Programme final

Inscrivez-vous ICI à la conférence d'anniversaire de l'UniGR-CBS !

Certains panels, présentations, ateliers et événements de conférence de toutes sortes sont marqués d'un code couleur spécial pour souligner leur rôle particulier au sein des réseaux et alliances concernés.

Bien entendu, tous les événements sont ouverts à tou.te.s les participant.es à la conférence, quel que soit le code couleur !

Certains panels sont proposés dans un format hybride via la plateforme MS Teams de l'Université de la Sarre. Les liens pour accéder aux sessions se trouvent dans les panneaux respectifs ci-dessous.
Si vous avez besoin d'aide avec les équipes, veuillez consulter ce site : <https://aka.ms/JoinTeamsMeeting?omkt=en-GB>

N'hesitez pas à nous contacter en cas de questions ! borderstudies@uni-saarland.de

Keynote Dr. Martina Tazzioli (Università di Bologna) (EN)
Jeudi, 17h00 | R. 3.05 | hybrid

Border Abolitionism: Multiplying Genealogies, Undoing the Detractive Rights’ Logics

Martina Tazzioli (Università di Bologna)

Link to the meeting on MS Teams:
https://shorturl.at/kd6aw
Meeting ID: 343 016 461 97
Passcode: UrrasU

Chair: Eva Nossem (Universität des Saarlandes)

This talk advances border abolitionism as an analytics for elaborating a critique of the border regime, focusing on the interlocking racialised modes of mobility containment. An abolitionist perspective, challenges migrants' confinement beyond the distinction between deserving and undeserving migrants and, thus, dismantles the very logics of migration confinement and kidnapping.  Abolitionism as an approach, equips us with the analytical tools for engaging in transformative political processes while undoing the binary opposition between democratizing borders or removing them, as it holds together processes of dismantling and building up. I argue  that it is key to multiply the genealogies of abolitionism, by de-centering US-focused framing of it. In order to do that, I draw attention to the movement against psychiatric hospitals, called Psichiatria Democratica, led by  Basaglia in Italy, between the late 1960s and the mid 1980s.  The anti-asylums movement has been of inspiration to struggles against prisons across Europe and more broadly against the confinement continuum, and it has been key for developing abolitionism beyond the reform/revolution dichotomy.

Martina Tazzioli holds a PhD in Politics from Goldsmiths, University of London (2013), a MA and a BA in Philosophy from the University of Pisa. Before joining the University of Bologna, she was Reader in Politics & Technology at Goldsmiths. Her research is situated at the crossroad of Political Geography, critical Migration and Border Studies and Political Philosophy. She is working on three projects. One on memory of border controls and migrants’ struggles; a related project about counter-mapping and legal geographies of border violence on central Mediterranean route; and a research project about social reproduction activities in camps, with a focus on Greece. She is the author of "Border abolitionism: migration containment and the genealogies of struggles" (2023). The Making of Migration. The biopolitics of mobility at Europe’s borders (2019), Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprisings (2015) and Tunisia as a Revolutionised Space of Migration (2016).

Keynote Dr. Paul Richardson (University of Birmingham) (EN)
Vendredi, 14h00 | R. 3.05

The Myth of the Border and the struggle to reach beyond it

Paul Richardson (University of Birmingham)

Chair: Astrid M. Fellner (Univeristät des Saarlandes)

Whether it is Trump’s border wall, Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, or the Great Wall of China, such immense feats of engineering and effort tend to be held in the popular imagination as secure lines of defence between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Yet this is not how they have functioned and in the shadow of great walls diverse and vibrant border cultures can germinate. Borders attract as much as they repel, and they can just as readily become monuments to insecurity as security. Counter to the mythology that surrounds them, borders and their walls symbolise movement not stasis. Hadrian’s Wall was no impenetrable barrier – it was even abandoned and reoccupied shortly after it was built – while China has several times been ruled by dynasties from beyond its Great Wall. As for Trump’s wall, it has done little to stymie the flow of narcotics or migrants. This presentation engages with how popular/populist understandings of borders in the present are projected into the past, creating misreading of past walls, that can then be used to legitimate present structures. However, when a sense of responsibility for the lives of others beyond the wall is lost to the myths that surround them, any hope of achieving human security remains out of reach.

Paul Richardson is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Birmingham in the UK. He is an established scholar in the field of geography and Border Studies, and is the recent President of the Association for Borderland Studies. He has previously held academic positions at Hokkaido University in Japan and the University of Manchester. His work has been published in Annales of the Association of American Georgraphers, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Geography Compass, Europe-Asia Studies, Eurasian Geography and Economics, Journal of Borderland Studies, and Politics. His second book, Myths of Geography, will be published this October, with a German edition to be published in 2025 by Piper.

 

MABS Graduation Ceremony (DE, EN, FR)
Vendredi 16h00 | R. 0.07

Master in Border Studies - Graduation Ceremony

Chair: Ines Funk (Universität des Saarlandes)

Welcome
Florian Weber (Universität des Saarlandes)

Talk:
Jessica Nouguier (MABS)
L'Eurodistrict SaarMoselle face à la frontière : l'exemple de la coopération sanitaire transfrontalière (FR + Interpretation EN)

Graduation Ceremony: Award of Diplomas

Presentation of the Alumni Network

 

Workshop (1-C) "Dissonant Heritage and Diverging Cultural Memories: A Focus on Border Regions" (EN)
Jeudi, 10h30 - 12h00 | R. 3.03

Dissonant Heritage and Diverging Cultural Memories: A Focus on Border Regions (Workshop)

Jonas Nesselhauf and Joachim Rees (both Universität des Saarlandes)

In recent years, the concept of dissonant heritage has gathered momentum in various areas of research to address material legacies charged with conflicting memories and discordant layers of meaning. From single objects in museums and collections to the built environment and canonized lieux de mémoire, we may encounter dissonant heritage which is at odds with streamlined historical narratives and current ways of marketing and ›consuming‹ the past: How much critical ›dissonance‹ is actually institutionally admitted when it comes to celebrating cultural ›treasures‹ for tourism? To what extent is dissonant heritage exposed to (willful) neglect thus contributing to a fading out of unsolicited pasts? In what sense can museology, heritage-management and artistic interventions help to promote different ways of acknowledging and dealing with cultural heritage in all its resonance and dissonance?
Although cultural heritage can potentially become ›dissonant‹ in any geographical location, ›eventful‹ border areas (frontières évènementielles) seem particularly apt to study sites of conflicting heritage given the spatial and cultural condensation of different (if not divergent) memory cultures and ways of managing a shared history of conflict, alienation and reconciliation: How are historical events remembered on both sides of the border? How has this remembrance changed with shifts in the drawing of national borders over time? What is the relationship between the nation(s) and its border region(s), the (cultural, political etc.) center and periphery?
This open workshop will be based on selected theoretical texts around the topic of dissonant art and cultural heritage (provided online in advance), which will then be discussed together and supplemented by the participants’ own disciplinary approaches and regional case studies.

Organization: Jonas Nesselhauf and Joachim Rees are researching and teaching at Saarland University’s department of Art History and Cultural Studies. They co-organized the 2023 summer school »Difficult Pasts in a Cross-Border Perspective: Challenges and Responses « and are the editors of a forthcoming book on Dissonantes Kunst- und Kulturerbe / Dissonant heritage / Art et patrimoine culturel dissonants with articles by T4EU researchers from Koper, Saarbrücken, Sofia and Trieste.

Please contact the workshop organizers to get the readings: jonas.nesselhauf@uni-saarland.de; joachim.rees@uni-saarland.de

Workshop (2-C) "Border Hydropolitics" (EN)
Jeudi, 13h00 - 14h30 | R. 3.03

Border Hydropolitics (Workshop)

Dr. Ewa Macura-Nnamdi and Dr. Marcin Sarnek (both University of Silesia in Katowice)

This workshop will explore the relationship between borders and water in historical and contemporary contexts. To do so, we will analyse several examples of the geopolitical significance of water resources in regional border conflicts and co-operations. We will in particular look at three related aspects of water-borders: 1. the environmental impact of border policies on ecosystems; 2. water as border and resource; 3. historical and contemporary border disputes. The workshop will invite the participants to take part in a number of activities, aiming to develop a more nuanced understanding of the issues of border hydropolitics.
The workshop will address the following key concepts: hydropolitics, water as a strategic resource, sample historical narratives of water disputes.

Please sign up to this workshop via mail to borderstudies@uni-saarland.de

Students are particularly invited to attend this workshop!

 

Panel 1-A: WG Bordertextures (EN)
Jeudi, 10h30 - 12h00 | R. 3.05

WG Bordertextures: Approaching Borders as (Contested) Alliances through the Bordertextures Lens

Christian Wille (Université du Luxembourg; Chair)

The bordertextures approach was developed within the framework of the UniGR-Center for Border Studies and has been received by the international border scholar community for several years. It became apparent that the approach that grasps borders as (contested) alliances is applied in different ways, related to theoretical and conceptual questions that are posed and weighted differently depending on the disciplines. The panel aims to show how the bordertextures approach can be used as a research practice, methodology, and object of analysis by means of three papers focusing on films, literatures, and discourses. In the cultural border studies analyses, dynamics of border (de)stabilization, as well as power relations and their contestations (over time), will be shown. Building on the papers, theoretical-conceptual ambiguities, and blind spots of the bordertextures approach will be systematized and discussed.

Tobias Schank (Universität des Saarlandes)
Struggling “Home” – Bordertexturing the German-Polish borderlands

In this paper, I will explore two filmic examples dealing with the discourses of displacement and forced migration as they pertain to historical border struggles in the German-Polish borderlands. Combining elements of film phenomenology as proposed most prominently by Vivian Sobchack with the theoretical-methodological tool of bordertexturing, I will analyze and discuss Andreas Voigt’s GRENZLAND – EINE REISE (1992) and Christian Fuchs’s DER LANDRAT UND DIE LIEBEN NACHBARN – BEOBACHTUNGEN DER DEUTSCH-POLNISCHEN GRENZE AM ODERHAFF (1993), allowing the films and their protagonists to speak to and through one another. Though the two documentaries were arguably made without knowledge of the other, each of them incidentally interviews the same elderly German couple, Irma and Willy Neumann, two German expellees who used to live in Neuwarp, a small town at the Szczecin Lagoon, which subsequently became Nowe Warpno and part of Poland after the Potsdam Agreement in 1945. Now, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Irma and Willy have made it a habit to regularly visit Altwarp, a town opposite of Nowe Warpno, situated across the lagoon on German shores, where they pitch a tent, set camp, and look at their former home through binoculars. Putting both testimonies and their representations on film into a productive dialogue with one another, and articulating them with contextual information, I will illustrate my interpretation of bordertexturing as a research practice. Incidentally, I will develop an argument about how the two films weave a complex texture comprising different layers of time and space, at once linking and dissolving conflicting messages and meanings that these borderlands are suffused with, making the German-Polish borderlands re-experienceable as hybrid borderlands and a site of border struggle, in which the nation state paradigm palpably implodes as a coherent source for identity construction.

Tobias Schank (he/him) is a postdoctoral researcher in North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University. He has worked as a researcher in the joint project Linking Borderlands: Dynamics of Cross-Border Peripheries, funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research, and has co-edited the volume Linking Borderlands: Komplexität – Dynamik – Interdisziplinarität. He is a member of the UniGR-Center for Border Studies and part of the interregional Working Group Bordertextures. In his current research, Dr. Schank is working on seascape epistemologies, alternative forms of knowledge production, and the American Imaginary. His other research interests include Gender & Queer Studies, Film Studies, and Heavy Metal Studies.

Bärbel Schlimbach (Universität des Saarlandes)
Disentangling Discourses and Histories: Bordertextures in the American West

My paper utilizes the concept of bordertextures as a tool for a cultural studies analysis of representations of borders and border struggles in the American West as well as a re-evaluation of discourses about the American West and its history/histories. Bordertextures enable me to show how power relations are inscribed into texts and to disentangle underlying dynamics of power and resistance. The text for my analysis is HBO’s TV series Westworld, and my analysis will show that the American West presented in the series represents the West and its histories as rhizomatic structures. Bordertextures enable me to identify and investigate these rhizomatic entanglements. The series offers numerous border discourses which re-negotiate, for example, different narratives about the American West, thereby exposing ordering principles as well as struggles and violence connected to borders. Investigating HBO’s Westworld allows me to show the series’ potential to disrupt traditional representations as well as myths about the American West. I will focus on the intersection of discourses and artistic/aesthetic representations of the West as well as on different border crossings, like the contrast between “human” and “robot.” Possibilities to facilitate imaginary representations of the West enable new insights into the creation of (national) myths and hegemonic/mainstream narratives. My analysis will stress the fabricatedness of borders and bordertextures allow to see the fabric, the interwovenness and the different layers or threads and look at all elements as interconnected but blurred at the same time.

