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.
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.
