Over 250 border scholars from around the world met in Eilat, Israel, February 13-18, 2023. There, the third world conference of the Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS) took place at Ben-Gurion University in the border triangle of Israel, Jordan and Egypt. In addition to field trips along the Israeli border, the five-day conference "Borders, Edges and Interfaces. Pluralities and Scales" featured international panels from the multidisciplinary spectrum of international border research.
Among them was also the panel "Beyond representations: grasping the textured character of borders" chaired by Christian Wille (University of Luxembourg) and Astrid M. Fellner (Saarland University). In their talks, the four speakers discussed the border in its textural character and used case studies to show how this understanding of borders can be implemented in analysis. The following talks and speakers were part of the bordertextures panel:
Representations and Realities as a Guideline to Bordertexturing Saarlor Industrial Cooperation
Andrea Wurm, Saarland University
Bordertextures and the Textu(r)al Cohesion of the Border
Eva Nossem, Saarland University
Textured Borders around a Railroad to the North. Approaching Bordertextures through Industrial Films
Isis Luxenburger, Saarland University
Bordertexturing the German-Polish Borderlands
Tobias Schank, Saarland University
The working group Bordertextures organized the panel "Texturing the border" and a public working group session at the "Border Renaissance" conference. Members of the working group have also participated in other panels of the conference.
The panelists were border scholars from the UniGR Center for Border Studies:
- Theorizing from the Border: Bordertexturing as an Epistemic Framework
Astrid M. Fellner (North American Literary and Cultural Studies, Saarland University and UniGR-Center for Border Studies) - Text(uris)ing Belfast and the Northern Irish Border
Joachim Frenk (British Literary and Cultural Studies and UniGR-Center for Border Studies, Saarland University) - Of Three Colors and Third Spaces: Discussing the Construction of Cultural Identities in Borderlands and Their Representation in Film
Tobias Schank (Saarland University and UniGR-Center for Border Studies) - Interwoven (His-)Stories and Border-Crossings: Bordertextures in Hernan Diaz’ In the Distance
Bärbel Schlimbach (North American Literary and Cultural Studies, Saarland University and UniGR-Center for Border Studies) - Re-Negotiating Migration Narratives in the American West: C. Pam Zhang's How Much of these Hills Is Gold
Bärbel Schlimbach (North American Literary and Cultural Studies, Saarland University and UniGR-Center for Border Studies) - Approaching border complexities: von der Linie zur Textur
Christian Wille (UniGR-Center for Border Studies, University of Luxembourg) - Overcoming Borders. Cinematic Representations of Border Languaging in Industrial Borderlands
Andrea Wurm (Department of Language Science and Technology and UniGR-Center for Border Studies, Saarland University)
The « Border Renaissance » Conference took place on February 4 and 5, 2022 in Saarbrücken (hybrid) was organized by the UniGR-Center for Border Studies.
More information can be found here: Conference « Border Renaissance ».
The joint project "Linking Borderlands: Dynamics of Border Regional Peripheries" by the UniGR-CBS and the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION takes an interdisciplinary look at European border regions as contact zones and transition areas at the edges of nation states. Together with different project partners, a focus is put on the border regions SaarLorLux+ between Germany, France and Luxembourg and Brandenburg/Lebus between Germany and Poland.
Within the project, five research-related focal points will be worked on in order to be able to advise decision-makers in politics and society in current topics on problems and opportunities of cross-border cooperation in a further step.
More information can be found here.
Borderland Stories is a multilateral, transnational, interdisciplinary two-class module of Saarland University’s MA Border Studies, which combines ethnographic analysis and creative work in the visual arts to facilitate intercultural communication across two distinct European borderlands. It brings together students of Saarland University and Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University of Mykolaiv (Ukraine) in critical discussions about Border Studies research as well as lived experiences in the borderlands of the Greater Region and the Black Sea.
The project is funded by the grant program “MEET UP! Youth for Partnership” by the Remembrance, Responsibility and Future (EVZ) Foundation and the Federal Foreign Office. More information can be found here.