Bärbel Schlimbach, M.A., is a PhD candidate in North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University / Germany. Her PhD project utilizes theoretical approaches from Critical Regional Studies, Post-Western Studies, Gender Studies and Border Studies to analyze literatures and films from the Post-Western genre to investigate their innovative potential with respect to identity constructions, imaginary Wests as well as constructions of national narratives. She is a member of the working group Bordertextures and co-editor of (Pop-)Cultures on the Move: Transnational Identifications and Cultural Exchange between East and West (2018). Her research and teaching interests include 20th and 21st century American literatures on and from the American West, Western and Post-Western film and fiction, Cultural Border Studies, Gender Studies, as well as Gothic and Crime Fiction.

Andrea Wurm (Universität des Saarlandes)
From conflict to cooperation: Discourses through hundred years of history in the Greater Region

The Greater Region “champions the idea of transnational cooperation and a plurality of nations living together in harmony.” (https://www.granderegion.net/en, 24.06.24). This implies that the relations between Saarland and France are good, and within the Greater Region, cooperation works well and is institutionalized to a high degree. The trans-border region thus seems to be one of the most successful in EU and perhaps worldwide. However, looking back just a hundred years, during the time of the French protectorate 1918 to 1935, Saarlanders fought to upkeep their German identity as well as their linguistic and cultural heritage. They perceived themselves rather as a French colony, as occupied territory which was detached from their own nation. Saarland population did not seem to have the same rights as Europeans elsewhere and saw themselves forced into a French culture they did not want.
The paper will dress the picture of a century-long development from confrontative struggle about the tracing of the border and cultural belonging, passing through the beginnings of European unification after World War II to arrive at today’s integrated trans-border region within the EU, and Saarland acting as a bridge between France and Germany (cf. Landesregierung Saarland 2014:1). To do so, several institutional and individual discourses from different times are analysed. The discourses reflect dynamics of power, resistance, and negotiation, but also the will to act in a “spirit of cooperation” (Saarlor 1957, art. 2) and the analysis situates them in historical, political, economic and socio-cultural frameworks with their respective temporality. This allows for a greater evolution to be retraced over a century of history in highlighting representative discourse elements. Predictions for the future are not possible, though.

Bibliography

• Landesregierung des Saarlandes. 2014. Eckpunkte einer Frankreichstrategie für das Saarland. https://www.saarland.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/mfe/Gro%C3%9Fregion_und_Europa/Eckpunkte_Frankreichstrategie_D, 10.07.24
• Saarlor. 1957. Statut der Saar-Lothringischen Kohlenunion, deutsch-französische Gesellschaft auf Aktien / Union charbonnière sarro-lorraine, Société par Actions franco-allemande vom 20. Dezember 1957. Geändert und ergänzt durch Hauptversammlungsbeschluss vom 27. Oktober 1961 mit Genehmigung der deutschen und französischen Regierung. Exemplar in Documentation historique Saarlor, CAITM Saint-Avold, 1812CAITM52

Andrea Wurm is a faculty member at the Department of Language Science and Technology at Saarland University and a member of the University of the Greater Region-Center for Border Studies (UniGR-CBS). She graduated in 1998 as a translator (French and Spanish) and holds a PhD in Applied linguistics and translation earned with a book on the effects translators could have on target culture and language in Early Modern cookbook translations (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008). After finishing the doctoral dissertation, she began corpus-based studies of translation evaluation as well as the development of translation competence. Her current research interests additionally cover Cultural Border Studies with a particular focus on language and culture contacts in the industrial history of the Greater Region. The methodology used is a combination of historical-ethnographic and translation sociologic approaches with a situated, micro-historic view on cultural phenomena.

Panel 1-B: From "Biopolitics of Borders" to "Border Chronotopes" (EN)
Jeudi, 10h30 - 12h00 | R. 0.01 | hybrid

From "Biopolitics of Borders" to "Border Chronotopes": 10 Years of Partnership between Saarbrücken and Mykolaiv

Astrid M. Fellner (Universität des Saarlandes; Chair)
Yuliya Stodolinska (Universität des Saarlandes / Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University; Co-Chair)

Lien vers la réunion en ligne sur MS Teams :
https://shorturl.at/OBoQD
Meeting ID: 311 299 879 899
Passcode: HqgZki

Since 2014, the UniGR-Center for Border Studies, as the first interdisciplinary UniGR Center of Expertise has been continuously shaping and strengthening cross-border alliances not only in the Greater Region but also far beyond. The close collaboration of the UniGR-CBS and the Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University (UdS) in Saarbrücken, Germany with the Chair of English Philology at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University (PMBSNU) in Mykolaiv, Ukraine is one of the successful examples. Within the Jubilee conference on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the UniGR-Center for Border Studies, this panel intends to present the most prominent international and interdisciplinary research and teaching projects that step-by-step helped build strong cross-border alliances between the scholars and students of the two universities. How have the project members contributed to introducing Ukrainian academia to the interdisciplinary field of Border Studies and integrating the respective courses into the curriculum? Was it possible through collaborative efforts to transcend national boundaries during the pandemic? What are the keys to bridging borders during the full-scale invasion of Ukrainian territories? This panel aims to offer a flashback on our cross-border cooperation which encompasses ten years of crossing and bridging borders between Mykolaiv, Saarbrücken, and beyond, to summarize the results of the international multidisciplinary projects, and to outline the prospects for future cooperation.

Yuliya Stodolinska (Universität des Saarlandes / Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University)
Building Strong Cross-border Alliances by Crossing and Bridging Borders: The Case of UdS and PMBSNU

In 2014, close cooperation between the Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies, the UniGR Center for Border Studies at Saarland University and the Department of English Philology at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University began and since then has grown and expanded despite numerous challenges and boundaries. During these 10 years faculty and students from both universities engaged in teaching (workshops, seminars, guest lectures) and research activities (conference panels, presentations at international conferences) that were part of joint international projects. In this paper, I offer a flashback on our cross-border cooperation which encompasses ten years of crossing and bridging borders between Mykolaiv and Saarbrücken, aimed at building strong cross-border alliances. I also provide an overview of numerous cross-border experiences that led to a more precise understanding of the nuances of different types of borders, border crossings, the challenges of border violations, shifting borders, (re/de)bordering processes, the importance of preserving national identity.

Yuliya Stodolinska is a visiting postdoctoral scholar at the Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University, member of the UniGR-Center for Border Studies, and an associate professor of the English Philology and Translation Department at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University in Ukraine. She holds a PhD in Philology (Germanic Languages). Her research focuses on the multimodal representations of borders and border crossings in American and European digital media, literary, and marketing discourses. Her scientific interests include Border Studies, Discourse Studies, Intercultural Business Communication, Cultural Studies. She is an active participant of the projects “​​Border Chronotopes in the Digital Age: Memories in Times of Wars” within the framework of the DAAD East Partnership Program, “AI Across Borders” within the “Digital Teaching Plug-in” project at Saarland University, “Cross-linguistic InformationTheoretic Modelling of Communicative Efficiency” at the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1102, and other international projects.

Oksana Starshova (Pembroke College, University of Cambridge / Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University) - online
How to Introduce a “Border Course” to the Ukrainian Curriculum: Some Reflections, Results, and Future Perspectives

After several years of cooperation and joint discussions of the border issues between our two universities (Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University and the Chair of English Philology at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University) and outside, in spring 2021, we arrived at the idea to add a new course Introduction to Border Studies from a Cultural Studies Perspective to the curriculum of the English Philology programme in Mykolaiv. It received a spirited support on both sides, although it took a while to obtain an official approval. Fortunately, at that time in Mykolaiv we had enough freedom to make changes in the curriculum, which is otherwise quite rigid in structure and submits to innovations rather slowly. In these three years of setting up, teaching, and rearranging the syllabus, the course proved to be a success for several reasons: as a project of cooperative teaching that provides a wide range of interdisciplinarity; as a course that awakens the awareness of borders in the time of geopolitical and cultural shifts; as a Cultural Studies course in our philologically focused programme, etc. In my presentation, I am going to talk about this experience of collaboration, the possible pitfalls and its further perspectives.

Oksana Starshova is an Associate Professor at English Philology Department of Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University in Mykolaiv, Ukraine. She holds a PhD in American Literature from the Shevchenko Institute of Literature, the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. In 2008 she defended her dissertation on the issues of authorship in American postmodernism titled Problem of the Author in John Barth’s Works. Her research interests include: postmodernism, geocriticism, urban space and literature, migration literature. She is currently a Researchers At-Risk Fellow at Pembroke College, University of Cambridge, doing her research on real and imagined spaces in migration narratives of New York.

Halyna Zaporozhets (Universität des Saarlandes / Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University)
Studybridge Ukraine-Saar to Ensure Academic Success in Times of Crises

Education has experienced significant changes and new formats of digital classes have been adopted during pandemic times at universities worldwide. The full-scale attack of Russia on Ukraine in 2022 has created a new geopolitical situation in Europe eliminating borders in all spheres of life: political, social, and educational. The war threatens the existence of some Ukrainian universities. Thousands of students have had their classes disrupted, teachers were forced to relocate within Ukraine or abroad. The aim of the project Studybridge Ukraine-Saar is to strengthen cross-border cooperation, to show how digital spaces bridge borders between academic traditions, and different disciplines. In my presentation, I will speak about the new project of cooperation between long-time partners – the Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University and the Department of English Philology at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University. The project focuses on digitalization of the bachelor’s and master’s degree programs in German, English, and Spanish languages that are among the most important languages of communication both within Europe and globally. This project, aimed at digitalizing the most important foreign language degree programs, is an example of cross-border cooperation in curriculum development involving the use of best practices of technology-enhanced language learning. Being abroad in Europe and the USA Ukrainian teachers explore innovations and integrate new technology into language learning experiences, helping Ukrainian students to study no matter what their location is. The challenges and perspectives of this cross-border cooperation are outlined in the proposed paper.

Halyna Zaporozhets holds a PhD in Pedagogy. She is an Associate Professor of the Department of English Philology and Translation at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University in Mykolaiv, Ukraine. Currently, as a Visiting Scholar at the Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University she is working on the DAAD project “Study Bridge Ukraine-Saar 2022-2024.” Her research interests include American Studies, Women Studies, British Studies, Academic Writing, Border Studies.

Liudmyla Sherstiuk (Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University)
DEFEP Project as a New Way of Partnership Collaboration

The DEFEP Project, a collaboration between Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University and Saarland University, is focused on establishing a sustainable and effective distance education system in the Eastern Partnership countries. By leveraging the experiences and best practices of European universities, the project aims to restructure and improve the distance education systems in Ukrainian and Moldovan higher education institutions. This cooperation is vital in addressing the challenges posed by technological changes and evolving labor market demands. The project emphasizes creating institutional frameworks, developing distance learning methods, and training academic and administrative staff to strengthen distance education as an independent form of learning. It seeks to provide barrier-free access to education and ensure a safe learning environment in today's complex realities. The expertise shared between Petro Mohyla and Saarland University will help design a distance education system that supports students in acquiring professional competencies and soft skills, preparing them for future workforce demands. Additionally, the DEFEP Project contributes to developing distance education by testing it in experimental specialties within HEIs, using an electronic platform and didactic materials. This cooperation between Eastern Partnership countries and EU HEIs will strengthen institutional and logistical support for distance education, ultimately enhancing the socio-economic potential of the region. By focusing on inclusive and accessible education, the project lays the foundation for a future-proof education system that addresses the needs of both students and the labor market.

Liudmyla Sherstiuk is the Dean of the Philology Faculty at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University in Mykolaiv, Ukraine. With over two decades of experience in higher education, she has held key leadership roles, including Vice-Dean of the Philology Faculty and the Head of the English Philology and Translation Department. Liudmyla Sherstiuk holds a PhD in Pedagogy, with her research focusing on differentiated foreign language teaching for non-philology students. She is actively involved in curriculum development, training programs, and research, having authored over 60 academic publications. She has participated in several international programs, including an internship for educators in Warsaw, Poland, an exchange at the University of Northern Iowa, USA, and has led various educational initiatives aimed at improving teaching methods. A strong advocate for modern pedagogy and distance learning, Sherstiuk also supervises student research and contributes to regional educational projects.

