BorderStudiesTalk is an event organised as part of Geo Week 2021 for scientists and interested members of the public consisting of keynote statements und debate.
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.
The working group Bordertextures launched the book project “Bordertextures: A Complexity Approach to Cultural Border Studies” in 2019. In this book, about 20 border scholars discuss the bordertextures approach and attempt to refine the concept. The English language book will be published by transcript-Verlag and edited by Christian Wille, Astrid M. Fellner and Eva Nossem.
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.
In recent decades, Border Studies have gained importance and have seen a noticeable increase in development. This manifests itself in an increased institutionalization, a differentiation of the areas of research interest and a conceptual reorientation that is interested in examining processes. The thematic issue published in the series “Borders in perspective” of the UniGR-Center for Border Studies (UniGR-CBS) treat these developments as an opportunity for a long-overdue self-examination.
The 6th annual conference of the Kulturwissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft (KWG) took place from 8-10 October 2020 at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). The overall theme was "B/ORDERING CULTURES: Everyday Life, Politics, Aesthetics". The conference discussed socio-symbolic, aesthetic-material and political-territorial or borders and orders, as well as the related dynamics.
The trinational project “Border Complexities” is based on a recent development in border studies and intends to further develop it. For this purpose, the five partners organize from 2019 to 2022 a series of workshops on different sites in Germany, France and Luxembourg. The cooperation project is funded by the Franco-German University.
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.
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.
The Governance and Sustainability Lab takes up the challenge of exploring policies and governance mechanisms to cope with socio-ecological change and to steer development towards sustainability. As an interdisciplinary team, we employ multifaceted perspectives on sustainability, resource management and governance and steering processes in local borderscapes as well as in cities of the global North and South.
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.