The project Bridging Borders wants to address dynamic processes of bordering and related nascent cultural practices by bridging borders – between pre-COVID times, today, and what is still to come. The fundamental change the current situation is bringing about requires detailed attention in research and teaching. In order to critically engage all these issues in the context of this collaboration, the project proposes to structure the discussion according to following fields of inquiry and activity:
- Bridging Borders from Challenges to Chances: Bringing Emergent Cultural Practices into Dialogue
- Bridging Borders from Immobility to Dynamics: Researching and Teaching in a Shared Virtual World / Blended Mobility/Activities to Strengthen Cooperations / Convergence in Times of Social Distancing
- Bridging Borders from Rebordering to Debordering: Activism and Protest in Europe and North America/Confronting Nationalism and Populism
- Bridging Borders between Schengen, the EU’s Outer Borders, and the Transatlantic World: Building Alliances and Organizing Across Borders
- Bridging Borders between us and them: the Border-Mobility-Nexus/the Two-Folded Relationship of Borders and Mobilities
- Bridging Borders to Close the Digital Divide: Sustainable Shared Teaching Stimuli
More information can be found here.
The working group Bordertextures organized the panel "B/Ordering processes as border textures: empirical contributions of cultural border studies" at the 6th annual conference of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft (KWG). In their talks, the panelists presented their takes on the bordertextures approach with the aim of grasping and analyzing b/ordering processes in a complex way.
The panelists were border scholars from the UniGR Center for Border Studies:
- B/Ordering-Prozesse als Bordertexturen
Christian Wille (UniGR-Center for Border Studies, University of Luxemburg) - B/ordering Processes in Whoop-Up Country: Bordertextures on the Canada-U.S. Border
Astrid M. Fellner (North American Literary and Cultural Studies, Saarland University and UniGR-Center for Border Studies) - Bordertextures in the American West: HBO’s Westworld
Bärbel Schlimbach (North American Literary and Cultural Studies, Saarland University and UniGR-Center for Border Studies) - Fluid Trajectories: Migratory Afterlife of Jamaican Women in Montreal
Lisa Johnson (IRTG Diversity: Mediating Difference in Transcultural Spaces, University of Trier) - Lexicographic de-b/ordering: Bordertextures and the assemblage of the UniGR-CBS Glossary Border Studies
Eva Nossem (UniGR-Center for Border Studies, Saarland University) - Von der Textur zur Bordertextur: Poetische Konfigurationen von Liminalität und Transgression in einer kulturwissenschaftlichen Perspektive
Sylvie Grimm-Hamen (Centre d’Etudes Germaniques Interculturelles de Lorraine (CEGIL)University of Lorraine (Nancy) and UniGR-Center for Border Studies) - Backstopped: (Re-)Negotiations of the British/Irish Border in Recent Irish Literature
Joachim Frenk (British Literary and Cultural Studies, Saarland University and UniGR-Center for Border Studies)
The 6th annual conference of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft (KWG) took place from 8 to 10 October 2020 in Frankfurt (Oder). The conference was organized by the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION in cooperation with the KWG section “Cultural Border Studies.”
More information here KWG2020 "Bordering Cultures."
BOTEX is a book project (2019-2020) developed within the working group Bordertextures, in which researchers in the field of cultural border studies from Germany, Luxembourg, France, Italy,… work together. In their contributions, these scholars discuss the approach of bordertextures, thereby contributing to the sharpening of this concept and this tool of analysis. The critically productive discussion aims at the following issues:
- Conceptional questions and recent development
- Methodological considerations and problematizations
- Empirical applications and practical testing
The BOTEX projects contributes to a stronger theoretically conceptual grounding of cultural border studies and ensures an increased visibility of this field.
The volume will be published with transcript Verlag and is edited by Christian Wille, Astrid M. Fellner, and Eva Nossem.
The Global Track project was part of the second world conference of the Association for Borderlands Studies (10-14 July 2018) in Vienna/Budapest. The project involves the recording of seven panels of the conference program with the aim of documenting the current state of the art in border studies and disseminate its contents also beyond the scientific community.
The project was supported by the German Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung) and realized by Astrid M. Fellner (Saarland University) in collaboration with Machtheld Venken (University of Vienna).
Recorded panels:
- From Barriers to Bridges: The Evolution of African Borders and Borderlands Since World War
- Borders and Boundaries in Asia: Borders in South Asia
- Border-Making and its Consequences: North America/Canada - U.S. Border
- Borders in Latin America
- Rethinking Borders and Territory in the Middle East
- Eastern Dimension of EU Actorness
- Border Textures: Interwoven Practices and Discursive Fabrics of Borders
The Panel “Border Textures: Interwoven Practices and Discursive Fabrics of Borders” was organized by the working group Bordertextures and included talks by Astrid M. Fellner (Saarland U), Johan Schimanski (U of Oslo), Chiara Dorbolò (U of Delft) and many more.
The series is published by Nomos-Verlag and is intended above all to offer a platform for cultural analyses, to address recent developments in border research and to develop perspectives that allow innovative ways of thinking about and researching borders.