Panel 1-D: Struggles and Alliances across India's Borders (EN)
Jeudi, 10h30 - 12h00 | R. 3.04

Struggles and Alliances across India's Borders

Jennifer Turner (Universität Trier; Chair)

Neha Meena (University of Delhi)
Border Struggles and Practices of Citizenship: Pakistani Hindu Immigrants in Western Rajasthan

This paper deconstructs the nature of the western India-Pakistan border, which is predominantly considered closed and peaceful, by examining it through the lens of continued cross-border migration of Hindus from Pakistan to Rajasthan. The idea is to interrogate discursive interplays of— perilous journeys of cross-border migration, socio-economic disparities, and practices of citizenship—for Pakistani Hindu immigrants. Most of these Hindu immigrants belong to the marginalised caste and class categories which further add to their struggles of seeking settlement and claims for citizenship after the migration. Their everyday life includes the negotiations of migration, struggles of survival, and the continuous efforts to make life meaningful through strategies and alliances constituted during the migration and interactions with the state bureaucracy. Building on border studies scholarship in the context of migration, I add to the literature (Ibrahim 2020; Jayal 2013; Raheja 2018) on Pakistani Hindus that have given limited attention to the interplays of border struggles and socio-economic inequalities of immigrants. Based on a detailed ethnography in western Rajasthan, the paper explores how the border struggles and immigration practices are articulated, imagined, and deconstructed by Pakistani Hindus who continue crossing the border irrespective of their marginalized socio-economic conditions and the exclusionary bureaucratic practices for Indian citizenship.

Neha Meena is an Assistant Professor (Contractual) at the Department of Sociology, Miranda House College, University of Delhi, India. She has recently completed Ph.D. degree at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research interests focus on the themes of citizenship, bureaucracy, documentary practices, anthropology of borders, pastoralism, mobility and identity politics. She has published research articles in the International Institute for Asian Studies Newsletter (2019) and the South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies (2022). She has also presented her research in various national and international conferences and workshops, such as organised at Aalborg University, University of Toronto, Cambridge University, John Hopkins University, SOAS University of London, University of Lethbridge, and IIT Delhi.

Amit Gautam (Tribhuvan University, Nepal)
Border as a Space of Negotiation: Quest for Livelihood Among the Residents of Susta, Nepal

Studies on international borders primarily emphasise politico-legal aspects, centering the academic debates on and surrounding issues such as sovereignty, territorial integrity, and geopolitical interests, while also emphasising laws and treaties as the key to governing border relations between countries. Consequently, much scholarship on border studies centres on how borders affect bilateral relations between countries, treating these interactions in a linear fashion. Nonetheless, such academic endeavours overlook the daily lives and experiences of border residents, creating a gap in understanding how these interactions provide meaning to the border. This research addresses the gap by examining the Nepal-India border in Susta Rural Municipality, where interviews with twenty-four local residents were conducted to gain insights into their experiences and perceptions regarding their interaction with the ‘everyday border’. In that sense, this study takes an unconventional approach by examining the border as a space of negotiation for the local residents. The findings reveal that while states wield considerable authority, this influence is less stringent in border regions where local dynamics are driven by the needs of people and the long-standing relationships among individuals, families, and businesses across the border. Nonetheless, the study does not invalidate the state’s presence along the India-Nepal border in Susta but asserts that residents of Susta have found ways to circumvent state controls in pursuit of their livelihoods. For the locals of Susta, securing a livelihood takes precedence over adherence to the state’s border regulations. This study provides an alternative perspective on international borders by examining the Nepal-India border as a dynamic space shaped by local negotiations and livelihood imperatives rather than (solely) by state-defined apparatuses. The study reveals how border residents prioritise livelihood security over formal state regulations, highlighting the resilience and agency of communities in navigating the complex socio-economic realities of the border area.

Amit Gautam is a social science researcher with nearly five years of experience working on a range of themes, including subnational governance, democracy and participation, and conflict. He holds a master’s degree in international relations and diplomacy from Tribhuvan University, Nepal and has recently developed an interest in space and placemaking, aiming to understand how people’s everyday practices give meaning to different spaces. Currently, Amit is involved in three research projects related to this theme: studying how heritage spaces contribute to resilience building, exploring how temples and churches in Nepal are used for non-religious community activities and how these activities give meaning to religious spaces, and examining the India-Nepal border as a space of negotiation vis-à-vis local Nepali residents quest to secure their livelihoods.

Panel 2-A: WG Bordertextures: Literaturwissenschaft und Bordertexturen (DE, FR)
Jeudi, 13h00 - 14h30 | R. 3.05

WG Bordertextures: Methodische Allianzen: Literaturwissenschaft und Bordertexturen

Daniel Kazmaier (Université de Lorraine; Chair)

Der Bordertexturen-Begriff wurzelt im Kontext der Grenz(raum)studien und zielt darauf ab, den Grenzbegriff kulturwissenschaftlich zu erweitern. Gegen eine einfache Vorstellung der Grenze als Linie, die zwei politische Einheiten teilt, soll eine Mehrdimensionalität ins Spiel gebracht werden. Der Begriff der Textur bezieht geopolitische Einheiten, Landschaften und andere Faktoren mit ein.
Nichtsdestotrotz bleiben diese Erweiterungen auf die grundsätzliche und vorgängig räumliche Erscheinungsform und Erfahrungsweise bezogen. Ein literaturwissenschaftlich erweiterter Bordertexturen-Begriff rückt demgegenüber andere Grenzformen und Grenzziehungsprozesse gleichberechtigt in den Fokus. Nicht nur die räumliche Anschauungsform soll den Blick auf Grenzen leiten, sondern auch andere Ordnungen als dergestalt texturierte Grenzen in den Blick kommen. Bordertexturen sind zudem als (Resultat von) Dynamiken – grundsätzlich also als ein Agieren zu sehen. Daraus folgt, dass texturierte Grenzen anhand verschiedener, ggfs. gleichzeitig zu bemühender Kategorien zu untersuchen sind.
Deshalb schlagen wir als Erweiterung ein Bündel an Kategorien vor, das uns geeignet scheint, den Begriff der Bordertextur umfassender in die literaturwissenschaftliche Diskussion einzubringen: Raum, Zeit, Sprache, Geschlecht, Klasse, Ethnie/race, Religion/Glaubenssysteme, Politik/Nation, Transformationen und Transfers (Inter- und Transmedialität, Inter- und Transkulturalität, Intertextualität usw.)
Das Panel zielt darauf, in einem gemeinsamen Gespräch die Anwendbarkeit eines solcherart theoretisch bzw. methodologisch erweiterten Begriffs der Bordertexturen zu überprüfen und in drei Impulsvorträgen zu vertiefen.

Diskutant:innen

• Chamayou-Kuhn, Cécile (Université de Lorraine)
• Kazmaier, Daniel (Université de Lorraine)
• Demeulenaere, Alex (Université de Lorraine)
• Wetenkamp, Lena (Universität Trier)

Biographical notes

• Dr. Cécile Chamayou-Kuhn, Maîtresse de conférences, Forschungsschwerpunkte: Germanistik : Gegenwartsliteratur- und theater, Gender Studies, Border Studies.
• Prof.-Jun., Dr. Daniel Kazmaier, Professeur junior, Forschungsschwerpunkte: Deutsch-französische Komparatistik, Schreibprozesse, Border Studies
• Jun.-Prof., Dr. Lena Wetenkamp, Juniorprofessorin, Forschungsschwerpunkte: interkulturelle deutschsprachige Gegenwartsliteratur, Gender Studies, Border Studies
• Prof. Dr. Alex Demeulenaere, Professeur, Forschungsschwerpunkte: Francophonie, Gegenwartsliteratur, Border Studies

Panel 2-B: WG Spatial Planning: Cross-Border Spatial Planning (EN)
Jeudi, 13h00 - 14h30 pm | R. 0.01 | hybrid

WG Spatial Planning: Cross-Border Spatial Planning

Tom Becker (Université du Luxembourg; Chair)

Lien vers la réunion en ligne sur MS Teams :
https://shorturl.at/O6y71
Meeting ID: 368 496 859 599
Passcode: cHTjtE

Tom Becker (Université du Luxembourg)
Promising Border Alliances in the Field of Cross-Border Spatial Planning? The Potential of Science-Policy Interfaces (SPIs)

Zero carbon transition, no net land-take or climate change adaptation and mitigation are among the most important environmental and societal challenges Europe is currently facing. From the perspective of spatial planning, and in particular cross-border spatial planning, these challenges are highly complex in nature and give, in border areas, often rise to complicated border struggles. Tackling these challenges is not an easy undertaking, as it requires a more critical
approach than conventional, rational and top-down spatial planning policy has so far allowed: firstly, the mechanisms of these challenges are very difficult to understand, as they require huge amounts of data, information and knowledge gathered over sometimes very long periods of time. Secondly, both the interrelationships between the individual elements and their effects are very difficult to explain, partly due to the underlying and sometimes unpredictable
development dynamics. Thirdly, the solutions required are therefore at least as complex as the challenges themselves, as they must build on (i) a very broad knowledge base and (ii) existing trajectories and socio-economic and political contexts. In addition, (iii) new (cross-border) alliances in the sense of new actor constellations are needed. Against this background, the two comparatively young science policy interface and policy mobilities literatures in particular provide essential theoretical and practical insights with regard to evidence-based policy-making and its mode of expression. This article investigates whether and how cross-border science-policy interfaces (SPIs) can help create and positively shape promising border alliances. In relation to cross-border spatial planning, the article discusses aspects such as the construction of planning cultures and the accidental construction of proposed solutions, the role of storytelling in knowledge transfer, as well as evolving and contrasting underlying epistemologies and ontologies.
The INTERREG VI-A project called "Laboratory of Territorial Intelligence" (LATI), which was developed by the six universities of the Greater Region and the University of the Greater Region and submitted in July of this year, is also orientated towards these findings in order to implement the regional development concept of the Greater Region. LATI primarily provides for integrated, context-specific, collaborative and participatory planning and learning approaches for a wide range of actors, especially at the sub-national planning levels, during the problem and solution formulation phase as well as during the implementation phase of solutions.

Valentino Sorani (Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos), Tom Becker & Catherine Jones (Université du Luxembourg) - online
Global Land Use Planning: Optimizing Sustainable Development Goals Implementation in Cross-Border Settings

Over the past decades, many a local, regional or national land-use plan has been developed with the ambition to counteract climate change and to support the carbon decent. However, no single global land-use plan to address these issues and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) globally has yet been launched. In addition, fragmented international funding and country-specific resource allocation hinder projects f.ex. related to food security, biodiversity, ecosystem conservation, and energy transition. The present paper seeks (i) to explain why global land-use approaches are lacking and where current local/regional/national approaches fall short. It proposes (iii) a participatory global cross-border approach to resilient and collaborative land-use planning. The proposed Global Land Use Planning (GLUP) approach aims on the one hand to identify priority sites for Sustainable Development Goals Fund investments, and on the other to create equitable, healthy, efficient, and resilient societies. Our approach consists of three steps: First, from the world-wide 276 cross-border river basins and 300 aquifer systems, a limited number of transboundary water basins (TWBs) will be selected using a set of carefully determined criteria. Each pilot TWB will implement localised land-use planning processes driven by community-defined land-use indicators as well as involving participatory data collection and analysis. The indicators will inform spatial planning scenarios, fostering a bottom-up spatial decision process to create a shared future vision. The second step expands GLUP to other strategic water areas and fragile ecosystems, considering agricultural heritage systems, human settlements, and eco-industrial parks. Specific funding schemes and transboundary planning support systems using artificial intelligence and spatial analysis techniques are necessary to execute the strategies defined in the transboundary land-use plans. Finally, a system for monitoring and spreading GLUP globally will be established, using indicators like land use change, water management or climate resilience.

Q&A

Panel 2-D: The Making and (Decolonial) Un-Making of Borders (EN)
Jeudi, 13h00 - 14h30 | R. 3.04 | hybrid

The Making and (Decolonial) Un-Making of Borders

Nadja Freier (Universität des Saarlandes; Chair)

Lien vers la réunion en ligne sur MS Teams :
https://lmy.de/TwEyJ
Meeting ID: 328 890 164 562
Passcode: D8yiCT

Johni R.V. Korwa (University of Southampton)
Historical Development of Border Regions: Re-conceptualising the Border-Making Between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea

Indonesia and Papua New Guinea (PNG) are two countries located at the intersection of Asia and the Pacific. Just like in most other post-colonial states, they embrace the concept of uti possidetis juris, preserving the boundaries drawn by European colonial powers—the Dutch, British, and Germans—during the 19th century. Even though the Indonesia-PNG border has evolved over time, from precolonial to independent periods, it has only been securitised at the state level, resulting in it being quite exclusive. The two nations are also grappling with issues of security, economics, and social coexistence along the border, not to mention that geometric lines on the map cut through cultural groups, languages, and traditional lands, making cross-border interactions somewhat challenging. As a next step, it would be beneficial to democratise the border by involving both state and non-state actors (e.g., churches, border communities, and non-governmental organisations) in order to make it more inclusive and participatory. This article aims to address this topic by attempting to answer the epistemological question: How is the Indonesia-PNG border reconceptualised based on the interests of all border actors? The preliminary findings, which are based on the author’s fieldwork interviews and observations, confirm the following: 1) Border-making is a relational product. It means that both Indonesia and PNG must contribute to border work—an effort by only one country would be considered non-productive; 2) Infrastructure is key to shaping border-making, that is, cross-border posts, roads, and border markets. These infrastructures should be present on both sides of the border to facilitate all actors with interests in border relations and for effective border work; 3) Connectivity, particularly through roads and air, is crucial to support the border-making process between Indonesia and PNG; 4) Travel documents and prerequisites should be simplified for non-state actors cooperating with entities across the border.

