The project is conducted under the leadership of Prof. Fellner at Saarland University by border researchers from Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University, Mykolaiv, Ukraine, who are currently guest researchers at Saarland University. Through this collaboration, the cooperation relations between the UniGR-Center for Border Studies at Saarland University and their partner university in Mykolaiv is to be strengthened, particularly in this difficult time of war.
This project offers a unique experience of cross-border views from 1950 to the present day on the Esch2022 territory. The results can be discovered through the audiovisual archives of the digital fresco "Au fil de l'Alzette... territoires et destinins partagés" and the three workshop-debates. At the end of these public events, a video mapping remixing video sequences from the audiovisual archives of France and Luxembourg are projected.
The three-year project focuses on the Greater Region SaarLorLux+ and the Brandenburg/Lebus region as zones of contact and transition at national borders. The border closures and increased controls in the course of the pandemic have made clear, especially in border regions, how closely the European Union is already interconnected at its territorial interfaces.
The scientific study of borders currently faces great challenges. At the same time the strong position of the geospatial sciences in favour of cultural perspectives on border (area) issues is being increasingly qualified. The "Cultural Border Studies" KWG Section set up in 2017 ties in with that and is attempting to develop this current further both on the level of theorisation and in the analysis of examples.
The UniGR-Center for Border Studies was the partner of the second Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS) World Conference. The 5-day event on the theme "Border-Making and its Consequences" was held from 10-14 July 2018 at the University of Vienna (AT) and the Central European University in Budapest (H) and was attended by 450 border researchers from over 50 countries.
Border research is forging new ways of thinking and analysing borders. The book release (2020) is following up this development and promotes a perspective that focuses on the everyday experience of borders.
The book series launched by academics from Viadrina University in Frankfurt (Oder), Saarland University and the University of Luxembourg is aimed at border researchers in the cultural and social science fields wishing to publish both empirical and theoretical work.
The members of the Association of Teachers of History and Geography (Association des Professeurs d’Histoire et de Géographie) regularly holds plenary sessions as part of a thematic conference. In 2019 the association held its conference from 23 to 25 October in Metz and Nancy and worked on the theme "Lorraine, land of fronts and borders" (La Lorraine, un territoire de fronts et de frontières). The UniGR-Center for Border Studies (UniGR-CBS) was involved in the planning of the programme in several ways.
Border research has undergone profound changes in the last few decades, which has altered the preoccupation with national borders as unchallenged phenomena. This reorientation is based on constructivist approaches and queries the processes of establishing, relativising, shifting or overcoming borders.
The 6th annual conference of the Kulturwissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft (KWG) will be taking place from 8-10 October 2020 at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). The overall theme will be "B/ORDERING CULTURES: Everyday Life, Politics, Aesthetics". The conference will be discussing socio-symbolic, aesthetic-material and political-territorial or borders and orders, as well as the related dynamics.
This project wants to retrace the function of the US-Canada border in the formation and consolidation of the two North American nations. It aims at developing a methodological framework that allows to analyze a series of historical and literary texts, images, films, and other cultural texts that function as alterna(rra)tives, that is subjugated knowledges, which have been buried deep down in national cultural imaginaries but which have the power to resurge as haunting presences in contemporary cultural texts.
How do cross-border regions come about and what characterises them? The 19 contributors to this collection examine the social experience of the EU's internal borders through the example of the SaarLorLux Greater Region. They discuss the practices of institutional actors and inhabitants of border regions in a number of areas: the economy, the job market, political cooperation as well as everyday life, the media and culture. The collection contains 16 contributions in French and German by 19 authors from Germany, France and Luxembourg.
Cross-border residential mobility appeared in the wake of the formal opening of European borders and is mainly brought about by national disparities in the real estate market in border regions. In the last 10 to 15 years we observe considerable residential flows from Luxembourg to its neighbouring countries which bring about major changes in the spatial and social composition of border towns. The research project CB-RES investigates the experiences and identity constructions of cross-border migrants as well as of autochthonous inhabitants in German border villages.
This research project addresses the topics of queer migration, belonging, and citizenship with a particular focus on Italy and its oscillating role between North and South, both due its geographical location on the European Union’s external border and also because of its internal regionalism and North-South divide.
This is a PhD project that is being conducted as part of a dual doctoral studies programme at the Universities of Trier and Luxembourg (2017-2021). The topic is contemporary state borders, which are conceptualised from the perspective of sociological practice theory and analysed through the example of a case of cross-border cooperation in Europe. The key issues considered are how borders can be understood as practices and according to what practical logic borders are drawn up.
GR-Atlas is an interactive, interdisciplinary, thematic atlas of the “Greater Region SaarLorLux,” which comprises the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, the Belgian region Wallonia, the former French region Lorraine as well as the German federal states Saarland and Rhineland-Palatinate.
