This article draws on the exchanges at the different sessions organised at the 7th Association for Borderlands Studies World Conference. Each session was devoted to the question of borders in a specific part of the globe: Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and North America. The primary aim of these sessions was to develop a shared approach on these different territories. This article summarises the exchanges that took place and assesses the global approach proposed.
The Border Culture/Border Poetics group is an international research group led by members of the Arctic University of Norway (UIT). They propose a new border aesthetics serving to better grasp the representations of borders in the artistic and academic domains. They focus their activities on the scientific and educational fields.
The Centre for Border Region Studies in the University of Southern Denmark, in Sønderborg (founded in 2016, based on a research tradition dating back to 1976), links the Faculty of Human Sciences and the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences for interdisciplinary and comparative research work using qualitative methods. Specifically, the disciplines represented for research in the field of European cross-border regions are anthropology, geography, history and political sciences.
The research themes are structured using four fields as indicated by the Centre for Border Region Studies:
The role and developing functions of borders and cross-border regions
Current cross-border European regions: conflicts and cooperation
The role of (cross-border) regions and of the European Union
Located in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the interdisciplinary Centre for International Border Research deals with border reconfiguration and conflict transformation at various levels. The academic staff involved comes from anthropology, geography, political science and sociology. The network represents an opportunity for scholars worldwide to network and exchange research outputs on borders. It does so by a wide range of activities: organization/supporting seminars and conferences, running a visiting fellowship programme, publishing working papers, hosting a well-documented multi-media resource platform. The website provides free access to a large extent of the network. The website documents mainly activities that ran in the 2000s and early 2010s.
The focus of this text is the boundaries between disciplines, subjects, specialized fields of knowledge as well as epistemic and knowledge cultures. The author addresses differences in cross-border and integrative research with the term boundary work. Different methods of boundary work, such as exploring professional profiles and identities; conceptual work and boundary work with variables, indicators and thresholds, are presented.