Johni Robert Verianto Korwa is currently a PhD student at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton, the United Kingdom, writing a dissertation on the border between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Prior to his PhD studies, he was a lecturer in International Relations at Cenderawasih University in Indonesia. He obtained his master’s degree from the Flinders University of South Australia. Over the last few years, he has written several publications, including: 1) Examining Border-Crossers at the Indonesia–PNG Border Post in Skouw, Jayapura, Papua; 2) Peri-urbanisation in Papua: a participatory and geospatial impact assessment of peri-urban development and transmigration in Port Numbay; 3) State Borders as Center of Economic Growth: Case Study of the East Arso District in the Indonesia-Papua New Guinea Border; 4) Constructivist Analysis of the Establishment of the AUKUS Security Pact and its Implications for Regional Stability in the Indo-Pacific; 5) Indonesia’s First Spaceport Plan in Biak Island: A View from International Relations. ORCID ID: 0000-0001-9181-5341

Eamonn O'Ciardha (Ulster University)
The Irish Border: Personal Reminiscences

Eamonn has grown up on an Irish Border whose existence has had a major impact on the political, socio-economic, and cultural life of the entire region. This border has evolved from an end-of-empire, low-itensity military theatre or sectarian flash-point (depending on one's perspective) and disappeared and re-appeared and disappeared in the contexts of the Belfast Agreement, Brexit, and the ongoing immigration crisis.

Eamonn's research interests are primarily centred on early modern and modern Irish history, the Irish, principally Gaelic, political, diplomatic, religious and intellectual and military Diaspora in early Modern Europe, the Irish outlaw, Irish popular politics, culture, language, literature and book history. Over the last ten years, he has taught Irish History, Language and Literature in Ireland, Britain, the United States and Canada.

Giulia Degano (Universitat de Barcelona) - online
Cross-border Alliances in Recent Cases of Border Curatorship

The paper focuses on the transnational and cross-cultural alliances emerging from recent curatorial initiatives taking place at geopolitical borders.
The anaysis of these practices of interconnection, resilience, de-centralization, and de-colonization fits methodologically in the interpretive line of the border concept proposed by Rodríguez (1996), Iveković (2010), and Mezzadra &Neilson (2013), seeking to give it novel application from an historical-artistic angle. The point to highlight, on this occasion, is a vision of the border as an opportunity for alliances that are shaping a global network of exchange and solidarity through curatorial practice that tends to subvert the hegemonic criteria of representation and identity. In particular, the paper will focus on two curatorial projects: The Real DMZ Project (2012-present) and Juntos Aparte (2017-present).

Giulia Degano is Ph.D. in Modern and Contemporary Art History from the Universitat de Barcelona, where she is a member, as a doctoral student, of the international research group Art, Globalization, and Interculturality (https://artglobalizationinterculturality.com/the-project/). Her doctoral dissertation focused on the disruptive work of artists and curators working on the concept and space of the border. Her research interests include arts and curation in the global turn, monuments and counter-monuments, and artivism in public spaces. She currently holds the position of associate lecturer of Contemporary Art History at the Accademia di Belle Arti G.B. Tiepolo in Udine, Italy.

Panel 3-A: Border Struggles and Border Alliances in Art (DE, EN)
Jeudi, 15h00 - 16h30 | R. 3.05

Border Struggles and Border Alliances in Art

Tobias Schank (Universität des Saarlandes; Chair)

Susanne Müller (Université de Lorraine)
Eine Linie, die keine ist: Die Maginot-Linie im Spiegel der fotographischen Arbeit La Ligne von Alexandre Guirkinger

Ausgehend von Alexandre Guirkingers La Ligne, eine zeitgenössische Fotoinstallation von 2016, befragt mein Beitrag den spezifisch künstlerischen Blick auf die Grenze. Ich gehe hierbei zunächst der generellen Frage nach, inwieweit ein Kunstwerk - in seiner konzeptuellen, materiellen und szenischen Dimension - es erlaubt, die Komplexität von Grenzen sichtbar zu machen. Die Maginot-Linie - eine in den 1920/30er-Jahren errichtetes Verteidigungssystem entlang der französischen Ost-Grenzen - erweist sich gerade im Rahmen der Arbeitsgruppe Bordertextures als passendes Beispiel, da es sich um eine mehrdimensionale Grenze (vielmehr: Grenzruine, Phantomgrenze) handelt, deren materielle Realität im Widerspruch zur Idee einer gradlinigen Grenz steht. Die Fotographien von Guirkinger, die den Spuren der Maginotlinie in verschiedenen Landschaften Ost-Frankreichs nachspüren, machen sichtbar, was der Name "Linie" kaschiert: dass es sich um eine lückenhafte, ausfransende, in die Breite und Tiefe gebaute Anlage handelt, deren lineare Vorstellung ein Konstrukt unserer Imagination ist.

Susanne Müller est maîtresse de conférences à l’Université de Lorraine (Metz). Docteure en Arts (Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne), elle est également diplômée en psychologie avec une spécialisation en psychologie de l’art (Université de Cologne). En 2023, elle a été enseignante-chercheuse invitée (DAAD-Gastdozentin Frankreich) en Histoire de l’art à l’Université de la Sarre (Sarrebruck). Membre du Centre de recherche sur les médiations (CREM), ses recherches portent sur le rapport entre l’art contemporain et l’histoire, notamment dans un contexte d’après-guerre. L’espace transfrontalier avec ses paysages hybrides y tient une place importante. Dans un récent projet de recherche intitulé « Paysage(s) de l’étrange » (MSH Lorraine), elle a interrogé l’apport de l’art contemporain à la commémoration difficile d’un patrimoine hybride comme celui du Grand Est français. Elle est l’auteure de « L’inquiétante étrangeté à l’oeuvre : l’Unheimlich et l’art contemporain » (2016, Publications de la Sorbonne) et directrice de publications de plusieurs numéros de revue et d’ouvrages collectifs.

Hanna Büdenbender (Universität des Saarlandes)
The U.S.-Mexico Borderlands: Photography and Migration since the 1890s   

The U.S.-Mexico border is both a geopolitical boundary and a social construction. As azone of national fortification and a permeable space of migration, mobility and movement of people, objects and practices, the borderlands can be defined as a hybrid ”in-between” space and a transcultural ”contact zone” of encounter and powerful negotiation including conditions of coercion, inequality and conflict. Since the installation of the border after the Mexican-American War and its photographic documentation in the Boundary Commission albums in the 1890s, the medium of photography has been closely linked to the construction and representation of the borderlands. This paper examines the intersections between migration, the installation and ongoing fortification of the U.S.-Mexico border, and the role of photography in the process. The focus is on three projects of contemporary photography that question the narratives of the ”secure” border and the ”myths of total vision” of the panoptic, surveilling gaze from above and open up new perspectives: In ”Best of Luck with the Wall” (2016), Josh Begley and Laura Poitras have compiled over 200,000 google maps satellite images into a short stop-motion film that transforms border surveillance technologies. Recognizing the enormous dimensions of the entire course of the border changes the viewer’s geographical perception. The photo series ”Frontera” (2014/15) by Pablo Lopez Luz, also taken from the air, shows a seemingly uniform landscape on both sides of the border and the visual discourse of a contiguous cross-border region as a contact zone. The participatory project ”Fotohistorias” (2014-15) makes the everyday experiences of migrants visible. By reversing the perspective from above to the ground, the migrants’ photographs show their views of life in the border region. Photography is thus used across borders as a mobile, transportable and transnational medium of migration.

Hanna Büdenbender is a research assistant at the Institute of Art History, Department of Art and Cultural Studies at Saarland University, Saarbrücken. She studied Art History, English Linguistics and Media Studies at Trier University and the University of Reading, UK, and graduated with a thesis on photography and the tourist gaze. In 2018, she completed her PhD on "Wow, that's so postcard!" De-/constructions of the Tropical in Contemporary Photography. Her research focuses on the interconnections of art, tourism, photography and popular culture, postcolonial theory, flight, migration and border regimes, transcultural artistic exchange processes and global art history. She is currently working on photography, transculturality and migration in the US-Mexican borderlands.

Joachim Harst (Universität des Saarlandes)
Künstlerische Counter-Surveillance im Mittelmeerraum

Die restriktive Grenzpolitik der Europäischen Union hat das Mittelmeer in den letzten Jahrzehnten von einem vermittelndem Element zu einer verräumlichten Grenze gemacht. So wird die See von der EU und ihrer Grenzschutzagentur Frontex als eine Barriere instrumentalisiert, die weit vor jeder politischen Grenze Migrationsbewegungen eindämmen soll. Aus diesem Grund ist das Mittelmeer zu einem streng überwachten Gebiet geworden, in dem digitale Sensoren verschiedenster Art meteorologische Bedingungen, Wellengang und Schiffverkehr verzeichnen (Heller und Pezzani 2017, 96). Die von Satelliten, Dronen, Radaren und Bojen erhobenen Überwachungsdaten werden auch dazu verarbeitet, Migrationsbewegungen frühzeitig zu erkennen. Doch anstatt in Seenot geratenen Migrant:innen Hilfestellung zu leisten, steht Frontex als mehr einigen Jahren in der Kritik, an illegalen Pushbacks beteiligt zu sein (Christides u.a. 2020) und Standortdaten von Migrant:innen nicht an zivile Seenotrettungsorganisationen, sondern an die libyische und  türkische Küstenwache weitergegeben zu haben - und damit die Migrant:innen Gefangenschaft und Folter ausgeliefert zu haben (Heller und Pezzani). Diese Vorwürfe werden von Journalist:innen, Aktivist:innen und NGOs erhoben, die in internationaler Zusammenarbeit dieselben Überwachungsdaten mit dem Ziel weiterverarbeiten, das europäische Grenzregime und seine Konsequenzen einer breiten Öffentlichkeit bekannt zu machen. So wird aus Überwachung "counter-surveillance" (Wlash 2018; Dubberley, Koenig, und Murray 2020). Im Geiste grenzüberschreitender "Open Source Intelligence" arbeiten Gruppierungen wie bellingcat, Forensic Oceanograhy und Border Forensics hauptsächlich mit offenen Daten, entwerfen neue Formen der vernetzten Berichterstattung und gestalten multimediale Präsentationsformate, die sowohl in parlamentarischen Gremien als auch in Museen vorgestellt werden. Forensic Oceanography etwa ist 2012 mit dem Webvideo The Left to Die Boat hervorgetreten, in dem Überwachungsdaten dazu genutzt wurden, die Route eines manövrierunfähigen Migrant:innenbootes vor der Küste Nordafrikas zu rekonstruieren (Forensic Oceanography 2012). Damit konnte nachgewiesen werden, dass zahlreiche zivile und militärische Schiffe die Route der Migrant:innen kreuzten, aber den Verdurstenden keine Hilfestellung leisteten. Am Beispiel von The Left to Die Boat und weiteren Open Source-Recherchen lässt sich jedoch nicht nur das europäische Grenzregime erörtern. Vielmehr zielt der vorgeschlagene Beitrag auf epistemologische, ästhetische und rechtliche Aspekte der "counter surveillance". Das Prinzip "Open Source" ist dabei nicht nur auf das Material der Recherche - offene Daten - zu beziehen, sondern ist ebenso als ein Modus der vernetzten Zusammenarbeit und steten Weiterentwicklung zu verstehen, der ein Gegenmodell zu disziplinär und regional eingehegten Wissensgemeinschaften darstellt (Lewis und Usher 2013; Ahmad 2019).

Joachim Harst vertritt seit Beginn des Sommersemesters 2024 den Lehrstuhl fpr Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft an der Universität des Saarlandes. Zuvor war er Juniorprofessor für Komparatistik an der Universität zu Köln (2018-2024). Zu seinen aktuellen Forschungsschwerpunkten zählen künstlerische Open Source-Investigationen (vgl. Harst 2024a; Harst 2024b; Harst 2023) sowie allgemeiner Schnittstellen zwischen Literatur und Recht (vgl. Harst 2021; Albers, Harst und Kaesling 2021).