More Information www.nomos-shop.de.
This interdisciplinary lecture series aims to explore the scientific debate about physical and ideational border spaces as to make (doctoral) students and experiences scholars of the Greater Region aware of borders and their challenges from a cultural, political, and historical perspective.
More information www.borderrealities.org.
The project is geared towards broadening and structuring the existing diversity of scientific competencies in Border Studies at the universities of the Greater Region. For the creation of a “European Center for Competence and Knowledge in Border Studies”, the Interreg VA Greater Region program provides the UniGR-CBS network with approximately EUR 2 million ERDF funding during 3 years. The main focuses of the European Center are on research, mobility, teaching, society and territory.
More information www.borderstudies.org.
Recently, Border Studies are experiencing methodological shift, which aims at describing and investigating borders in more complex ways. Here, the focus lies on dynamic formations of actors, activities, bodies, objects and knowledge that become effective as border (de)stabilizations. These formations, which are called “Border Complexities”, are discussed in the five-part workshop series from different thematic angles. Five partners from Germany, France and Luxembourg carry out this cooperation project, which is funded by the Franco-German University.
More information www.bordercomplexities.org.
This paper seeks to delineate the concept of bordertextures, tracing its origins as a conceptual and methodological approach to its genealogical roots in Chican@ Studies and decolonial thinking. In thinking from the trope of bordertextures, my paper seeks to delineate a way of borderthinking that opens up a space in which Indigenous epistemology and alternative literacies coexist with Western cultural and narrative forms. In order to visualize this understanding of bordertextures, or rather the process of bordertexturing, as I want to call it, I will look at visual expressions by recent border artists, e.g. the performative practices of Alan Michalson and Tatiana Parcero.
This article utilizes bordertextures to analyze representations of borders and border constructions in the TV series Westworld (HBO, since 2016) to reveal how identity constructions and power relations are inscribed in texts. The concept of bordertextures allows a deeper analysis of power constructions, helping to lay bare the underlying rhizomatic entanglements of (hegemonic) discourses about borders. Close readings of examples from Westworld aim to deconstruct the hegemonic narrative of the Westward Movement and the mainstream interpretation of national narratives.
In my research, I have a historical view on cross-border industrial cooperations and economic interlocking within the Greater Region. I am studying its legal and financial implications in several countries, migration, the changing political affiliation of the regions and the plurilinguistic side of the communication within such cooperations and to the outside. At the moment, I have two main interests: Saarlor Chemical Project and the interwoven cross-border structure of ARBED.
This article focuses on selected narrative texts from contemporary German literature that deal with the inner-German border. In all of these texts, the border interacts with other categories of difference and forms the backdrop to the personal crises of the protagonists. In analyzing the different layers of border experiences in the texts, the article draws on the methodological concept of border texture.
The TEXAZ project unfolds the hitherto still missing systematization of an emergent and disparate field, anchoring in it a new analytical development which is taken up and expanded into an analytical-heuristic instrument of analysis. This systematization is conducted in the framework of a cultural studies approach to borders, which allows us to grasp the dynamics and complex intertwinings on a spatial, social, and symbolic scale in a differentiated manner and supports collaborative forms of border research.
The Pacific Northwest of North America has long been recognized as a transborder region that has bonded across geopolitical border structures between states and countries and, in fact, in spite of them. This situation engendered various attempts at conceptualizing the region in terms that would reflect its transborder self-understanding and present it as a territorial and cultural total held together by specificities of landscape, ecosystems, culture, history, economy, mindset, and allegiances. A number of diverse imaginaries converge in the transborder storyscape of the Pacific Northwest region in a complex way. The aim of this article is an attempt to mobilize the concept of bordertexures for the analysis of a selection of literary texts coming out of the Pacific Northwest in order to grasp some of the defining aspects of this multifaceted complexity and make sense of the dynamics of their interaction with one another—dynamics that at the same time engage, question, and re-draw borders.
This contribution analyzes the compilation of the UniGR-CBS Glossary Border Studies as a bordertexture, that is a lexicographically multilayered woven fabric, in which different linguistic, theoretical, and methodological threads come together, constituting a diaphanous fabric which forms nodes and dissolves at some points. In order to be able to generate this interwoven multilayeredness, the glossary entries and their rhizomatic interconnectedness will be developed from the theoretical perspective of bordertexturing. As a result, the UniGR-CBS Glossary Border Studies itself becomes a productive space in which borders and their crossings bring to light new border knowledges.