UniGR-CBS-Arbeitsgruppe „Bordertextures“

The UniGR-Center for Border Studies Border Textures working group was set up in 2015 with the aim of strengthening and furthering develop the cultural orientation of Border Studies in the Greater Region. Its members include some ten academics from Saarland University, University of Luxembourg, University of Lorraine and University of Trier, including literature and cultural studies scholars from departments of English, American Studies, German language and literature, Translation Studies, Ethnology as well as Romance Studies/Intercultural Communication.

Together they are conducting research on borders from a resolutely cultural perspective, which in spite of its roots in Cultural Studies and the cultural sciences has become increasingly visible in Europe in the last decade. This research orientation focuses on the symbolic-social dimension of borders, which it addresses from both high and popular cultural angles and everyday cultural angles. To do this the working group has developed the Border Textures approach, which, as a methodology and heuristic, offers multiple starting points for analysing borders.

At the same time the approach can be tied in with what is probably the most important development in recent border research, which can be called "decentration" or a "processual shift", and describes a specific methodological attitude to investigation. This is a shift away from borders as ontological objects and towards a focus on the social processes in and through which borders are produced or (de)stabilised. What is relevant to cultural border research, above all, is some powerful practices and discourses which are critically and aesthetically handled in the popular, high and everyday culture field or which emerge from it.

Empirical observation has shown the social processes of border (de)stabilisation with regard to their actors, media, materialisation, effects, places and the interaction between them are diverse and are proving to be increasingly complex. With the Border Textures approach the working group offers an instrument for analysis and reflection that should reinforce and facilitate complexity-oriented border research, in order to get a better understanding of the cultural workings and mechanisms of border (de)stabilisation.

The approach has already been discussed from a theoretical-conceptual point of view, tested through analysis examples and published in a workshop report (2018). That report contains examples of Border Textures on the US-Mexican border, the French-German border and in Northern Ireland, which are broken down into the analysis dimensions of corporeality, spatiality and materiality. However, the potential of the Border Textures concept has not yet been exhausted, which is why the working group is continuing to work on and with the approach. As part of that work it is continually comparing notes with "border-sensitive" cultural scientists such as within the framework of the inter-regional "Border Textures Workshop" lecture series. Since 2017 colleagues from Italy, Sweden, Norway, Germany and the USA have already been invited to take part in the lectures, which mainly focus on questioning the theoretical and practical research aspects of scientific cultural research into border-related issues.
In addition, since 2019 the Border Textures working group has been preparing a book entitled "Border Textures. A Complexity Approach to Cultural Border Studies”. In the book some 20 border researchers from Europe and the USA discuss the approach and expand upon it. The book is due to come out in 2021 and examines conceptual issues, methodological considerations and empirical applications of Border Textures.