Panel 3-B: Border Regions as Spaces of Possibilities (EN)
Jeudi, 15h00 - 16h30 | R. 0.01

Border Regions as Spaces of Possibilities: Future Questions for the SaarLorLux Region

Julia Dittel (Universität des Saarlandes, Chair)

Border regions are a central feature of Europe – from a spatial, economic and social point of view. In these ‘living labs of European integration’, “new ideas and solutions for European integration are often tested for the first time” (European Commission 2021). The fact that border regions such as the Saar-LorLux region between Germany, France, and Luxembourg have the potential for innovation and crea-tivity became clear not least during the Covid-19 pandemic, when disruptions to business as usual re-quired unconventional, rapid action. Cross-border alliances were crucial for coordination and coopera-tion across borders and levels. However, as if under a magnifying glass, this period also brought to light a number of border stuggles – and with them not only new problems, but also challenges inherent in the cross-border context. With some distance from the pandemic, the question now arises as to the future development of the SaarLorLux border region. To what extent can common answers to future questions in Europe be found here? What border struggles are current initiatives facing? What opportunities exist at the same time and what importance is attached to the different types of cross-border alliances? These considerations need to be embedded in a European context, given the (hoped for) laboratory character of border re-gions: How can border regions contribute to the European agenda? The idea of border regions as spac-es of possibilities alludes to the transitional area between desires and ambitious goals on the one hand and challenges and conflicts on the other. Against this background, the interdisciplinary panel unifies papers on various future topics of European development within this space of possibilities –cross-border solidarity, energy transition, and ‘borderless’ crime.

Julia Dittel studied historical and applied cultural studies at Saarland University. Since 2021 she has worked as a research assistant in the research group ‘European Studies with a focus on Western Europe and Border Regions’ in the Department of Social-Scientific European Studies at Saarland University. She is a member in the UniGR-Center for Border Studies. Her research interests lie in the field of cross-border cooperation, resilience, landscape research, and perspectives of local sustainable development.

Isabelle Pigeron-Piroth (Université du Luxembourg), Birte Nienaber (Université du Luxembourg), Ines Funk (Universität des Saarlandes)
Cross-border solidarity in the Greater Region SaarLorLux. The example of the crossborder labour market

Due to the pandemic-related border closures within the European Union (EU) in spring 2020, freedom of movement has been temporarily restricted in some parts of the Schengen area. The cross-border labour market in the Greater Region was temporarily strongly affected by these re-bordering measures that meant increased effort for cross-border commuters. Hospitals and other employers feared that their employees would not be able to come to work. In this situation, there were calls for (more) cross-border solidarity from different actors. The (future) shortage of labour that may lead to a cross-border competition for labour also raises the question whether national interests continue to play a major role in the future or whether joint strategies can be developed.
While solidarity as one of the fundamental principles of the European Union was discussed at length in research, cross-border solidarity has received little attention. We will present a definition of cross-border solidarity before applying it to pandemic times and the case of the SaarLorLux Greater Region. Thereby, we have a closer look to the role of cross-border healthcare professionals. We discuss differ-ent forms of (non-experienced) solidarity during this period and the role of multi-level governance. In the last step, we derive predictions about future trends as well as possible political countermeasures.

Isabelle Pigeron-Piroth is a research associate at the University of Luxembourg and a member of the UniGR-Center for Border Studies (working Group Cross-border labour and education). Her research focuses on cross-border work in Luxembourg and the Greater SaarLorLux Region, with particular em-phasis on the sectoral segmentation and spatial structuring of cross-border labor markets. Interested in the cross-border context, comparisons with other areas affected by cross-border work are also at the heart of her recent research.

Birte Nienaber, Associate Professor in Political Geography at the University of Luxembourg, has coordinated and/or worked in numerous EU-funded projects in the area of migration and borders, e.g. MIMY, MOVE, CEASEVAL, RELOCAL and INNOVATE. She coordinates the national contact points of the EMN and FRANET. She is also involved in the UniGR-CBS as a member of the Steering Board and as a member of the working group “Labour and Education” as well as the course director of the trinational Master in Border Studies in Luxembourg. Methodologically, she is combing qualitative methods with participatory approaches.

Ines Funk is scientific assistant at the Department of Social-Scientific European Studies and CEUS | Cluster for European research at Saarland University in Saarbrücken (Germany) since 2010. She com-pleted her PhD in Human Geography in 2015 with a thesis on cross-border patient mobility in the Saar-land-Lorraine region. Her research interests are Border Studies, especially cross-border labor and train-ing markets. Current research activities focus on the consequences of the Covid19 pandemic for cross-border study programs, vocational training and labour markets. She’s a member of the working group “Cross-border Labour and Education” of the University of the Greater Region-Center for Border Studies.

Florian Weber (Universität des Saarlandes)
‘Do or die?’ Setting Up of a Cross-Border Hydrogen Network in the Greater Region

Relations between Germany, France, and Luxembourg with regard to the resourcing and supply of en-ergy have been beset with conflicts and crises. The French nuclear power plant at Cattenom has been a stumbling block in the border region for decades, and France, in turn, objects to the German attitude of moral superiority with its categorical rejection of nuclear powered electricity and refusal to accept the climate benefits of that source. The war in Ukraine has foregrounded the energy dependence of West-ern Europe on Russia and highlighted the French claim that nuclear power, in contrast to coal and gas, provides climate-neutral energy. The established goal of the EU – in connection with the Green Deal – to achieve climate neutrality by 2050 brings further sociopolitical challenges, with long immanent de-velopments in the industrial sector rapidly becoming acute and gaining urgency in the public mind. Thus, for the Saarland steel industry, the transition to ‘green steel’ has become a do-or-die matter. Against this background, my paper will focus on the planned hydrogen network ‘mosaHYc’ within the Greater Region – a cross-border alliance that is, again, not without conflict and struggle. What challenges and opportunities are associated with this project? What role do borders play? What networking potential lies in the concept of ‘hydrogen borderlands’?

Florian Weber studied geography, business administration, sociology and journalism at the University of Mainz and gained his doctorate at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg with a thesis comparing German and French area-based policies in light of discourse theory. He completed his post-doctoral degree (Habilitation) at the University of Tübingen in 2018. In April 2019 he was appointed Junior Pro-fessor of European Studies at Saarland University, with special reference to Western Europe and border regions.

Dominik Brodowski (Universität des Saarlandes)
Border regions as spaces of possibilities – for criminals?

The abolishment of stationary border controls or, coined positively, the right to cross borders at any place within the Schengen area is seen as one of the most perceptible accomplishments of European integration. At the same time, it is associated with the risk of illegal entry, migrant smuggling, and the ability of criminals to easily flee across the border into a safe haven. This latter viewpoint is becoming more dominant in a climate of risk avoidance, populism, and nationalism. This contribution tries to shed light on the question whether and to what extent border regions indeed are spaces of possibilities for criminals. Is ‘borderless’ crime a side-effect we need to accept if we want to enjoy the benefit of living in a border region without stationary border controls? What has the European Union achieved, in paral-lel to the creation of the Schengen area, to mitigate the risk of ‘borderless’ crime by allowing for ‘bor-derless’ crime control - from hot pursuit across borders and the European Arrest Warrant to joint pa-trols and joint investigation teams? And what may yet be done to make sure that border regions be-come spaces of possibilities for adequate crime control and law enforcement?

Dominik Brodowski is professor of Europeanization, Internationalization and Digital Transformation of Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure at Saarland University, Saarbrücken, Germany, and its Cluster of European Research (CEUS). He obtained a Dr. iur. from the University of Tübingen and a LL.M. from the University of Pennsylvania.

Panel 3-C: Crossing Lines: Refugee Narratives and the Chronotopes of Displacement (EN)
Jeudi, 15h00 - 16h30 | R. 3.03

Crossing Lines: Refugee Narratives and the Chronotopes of Displacement

Olha Polishchuk (Universität des Saarlandes; Chair)

In recent years, marked by various migration crises and a cascade of wars, there has been an unprecedented increase in the number of people crossing borders out of the need to flee wars and violence, seek asylum and a better life. Consequently, the issue of displacement has received considerable attention not only among researchers but also among writers, artists, and filmmakers who explore the issues of migration, refugeedom and border crossing. The panel is based on the assumption that cultural representations of a displaced person are primarily chronotopic as they are deeply rooted in the spatiotemporal paradigms of their experiences.Quite often migrants are defined through their journeys, border crossings and time spent on the road. Defined by what has been called viapolitics (William Walters) and its time inflections, the representations of the contemporary forms of displacement become especially adequate sites to examine how space inflects time and how time structures space (the mutually constitutive role of space and time Bakhtin called the chronotope) but also how these mutual imbrications affect and are affected by narratives of displacement. The papers in the panel will examine the migratory routes and border crossingsin order to unpack the space-time relationships of various migration narratives which map out the fractured universes and shattered home (lands) across various cultural, spatial, and temporal dimensions.

Svitlana Kot (Universität des Saarlandes and Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University, Mykolaiv)
Visualizing Chronotopes of Displacement in Graphic Refugee Novels

This paper  aims to explore the visual representations of refugees in contemporary graphic novels through the lens of chronotopes. It will investigate how visual elements and narrative structures convey the complex experiences of displacement, revealing the intricate interplay of time and space in refugee narratives. The study assumes that depictions of refugees within migration narratives are fundamentally intertwined with the blending of temporal and spatial dimensions, making them inherently chronotopic in nature. By analyzing graphic novels such as Illegal (2018) by Eoin Colfer, The Unwanted: Stories of the Syrian Refugees (2018) by Don Brown, Home (2021) by Julio Anta, and The Power of Welcome: Real-life Refugee and Migrant Journeys (2023) by Ada Jusic, the study will examine the ways in which these works illustrate both the physical journeys and emotional landscapes of refugees. Through this analysis, the research will highlight how the concept of the chronotope serves as a critical framework for understanding the refugee experience, illuminating the tensions and complexities inherent in their stories of displacement.

Svitlana Kot is a visiting postdoctoral scholar at the Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University (UdS), a member of the UniGR Center for Border Studies and a senior lecturer of the English Philology and Translation Department at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University.  The primary area of expertise is Border Studies, (Native) American Literature, Digital Cultural Studies. Holds a PhD in Philology (American Literature). In 2021 defended a PhD thesis "Poetics Of Space In The Novels By Louise Erdrich: Transcultural Perspective".  2022-2023 a Volkswagen postdoc scholar affiliated with Saarland University involved in the project "Borders in Crisis: Discursive, Narrative, and Mediatic Border Struggles in Ukraine, Europe, and North America". Currently working on the projects: "Border Mobilities and Refugee Writing";  "(Un)welcomed and (Il)legal: Affective Perspectives on Child Migrant Representations  in Graphic Novels", "Documenting Ukraine: Digital War Diaries"; and “Border Chronotopes” 2024-2026.

Olha Polishchuk (Universität des Saarlandes)
Border and Identity in Eugenia Senik’s “A House of Matches”

Displacement/migration is a topic of constant literary reflection due its existence as a global state of civilization and an attributive feature of modern life. Writers who have experienced migration have a deeper and more qualitative understanding of it, which they express through literary images and reflections. Constructive analysis of migration - including imprisonment, exile, political and economic emigration, displacement due to terrorism, repression, or war - within the literary domain, is pivotal in today's world. This analysis might demonstrate how transcultural context comprehensively includes and influences national identity. One of these writers is Eugenia Senik, a Ukrainian writer who emigrated to Switzerland and whose direct border-crossing experience is reflected in her novels. The purpose of this research is to investigate how emigration impacts self-discovery in a transcultural environment, using Eugenia Senik's novel “A House of Matches” as a case study. The author of the aforementioned novel skilfully employs the House of Matches metaphor as a symbol of community unity among diverse individuals. In her mind's eye, every individual “match” is unique and contributes to the creation of a unified whole. This metaphor facilitates an examination of the connection between the Self and the Other in the context of shared spatial life realization. For a comprehensive investigation into this subject, a transdisciplinary strategy was implemented, which incorporates theories from a range of disciplines including history, philosophy, geography, anthropology, cultural studies, linguistics, and geopolitics in the literary analysis. The research methodology is founded on border studies and encompasses theories of psychological and cultural trauma. The work will deepen the understanding of the relationship between the lived experience of displacement and the literary construction of narratives about border crossing.

Olha Polishchuk has a Ph.D. in Literary Theory (Mykolaiv, Ukraine, 2016). Currently, she is collaborating with the UniGR-Center for Border Studies and the Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University (Germany). June 2022 - May 2023 she researched “Borders in Crisis: Discursive, Narrative, and Mediatic Border Struggles in Ukraine, Europe, and North America” (Volkswagen Fond, Germany). Since July 2023, she has been a visiting researcher at Saarland University (Germany).

Ewa Macura-Nnamdi (University of Silesia in Katowice)
The Chronotopes of Wait: Quatic Time in Wolfgang Fisher's Styx

This paper reads Wolfgang Fischer's 2018 drama Styx for its rendition of violence of wait in migrant lives and the manifold ways the geography of the sea gets mobilized in the service of this temporal suspension (which is also a suspension of movement, and thus a suspension of one's traversal of space), and consequently, European border regimes. It is interested in how the narrative depicts both how time and space are deployed to reproduce political order, but also how technologies (here, the maritime equipment used by vessels) are used not to shrink distances and contract time, but rather, to expand the former and to protract the latter. To examine these, I draw on Hassan Hage's work on waiting, and in particular, his examination of how waiting becomes, in crisis situations, a conservative mode of endurance, a condition which not only normalizes waiting itself but also the context which occasions it. In this paper, however, I examine how Styx radicalizes Hage's take on waiting as a form of survival, transforming the telos of waiting from survival into death.

