Methodologie

This paper engages with the established use of the concept of bordering in Border Studies and argues that it is often characterised by an insufficient explicit articulation of the underlying processual understandings of borders. Against this background, the paper proposes a heuristic that distinguishes between two ideal-typical approaches to bordering processes: an outward-oriented bordering inspection, which examines the effects of presupposed borders, and an inward-oriented bordering introspection, which reconstructs the border itself as the fabric of social and cultural processes of dis/ordering. This distinction seeks to more precisely situate different epistemic interests, objects of inquiry and methodological approaches within Border Studies and to relate them to one another. Drawing on examples, the paper demonstrates how both perspectives can be combined productively. It conceptualises the plurality of bordering not as a deficit but as an epistemic opportunity, the use of which, however, requires an explicit articulation of the underlying processual understandings of borders.