). For this purpose, I utilize the geolocator of the mobile phone. The originality of the text consists in establishing the analytical category borders of securitization as an epistemological watershed that brings together a series of events, phenomena, institutions, and policies (in general global border governance) that are translated, differed and displaced to invert the concept of border security by that of borderization of security.
https://ref.uabc.mx/ojs/index.php/ref/article/view/1156/2554?lan=en_US
DE-CONSTRUCTING THE BORDER: MATERNAL LANGUAGE INTERDICTION (AND IT IS LITERARY REPRESENTATION)
To do this research, first I will refer to what Jacques Derrida calls “maternal language interdiction”, when he questions his own tongue (French) according to his political reality (having been born in Algeria instead of France). Secondly, I will deconstruct the maternal language interdiction for the specific case of border literature, studying two representative stories of the border literature: “Mericans” by Sandra Cisneros and “Sabaditos en la noche” by Luis Humberto Crosthwaite.
https://roxanarodriguezortiz.com/2012/03/21/de-constructing-the-border-maternal-language-interdiction-and-it-is-literary-representation/
LES LIMITES DE L’HOSPITALITÉ À LA FRONTIÈRE ENTRE LE MEXIQUE ET LES ÉTATS-UNIS / REVUE DIOGÈNE
Ses recherches portent sur l’étude de la frontière mexicano-américaine, la philosophie de la culture, la philosophie de l’art, la littérature comparée, la littérature de la frontière et la théorie critique. Dans ses trois études sur la frontière, elle souligne la nécessité de déconstruire les idées toutes faites sur la frontière afin de la concevoir moins comme une limite que comme une condition pour mettre en place des politiques publiques qui bénéficient aux communautés des deux côtés de la frontière.
Rodríguez. R. 2014. Les limites de l’hospitalité à la frontière entre le Mexique et les États-Unis, en Diogène, France, Nº 246-247, Avril-Septembre 2014, pp. 62-75.
LITERARY DISTANCE ON THE U.S.-MEXICAN BORDER
This article seeks to establish the differences that exist between Chicano writing and border writing taking as elements of analysis discourse/performance and the urban phenomenon, respectively, with the intention of promoting the literary work that develops on the U.S.- Mexican border.
LITERARY DISTANCE ON THE U.S.-MEXICAN BORDER. (2008). Andamios, Revista De Investigación Social, 5(9), 113-137. https://doi.org/10.29092/uacm.v5i9.291