Ewa Macura-Nnamdi is assistant professor at the Institute of Literary Studies, University of Silesia, Poland. Her research interests include refugee narratives, maritime studies and environmental postcolonial humanitites. She has recently co-edited a special issue on water for Angelaki: the Journal of Theoretical Humanities. She is currently working on a book on Fictions of Water: Refugees and the Sea. She is currently a Principal Investigator in a grant project awarded by the National Science Centre titled Weathers of the Future: Displacement and Climate Change.

Agnieszka Pantuchowicz (SWPS University)
Male Hysteria and Armoring of Bodies in Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border
 
The notion of “green border” refers, in Polish, to a poorly protected section of the state border, often covered with vegetation and stretching over an area with varied landscape (Cf. Glosbe). In Agnieszka Holland’s film the term is used somehow ironically, and refers to the part of the Belarusian-Polish border where a “protective” construction against immigrants has been erected. Though variously called in the Polish media – a fence, a barrier, a wall, a dam (płot, bariera, mur, zapora) – the construction may be read as an exponent of what might be called a “male hysteria” (Krystyna Kłosińska’s concept)  of being simultaneously unprotected and unable to protect in which the object of protection is located both outside and inside of the defender. In the paper I will project Kłosińska’s concept onto contemporary Polish realities and attempt at showing how the separation of hysteria from its uterine etiology may pose a threat to the established world order through the possibility of species mixing. It is not only the border fence on the Belarusian-Polish border that is supposed to protect us from the threat of mixing, but also the ideology of identity unity and unambiguity. Attacks on Agnieszka Holland’s Green Border are connected with a sense of threat to masculinity and the attribution of hysterical nature to it. The slightly leaky fence on the Polish-Belarusian border is a structure whose symbolism clearly shows the state as a threatened sphere, the security of which requires the presentation of the state’s interior as a feminine sphere requiring protection and defense.

Institute of Humanities; Vice-Director, Institute of Humanities; Co-ordinator - Linguistics, Literary Studies; Department of English Studies
Her academic focus is on theory of translation and literature. Her areas of expertise include: translation studies, cultural studies, comparative literature, and feminist criticism. She is the author of sixty articles and co-editor of six collections of academic essays. With Elżbieta Tabakowska she is editor of the series Cultures in Translation. At SWPS University, she heads two interdisciplinary projects: the first deals with processing natural language and its social impact; the second aims to establish to what degree and how reading literature influences attitudes manifested in the choice of specific linguistic expressions. She conducts classes in translation analysis, literature, and stylistics.

Panel 3-D: Cultural Legacy in the Struggle for Borders: Eaghor G. Kostetzky (EN)
Jeudi, 15h00 - 16h30 pm | R. 3.04 | hybrid

Cultural Legacy in the Struggle for Borders: Eaghor G. Kostetzky and the Challenges Facing Contemporary Ukraine

Tetiana Shestopalova (Chair)

Lien vers la réunion en ligne sur MS Teams :
https://lmy.de/LAsSH
Meeting ID: 371 831 075 02
Passcode: RoPRZ5

The affirmation of the subjecthood of Ukrainian culture and its independent agency on the world stage is an integral factor in Ukraine's contemporary struggle to preserve itself as a political nation within the borders of an independent state as defined by international law. The literary and artistic practices of twentieth-century Ukrainian emigration (though often ambiguous and contradictory) have developed and strengthened the idea of Ukrainian cultural activism, which promotes Ukrainian culture as an independent agent in the global arena, in contrast to the Soviet policy of either primitivizing and eroding it, or uprooting and appropriating its best achievements. The critical analysis and understanding of the key concepts and practices of twentieth-century Ukrainian emigration is fundamental to the decolonization of knowledge about Ukraine and its culture. The reference to the case of Eaghor G. Kostetzky is not accidental. According to the organizers and key speakers of the roundtable, it is worth tracing a unique combination of an intellectual's ambition to break down the boundaries that have long separated Ukrainian culture from open dialogue with other cultures of the world. At the same time, with a firm defense of one's own national identity and boundaries, albeit self-determined as a free choice, when we speak of Kostetzky as a creative intellectual, cultural activist, and bright personality. Which parts of Kostetzky’s experience of self-identity formation, which of his culture-building ideas and projects will be helpful in coping with the challenges of the Russo-Ukrainian war, and which have not stood the test of time? These questions will be the focus of the roundtable discussions. So, the planned roundtable aims to emphasize both the ambiguity and creative and intellectual merits of Kostetzky’s cultural legacy, which gives rise to discussion and reflection on the problem of decolonizing knowledge in Ukraine and about Ukraine in the world since the russian aggression began in 2014.

Information about Kostetzky

Ihor (Eaghor G.) Kostetzky (family name: Merzliakov) (1913-1983) is one of the key figures of twentieth-century Ukrainian culture. Hailing from a mixed Russian and Ukrainian family, he embodied his creative legacy not only in his literary works and cultural initiatives but also in his unique project of self-creation and self-realization as a Ukrainian intellectual and independent creative personality. That project began with his deliberate choice of Ukrainian national identity in 1938 in the USSR, and it reached its apex in West Germany, where he arrived in 1943, along with many other Ostarbeiters brought by the Nazi regime. Kostetzky’s literary, translation, and publishing work after WWII was so remarkable and unparalleled in the context of local Ukrainian community that the writer Oleksa Izarsky called him “a Ukrainian island in the German sea.” Simultaneously, an ultimate goal of Kostetzky’s activities in Germany was “to give birth to Ukraine as a real, earthly body” beyond its geographical boundaries at a time when, within the political borders of the USSR, Soviet totalitarianism was consistently destroying Ukrainian identity and culture through terror, famine, and repressions. Kostetzky’s self-definition as a “cosmopolitan within the Ukrainian culture”? speaks for itself. His ‘cultural cosmopolitanism’ and absolute belief in art above and beyond politics eventually led to his public conflicts with the leading political circles of Ukrainian emigration and his irreversible split from them. During the current Russian-Ukrainian war, when millions of Ukrainians are once again abroad, the issues raised by Kostetzky in his works of fiction, essays, and literary studies are being reactualized with particular intensity. These include but are not limited to: -the choices and fate of an artistically gifted and active personality in conditions of emigration/forced displacement; -the formation and functioning of the national cultural community in exile; -Ukraine’s artistic presence in Europe and Ukraine’s ‘doom’ to be a neighbour to Russia; and the Russian factor in Ukraine.

Marko Robert Stech (University of Toronto) - online
Ihor Kostetzky: A Sketch to a Portrait of the Artist

The report will present the main activities and major creative achievements of Ihor Kostetzky.
Marko Robert Stech is a writer, literary scholar, and specialist in the history of culture. He holds a PhD in Slavic Studies and a MASc in Engineering from the University of Toronto. He holds several positions at the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) of the University of Alberta and the University of Toronto: director of CIUS Press and Scholarly Publications, overseeing the Press, the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies and Ukraina Moderna; and project manager of the Hrushevsky Translation Project.
His novel, The Voice («Голос»), won the 2009 Mykola Gogol International Prize for Literature. He is the author of Essays in Search of Sources («Есеїстика у пошуках джерел»), the experimental novel The Undying («Невмирущі»), and numerous other essays.
He is the compiler of the literary legacies of Ihor Kostetsky, Iurii Kosach, and Emma Andiievska; and a compiler and editor of an anthology of Ukrainian short prose in Czech translations.
He has written and produced over 100 episodes of the «Очима культури» TV series on Kontakt TV (OMNI TV, Canada). His writings have received several awards of recognition. He was awarded the Koshelivets International Literary Prize in 2008 (Israel), the Gogol International Literary Prize in 2009 (Ukraine), and the ‘Hlodoskyi skarb’ International Prize in 2014 (Ukraine). https://www.petersonliteraryfund.com/the-jury-1/marko-robert-stech

Lada Kolomiyets (Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv) - online
Translating and Transcending Tradition in Eaghor G. Kostetzky’s Project of Modern Ukraine

The present study examines Kostetzky’s conceptualization of modern Ukrainian culture, with a particular focus on his efforts to rethink and expand the boundaries of the national literary tradition. To achieve his objective of integrating stylistic elements, visual imagery, thematic content, and conceptual frameworks derived from the global literary heritage into his vision of modern Ukraine, Kostetzky employs the use of translation and the production of scholarly essays as facilitating tools.
Lada Kolomiyets is D. Philol. Sci. (Translation Studies), Prof., Professor of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, Department of East European, Eurasian and Russian Studies (USA), Academician of the Academy of Sciences of Higher School of Ukraine, and a member of the National Writers’ Union of Ukraine (NSPU). Fulbright scholar at the University of Iowa (1996-97) and Pennsylvania State University (2017-18). She has held fellowships at Wenner-Gren Foundation (Sweden, 2022) and Harris Distinguished Professorship Foundation (USA, 2023).

Svitlana Lushchii (T. H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) - online
The Concept of War in Eaghor G. Kostetzky’s Prose: Lessons for the Present

The report's object is the literary texts The Whole World Belongs to You and No More Dead. The speaker will analyze the realization of the concept of war on different levels of these texts: problematics, image system, and textual strategies. Today, Kostetzky’s work is worth reading in a new way. In many ways, it turned out to be prophetic and instructive.
Svitlana Lushchii is D. Philol. Sci., a Senior Research Fellow, Head of the Department of Ukrainian Studies Abroad at the T. H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. She is the author of more than 170 articles and individual monographs Artistic Models of Being in the Novels of V. Podmogylny (2008), Romance of the Ukrainian Diaspora in the 1960s1980s: Issues, Genre and Style Paradigms (2017), ‘Great Prose’ of the Ukrainian Diaspora 1940s1980s (2017), “Restoring the History of Destruction and Revival”: Yu. Lavrinenko and the Diaspora’s Literary Critical Thought (2018). Priority directions of scientific activity are the history of Ukrainian literature, literary criticism, textology, and source studies.

Tetiana Shestopalova (Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University, Mykolaiv and Universität des Saarlandes)
Ukrainian archives on the borderlands and abroad: Challenges of the Russian Invasion and the Case of Eaghor G. Kostetzky

In the presentation, the speaker will outline the position and role of Ukrainian literary and artistic archives in Ukraine and abroad during the Russian invasion and analyze the collection of Eaghor G. Kostetzky in more detail. She will then focus on the thematic, figurative, and ideological markers of borders in the documents of the above-mentioned archival collection and raise the question of how they correlate with the problem of decolonization of knowledge in and about Ukraine.
Tetiana Shestopalova is D. Philol. Sci., Prof., Professor at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University (Mykolaiv, Ukraine), a member of the Ukrainian Association of the Fulbright Academic Exchange Program Alumni and the Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas (MESEA), a Fulbright visiting scholar at Columbia University (New York, USA, 2006-2007 and 2014-2015), a visiting scholar at Saarland University (Saarbrucken, Germany, 2022-present). Her research has focused on modern Ukrainian literary criticism and the legacy of Ukrainian literary emigration after WW II. The current research project is ‘Beyond Border’ Discourse of the Ukrainian Literary Process in Germany After World War II in the archival collection of Ihor (Eaghor G.) Kostetzky.

Co-moderators:
Tetiana Shestopalova, D. Philol. Sci., Prof.
Nataliya Torkut is D. Philol. Sci., Prof., the Head of the Ukrainian Shakespeare Centre, Professor at Zaporizhzhia National University, Leading Research Fellow of Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Academician of the Academy of Sciences of Higher School of Ukraine, a Visiting Professor in the Department of English, within the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King’s College of London (November 01, 2022-October 31, 2023), an Honorary Senior Research Fellow of the Shakespeare Institute of the University of Birmingham (since April 21, 2023). She is a member of the European Shakespeare Research Association, the vice-president of the Ukrainian Association of the World Literature Lecturers and a member of the Board of The International Shakespeare Association.

Panel 4-A: Cultural Heritage in the Borderlands of Trieste / Slovenia (EN)
Vendredi, 09h30 - 11h00 | R. 3.05

Cultural Heritage in the Borderlands of Trieste / Slovenia

Astrid M. Fellner (Universität des Saarlandes; Chair)

Tullia Catalan (Università di Trieste)
The Silos of Trieste between conflictual memories and removals

After the First World War, which saw the passage of Trieste from the Habsburg Empire to the Kingdom of Italy, some large public buildings, useful for commercial port activity, changed their use, to be used by the fascist and Nazi authorities for other purposes, mostly for collecting and sorting people: soldiers, emigrants, deportees, refugees (exiles). Over a period of time from 1923 to the post-World War II decades, Jewish refugees on their way to Palestine and the Americas fleeing anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe passed through the Silos. From 1933 and 1938, they were joined by German and Austrian Jews who, after crossing several borders, left the port of Trieste for safer destinations. For all of them, the Silos was the first building they encountered getting off the trains, and their luggage was sorted in it. From 1943 to 1945, during OZAK (Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland), the Nazis used the building as a Lager, where they concentrated partisans and deported them to camps in Germany and Poland. Many Jews awaiting deportation also passed through this building from 1944 to 1945, leaving the Polizeihaftlager of the Risiera di San Sabba and heading for Auschwitz. After World War II, the building was used as a permanent refugee camp for Istrian and Dalmatian refugees fleeing from the Republic of Yugoslavia. Then for many years the oblivion and removal of this place from the city's memorial sites. The intervention intends to reflect on this last aspect, where the stratification of memories and various actors contributed to erasing an important chapter related to emigration and deportation from the city's collective and conflictual history.

