04/04/2026
Join the Urban Bird Project for a presentation on Monday April 6th, from 4:00 - 5:00 pm in the Learning Lab 1 (PCL) at UT Austin.
This talk discusses the transdisciplinary practice of the Urban Bird Project (UBP), an environmental justice initiative that brings Rhetoric, Ecology, and Chicanx and Indigenous Studies together through local, migratory, and culturally significant birds. Led by faculty and graduate students from UT San Antonio, with community members across South Texas, Greater México, and beyond, this talk highlights a few projects that have emerged through our practice.
In the first project, Dr. Kenny Walker and Olarotimi Ogungbemi discuss how rhetorical science studies engages with ecological science through biocultural significance in UBP’s restor(y)ation repository and field guide to the cultural significance of birds; in the next section, King-Kostelac and Hinojosa discuss UBP’s collaborative bioacoustic monitoring project and how AI, digital field methods, and arts-based practices intervene in protection strategies for avian window collisions; Finally, Smith discusses UBP’s microplastics project that integrates citizen science and avian ecology to address the exposure of birds to microplastics to highlight potential issues of environmental justice. Together, the team ends with a discussion on the broader impacts of UBP’s transdisciplinary work through team-teaching, university-community partnerships, and community-based bird walks with transhemispheric connections.
The upshot reveals how and why transdisciplinary approaches to ecology demand rhetorical practice as a relational world-building architecture for community-engaged research across borders.
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To RSVP, visit https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSduG0rW598CRVVB-NJKi9EqtMcPSG5WGp_rtazC0QkUtYp9ig/viewform or scan the QR code on the flyer
Questions? email [email protected]
To learn more about UBP, visit urbanbirdproject.org