Tullia Catalan is Associate Professor of Contemporay History at the University of Trieste.  Her research interests include:  Racism  in Europe (Anti-Semitism, Anti- Slavism); the European Jewish philantropical associations; the Jewish emigration through the port of Trieste.
Among her recent publications: The Construction of the Enemy in two Jewish Writers: Carolina Coen Luzzatto and Enrica Barzilai Gentilli, in Rethinking the Age of Emancipation. Comparative and Transnational Perspectives on Gender, Family and Religion in Italy and Germany 1800-1918, edited by M. Baumeister, P. Lenhard, R. Nattermann, Berghahn, 2020; Conversions Paths of Trieste’s Jews in 1938-1939, in “Quest. Issues in Jewish Contemporary History”, n. 22, 2022. https://www.quest-cdecjournal.it/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/3-Q22_08_Catalan.pdf; L’Emigrazione ebraica attraverso il porto di Trieste tra Ottocento e Novecento. Spazi, pratiche, organizzazioni assistenziali, memorie in "STORIA URBANA " 172/2022, pp 37-57.

Roberta Altin and Giuseppe Grimaldi (both Università di Trieste)
The human hub’s heritage in Trieste borderland

In Trieste's city center, the Silos, a historic building built in the mid-1800s as a granary under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is protected by the Superintendence of Arts as a post-industrial architectural heritage. Historically, it represents a symbolic place of displaced memories and forced migrations, having become a human hub for deportees and refugees during and after the Second World War. In recent years, it has become an informal shelter for asylum seekers and a public space where citizens and activists hold a presidium against the institutional abandonment of migrants. From an 'ethnic-national' container commemorating the historical passage of Jews and Italian refugees, the Silos has become a space of transnational struggle that has activated forms of cross-border civic activism and solidarity. In border areas, migratory memories are often stratified and intertwined, and it is necessary to analyse cross-border heritage by holding together the lines of inheritance and continuity - but also of discontinuity and conflict. From this perspective, the Silos, due to the historical stratifications and the complexity of the entangled migration in the urban space of Trieste, can represent an emblematic case of cross-border heritage to be compared with similar cases in the T4E Alliance. The struggle for memory is a structural element of contemporary societies, especially when the past is remembered in different ways by different actors. Bordering as a process requires continuous symbolic and material construction, and memories are as political as migration policies: the emphasis on the heterogeneous history (and present) of borderlands is an attempt to develop the multi-diversity of the past and a non-prepackaged memory.

Roberta Altin is Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Department of Humanities, University of Trieste (Italy).  Her main research focus is transnational migration, refugee studies, and museum and media anthropology. She has been founder and coordinator of CIMCS - Center for Migration & International Cooperation on Sustainable Development, University of Trieste (2017-2023), vice-president of SIAA - Italian Society of Applied Anthropology (2020-23), and director of the Blacksmith Art and Cutlery Museum - Maniago (PN) (2004-2021).

Latest publications:

• Border Heritage: Migration and Displaced Memories in Trieste, Lexington Books, Lanham 2024.
• Historical Layers of Refugee Reception in Border Areas of Italy: Crossroads of Transit and Temporalities of (Im)mobility, (with S. degli Uberti) “Journal of International Migration and Integration” 2024. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12134-024-01125-0

Giuseppe Grimaldi is a research fellow in anthropology at the University of Trieste (Department of Humanities). His research topics are focused on children of immigrants, the nexus between agriculture and migration, school dropout and the relation between heritage and subalternity. He has conducted ethnographic research in Italy, Ethiopia, the United Kingdom, and Israel. Amongst other projects he has directed the association Frontiera Sud Aps, a research intervention project on informal intermediation in rural Southern Italy. In the T4EU project he works in the scientific coordination of the Wp7.

Katja Hrobat Virloget (University of Primorska)
A Common Divisive Borderland Heritage? Silences and Divided Memories along the Slovenian-Italian Border

The events along the shifting former Yugoslav-Italian border in the 20th century have left a difficult, contested legacy of memories, a common unifying and at the same time divisive intangible memorial heritage. The deepest wounds in this multi-ethnic borderland society have been inflicted by the border fascistic anti-Slavic racism and violence and the mass migrations of (mostly) Italian-speaking inhabitants after WW II, the Istrian exodus. Memories and emotional wounds have been politically abused and today compete in their victimhood strategy. Some memorial narrations have been silenced, and negated in the dominant hegemonic discourses, while some have been un-silenced and mythized to construct national victimization discourses. In the research frame of the project Ethnography of silence(s) the paper will discuss the formation of memories and silences in different social settings along this part of the former Iron Curtain. The different silences are not perceived merely as a consequence of memorial conflicts, but they are studied in connection to Freudian ideas about repression. The major historical borderland traumas have left various groups excluded from History. Even if some have been given voice recently on the national level, on the individual level they remain silenced and traumatized; On one side there are victims of the fascist regime with their intergenerationally transferred memories serving as the basis for collective identity, especially in the Slovenian minority in Italy. On the other hand, there are silences of groups whose formation is linked to the Istrian exodus: the migrants/refugees on the Italian side of the border, the minor part of Italians that have stayed in the new state of Yugoslavia, and the immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, which settled down in the emptied towns. The paper concludes with a psychotherapist-anthropological initiative of opening a space for giving voice and listening to divergent and traumatic borderland memories.

Katja Hrobat Virloget works as an associate professor, currently Vice-Dean for Research at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Primorska, Slovenia, and Head of the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Studies. She has recently received several prizes for her book in Slovenian (2021) about the Istrian Exodus (published by Berghahn books in 2023) including a nomination for the Excellence in Research Award by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency, and the national ethnological prize. From 2023 she leads the anthropological research project Ethnography of Silence(s).

Panel 4-B: Everyday Alliances in Cross-Border Regions (EN)
Vendredi, 09h30 - 11h00 | R. 0.01

Everyday Alliances in Cross-Border Regions

Christian Wille (Université du Luxembourg; Chair)

Johanna Trager (Charles University, Prague)
Beyond Economic Incentives: The role of Personal Networks in Cross-Border Commuting from the Czech Republic to Bavaria (Germany)

In this study, I explore cross-border commuting from the Czech Republic to Bavaria, focusing on factors beyond economic incentives that motivate labor force to commute. Unlike previous research, which mostly focuses on economic incentives, this analysis is based on the network theory of migration to provide insight into the role of cross-border commuters' personal networks in the job searching process and the decision whether to start and continue commuting across borders. Through thematic analysis of interviews with Czech cross-border commuters to Bavaria and Bavarian companies that employ Czech cross-border commuters, this study explains how personal networks have influenced cross-border commuting in a border region with significant, though changing, economic disparities over the past 20 years. The findings from the interviews reveal that both economic disparities and personal networks are important factors in job searching, starting cross-border commuting, and continuing but also stop to commute. Personal networks of cross-border commuters also serve as a highly valuable recruiting channel for Bavarian companies in the border region – a channel they rely on. The networks help overcome language barriers in communicating job descriptions and safely briefings, ensure employee commitment and necessary skills, and address labor shortages in the Bavarian border region, particularly in the unskilled and low-skilled labor sectors.

Johanna is a third-year Ph.D. candidate in Public and Social Policy at Charles University. Her dissertation explores cross-border commuting from the Czech Republic to Bavaria, with a focus on labor market dynamics and the impact of EU integration on rural border regions. Her research aims to enhance understanding of cross-border policy and cohesion in European border regions. Johanna holds a degree in Economics and Business Administration from the University of Passau, where she also completed a program in Czech language and cultural studies. She further studied Economics and Public Policy at the University of Economics, Prague.

Claude Barbier (University of Geneva)
(Almost) 250 years of exception: the free zone regime in the country of Geneva

In 1776, Voltaire, lord of Ferney, obtained from the French monarchy an exceptional regime for the Pays de Gex. This, stuck between the summits of the Jura, the Rhône, Geneva and the canton of Berne could not easily trade with the rest of France. Also an exceptional status was imagined which ended up taking the name of “free zone”. This regime was abolished with the invasion of Geneva in 1798 and was reestablished – at the request of Geneva – thanks to the Treaty of Vienna (1815). The north of Savoy benefited from an identical status (Treaty of Turin, 1816). It was even extended to 2/3 of current Haute-Savoie in 1860 for the inhabitants of northern Savoy to vote for France, even though they wanted to become Swiss. This regime almost disappeared in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), but nevertheless remained, including during the occupation of Haute-Savoie by the Nazis (1943-1944). Concerning, essentially, only agricultural production, the model is questioned, while the current problem is not – or at the margin – the food supply of Geneva, but rather access, for Geneva, to a pool of available labor, to superficies for the extension of its economic activities. For the Pays de Gex, and now the whole of Haute-Savoie, it is about bringing together, which is a challenge, populations living – poorly – because they are paid in euros, and others living (rather well) in Swiss francs. More than 100,000 cross-border workers come today to take part in this “variegation” of the zone territory (and beyond) which is not Swiss, which is no longer French, but which is French and Swiss. It is therefore not so much the past that is being questioned, but rather the future, while the exception (the free zone) has a longer existence than normality. Isn't the exception, here, the norm, while the latter would be the exception?

Bibliography:

• Barbier Claude, Schwarz Pierre-François, Atlas historique du pays de Genève, Des Celtes au Grand Genève, Saint-Julien-en-Genevois, La Salévienne, 2014, 132 p.
• Barbier Claude, Atlas historique du pays de Genève, Faire commerce, une brève histoire économique du Pays de Genève, vol. 4, Editions Le Tour, 2023, 232 p.
• Gombac Boris, Les zones franches en Europe, Bruylant, Bruxelles, 1991, 310 p.
• Guichonnet Paul, La Savoie du Nord et la Suisse, Chambéry, Société savoisienne d’Histoire et d’Archéologie, 2001, 158 p.
• Jouvet Robert, Le problème des zones franches de la Haute-Savoie et du Pays de Gex, Genève, Georg, 1943, 236 p.

Claude Barbier, historian (PHD Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). Will join the University of Geneva on November 1, 2024, where he will teach as a visiting professor “history and contemporary issues of the cross-border context in the country of Geneva”.

Panel 4-C: Experiences of Border Crossings (EN)
Vendredi, 09h30 - 11h00 | R. 3.04 | hybrid

Experiences of Border Crossings

Svitlana Kot (Universität des Saarlandes / Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University; Chair)

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Ahmet Idrees (Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, Qatar) - online
Precarious Crossing: Forms, Meanings, and Strategies for Solidarity among Sudanese Refugees in the Sudan-Egypt Border amid the April 15th 2023 Conflict

This paper is part of an ongoing research project that I started in October 2023, in which I investigate borders and mobility in relation to the Sudanese conflict that began on April 15, 2023. The paper explores the lived experiences of Sudanese refugees who cross the Sudan-Egypt border "illegally" in response to altered mobility regimes, which were influenced by the conflict that erupted in Sudan on April 15, 2023. The study builds upon the critical legacy developed in border and migration studies, drawing on contributions like John Torpey's work on passports and the state monopoly on means of movement, the theoretical framework of the Autonomy of Migration, and Judith Butler's notion of the Precarity of Life. This research employs qualitative methodology, utilizing in-depth interviews to elicit the border-crossing experiences lived by the refugees while crossing from Sudan into Egypt. The sample was collected through the snowball technique, coupled with the observation among various neighbors who fled from the city of Port Sudan in eastern Sudan to Egypt. The paper comprises several sections: first, the forms of Precarity that affect individuals' lives, produced by the Egyptian state through border regimes after the conflict in Sudan. in this section, I offer background on the evolution of the border regime between Sudan and Egypt and shed the light on the conflict eruption in Sudan. Second, addressing the meaning of “security” and “legality” that individuals and families produced through their crossing. Finally, the paper explores family-based, and extended family solidarity strategies during the crossing process, as well as forms of temporary solidarity that arose among Sudanese refugees.

Assistant Researcher at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies. I studied Psychology at the University of Khartoum, Sudan (2017), and obtained a master’s degree in Sociology & Anthropology (2023) from Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar. My research interests center around border studies, migration, sociology of the state, and political sociology. My current research project focuses on the lived experience of migration and cross border mobility in the context of conflict in Sudan post-April 15, 2023. I recently participated in a research workshop on critical security studies in the Arab region organized by the Arab Council for Social Sciences, Lebanon. Member of: Association for Borderlands Studies; International Sociological Association; African Studies Association. I am working on preparing my master's thesis for publication, and I have some published contributions (mainly in Arabic): Book Review (2023), “In the Meaning of the Land”, By: Bilal Awad Salama, Al-Muntaqa Journal; “Formation of The Native Administration System in Colonial Sudan” (in Arabic), Paper Presented at the First Conference (2023) of the School of Economics, Administration, and Public Policy (SEAPP), DI, Qatar; “The Issue of AIDS in Eastern Sudan: Is there a way to Propose a new Agenda in the Public Sphere? “(in Arabic), Published Paper. https://www.tasees.org/2021/03/01/aids-in-east-sudan/  ; “The Mental Image for Woman in Tigre poetry in Sudan”, Co Published Paper (in Arabic), The Scientific Journal of Bakhtarrudha University, (27).

Olena Gayevska (Taras Shevchenko National University, Kyiv)
Ukrainian Female Writers through a Comparative Lens: The Experience of a Temporal Frontier

Well-known Ukrainian writers (Olha Kobylianska, Lesia Ukrainka, Lyubov Yanovska, Iryna Vilde, later Maria Matios, Lina Kostenko, Emma Andievska and others) made significant contributions to the development of Ukrainian literature, advocating for women's rights and depicting complex female experiences, their literary works needs to be examined through comparative lens with consideration of frontier methodology. In my presentation I will discuss Ukrainian female writers’ experience of temporal frontier with American and Japanese. In American literature women's voices began to assert themselves prominently from the mid-19th century onwards. Notable authors (Margaret Fuller, Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Alice Walker and others) played crucial roles in this literary movement. Their works addressed critical social issues and explored the nuances of women's lives, contributing to the broader discourse on gender and equality, in context of shaping literary landscapes of frontier and advocating for social change. Japanese female writers (Higuchi Ichiyo, Hiratsuka Raichyo, Yosano Akiko and others) manifested women’s movement in Japan and later with the help of literary works contributed to the basis of modern Japanese literature, where temporal frontier reflection is an essential part.

Associate Professor and Bachelor's Programme Education Manager at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, with a teaching experience of over 15 years. Master's degree in Philology (MA in 2002) and in Psychology (MSc in 2022). PhD degree in Comparative Studies (2005), dissertation “Typology of Neoromantism in Lesya Ukrainka, Willa Cather and Yosano Akiko Literary Works”. Courses taught at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv - Intercultural Communication; General Theory of Translation; Strategy of Polite Forms’ Utilization in Japanese Language; Methodology and Applied Research for Interpreters, etc. Current research topics are Behavioral Analysis in Education, Innovation and Technology in Education, Comparative Analysis of Literary Works. Over 60 articles published.
I am mother of son with special education needs. Diversity and Inclusion activist.

Oleksandra (Alexandra) Filonenko (Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University, Mykolaiv; Friedrich Schiller University, Jena)
River Border Crossing During the War: An Artistic Representation

The paper focuses on the triptych “Crossing the River” by Volodymyr Bakhtov, one the most original artists of contemporary Ukraine, as an artistic interpretation of the role of Ukrainian rivers as natural borders and liminal spaces that proved to be crucial during the current Russian-Ukrainian war. The triptych was created in the second half of 2023 in Germany where the artist was forced to flee from his home in Mykolaiv, a city on the Southern Bug river in the south of Ukraine. The Ukrainian landscape is largely defined by the many great rivers flowing from the North into the South where they enter the Black Sea. Thus the Ukrainian territory is consecutively divided by these rivers into right- and left-bank territories with the right bank being western and the left bank - eastern. Movement towards Europe always means crossing from the left to the right bank of a river. The most important division – historically and geographically – is created by the river Dnipro. During the current Russian-Ukrainian war the river Dnipro proved to be an impenetrable border for the Russian occupying armies. Until now the frontline follows the river in the southern part of the country. All the occupied territories are on the left bank of the river Dnipro in the east of Ukraine, closer to the Russian border. Another important river, the crossing of which would have defined the fate of the entire south of Ukraine is Southern Bug on both banks of which the port city of Mykolaiv is situated. In late February – early March 2022, Mykolaiv withstood a series of attacks from the Russian army not allowing the enemy troops to cross to the right bank of the Southern Bug and move to the major Southern city of Odesa.
Bakhtov’s triptych “Crossing the River” symbolically reflects his own experience as a person who escaped from Mykolaiv to his summer residence in a village on the right bank of the Southern Bug and further – to the ultimate right/western bank of all Ukrainian rivers, to Germany, as well as the experience of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian people from the right bank of Dnipro who lost their homes but saved their lives and the loved ones by crossing the rivers to the right river banks, escaping into the west. The paintings were executed in the traditional medium of tempera on canvas and symbolically represent different states and experiences of being on the left bank, crossing the river and arriving at the right bank during the current war.

Oleksandra (Alexandra) Filonenko graduated in 2000 from the National Academy of Visual Arts and Architecture (Kyiv), Theory and History of Art department. She worked as an art curator until she entered Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University (Mykolaiv, Ukraine), English Philology Department in 2007. In 2017, she earned a PhD in Theory of Literature at the same university where she held the position of Senior Lecturer in the English Philology Department before the war in Ukraine. From August to December 2022, she was a research fellow at Saarland University. Currently, she is a visiting scholar at Friedrich Schiller University, Jena.

Q&A

Panel 5-A: Documenting Ukraine: Witnessing Shifting Borders, Narrating Wartime Struggles (EN)
Vendredi, 11h30 - 13h00 | R. 3.05

Documenting Ukraine: Witnessing Shifting Borders, Narrating Wartime Struggles

Alina Mozolevska (Chair)

This panel brings together four scholars to explore the dynamic interplay of borders, identity, and new media in the context of the Rosso-Ukrainian War. Each contribution delves into the different ways in which digital and visual media document and influence perceptions of conflict, spatiality, and resistance. Svitlana Kot investigates the transformative role of digital media in shaping notions of (im)mobility and spatial perception of war and conflict. Yuliya Stodolinska focuses on the role of media and visual popular art in wartime storytelling by examining the multimodality of narratives that reflect the temporal and spatial disruptions caused by war. Olha Polishchuk addresses the intersection og gender and digital art in her talk, highlighting how digital platforms challenger traditional gender roles and resist the encroaching violence, crafting a unique form of digital resistance that transcends physical borders. Alina Mozolevska explores the construction of time and space in the wartime rhetoric of Ukraine's President by analyzing how Zelensky speeches navigate and reconstruct temporal and spatial dimensions to foster a sense of national unity and resilience in the face of shifting geopolitical realities. Together, these contributions offer a comprehensive examination of how digital and visual media serve as vital tools for documenting, interpreting, and resisting the shifting borders and wartime struggles in Ukraine. The panel underscores the critical role of media in shaping collective memory and identity amid conflict, highlighting the resilience and creativity of those navigating these turbulent times.

Svitlana Kot (Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University, Mykolaiv and Universität des Saarlandes)
Borders in Transistion: Digital Media's Role in Shaping (Im)Mobility and Spatial Perception

At the outbreak of the full-scale invasion and as it is spreading social media have been at the forefront of its coverage not only giving users the possibility to exchange ideas and opinions but also emerging as powerful platforms for various forms of expression and a tool for representing the ambience.  Cultural production recirculated online can shed light on both the experiences of displaced people and the way they are perceived.  This paper will focus on a range of popular cultural representations of war-induced displacement. It will explore the visualization of various modes of (im)mobility and semiotics of migration, belonging, and up/rootedness in Ukrainian popular art shared on Instagram since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion. It will look at spaces and places of (im)mobility, migrant geographies mapping out the broken universes and devastated home(lands), migration routes, border crossings.

Svitlana Kot is a visiting postdoctoral scholar at the Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University (UdS), a member of the UniGR Center for Border Studies and a senior lecturer of the English Philology and Translation Department at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University.  The primary area of expertise is Border Studies, (Native) American Literature, Digital Cultural Studies. Holds a PhD in Philology (American Literature). In 2021 defended a PhD thesis "Poetics Of Space In The Novels By Louise Erdrich: Transcultural Perspective".  2022-2023 a Volkswagen postdoc scholar affiliated with Saarland University involved in the project "Borders in Crisis: Discursive, Narrative, and Mediatic Border Struggles in Ukraine, Europe, and North America". Currently working on the projects: "Border Mobilities and Refugee Writing"; "(Un)welcomed and (Il)legal: Affective Perspectives on Child Migrant Representations  in Graphic Novels", "Documenting Ukraine: Digital War Diaries"; and “Border Chronotopes” 2024-2026.

Yuliya Stodoslinksa (Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University, Mykolaiv and Universität des Saarlandes)
Temporal and Spatial Borders within the New Wartime Reality: Multimodal Narration in Digital Discourses

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2024 has led to the appearance of a significant number of digital artworks portraying wartime narratives on various social media platforms. These artistic practices are symbolic markers present in the digital space that try to document the events, role of specific people, actions, words which are important not only for this time in history but for the future generations as well. The analyzed digital art corpus embraces an essential thematic dimension relating to the construction and representation of Ukrainian wartime reality on Instagram during the full-scale invasion. In this paper I focus on the multimodal representation of temporal and spatial borders within the new wartime reality in the analyzed digital art. I aim to establish the distinctive features of multimodal narration and to identify the verbal and nonverbal components that are used to portray and shape the experiences, circumstances, surroundings, and challenges faced during the period of armed conflict.

Yuliya Stodolinska is a visiting postdoctoral scholar at the Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University, member of the UniGR Center for Border Studies, and an associate professor of the English Philology and Translation Department at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University in Ukraine. She holds a PhD in Philology (Germanic Languages). Her research focuses on the multimodal representations of borders and border crossings in American and European digital media, literary, and marketing discourses. Her scientific interests include Border Studies, Discourse Studies, Intercultural Business Communication, Cultural Studies. She is an active participant of the projects “Border Chronotopes in the Digital Age: Memories in Times of Wars” within the framework of the DAAD East Partnership Program, “AI Across Borders” within the “Digital Teaching Plug-in” project at Saarland University, “Cross-linguistic Information Theoretic Modelling of Communicative Efficiency” at the Collaborative Research Center SFB 1102, and other international projects.

Olha Polishchuk (Universität des Saarlandes)
Shifting Borders and the Resistance of Women in the Digital Art during the Russo-Ukrainian War

This research examines the role of digital art in portraying women's resistance during the Russo-Ukrainian war, focusing on the shifting physical and symbolic borders of conflict and identity. Art produced and shared on social media platforms, particularly Instagram, highlights how culture responds to the complexities of warfare. The study emphasizes how Ukrainian women are depicted as symbols of resilience, strength, and defiance, actively reshaping traditional gender roles and narratives through digital storytelling. Utilizing multimodal discourse analysis and visual analysis techniques, this study investigates portrayals of women as soldiers, volunteers, and paramedics within digital art, exploring how these representations challenge societal norms and contribute to preserving national and cultural identity. By analyzing digital artworks shared on Instagram, one of Ukraine's most popular social media platforms, this research offers insight into how Ukrainian women's resistance is visualized and disseminated during the ongoing conflict.  This study highlights the significance of digital art in documenting women's roles during war, shaping public opinion, and contributing to broader conversations about gender, activism, and national identity in times of armed conflict.

Olha Polishchuk has a Ph.D. in Literary Theory (Ukraine, 2016). 2017 – 2019 she participated in the research “Writer-Intellectual in the Migration Processes: Challenges for Memory and Identity” (Ukraine). In 2019 she was the head of the scientific project “Memory Model in the Ukrainian Modern and Postmodern Literature” (grant from the President of Ukraine for young academics). June 2022 – May 2023 she researched the conceptualization of borders in literary discourses within the project “Borders in Crisis: Discursive, Narrative, and Mediatic Border Struggles in Ukraine, Europe, and North America” (Volkswagen Fond, Germany). Currently, she is employed at Saarland University and involved in the projects "Documenting Ukraine: Digital War Diaries", “Border Chronotopes” 2024-2026, and other international projects.

Alina Mozolevska
Wartime Populism and Identity Amid Shifting Borders: Time and Space Construction in Zelensky's Addresses

The paper investigates the role of time and space in political performance, with a focus on Volodymyr Zelensky's wartime addresses during Ukraine’s Independence Day celebrations. In an era of heightened digital political communication, Zelensky’s speeches provide a unique case for analyzing how temporal and spatial elements are employed to construct collective identities,  and a sense of national unity. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from populism and discourse studies, this analysis highlights how Zelensky leverages key historical references and symbolic locations, such as Kyiv’s Independence Square, to create an affective us-building mechanism. Through this, the paper explores how wartime leadership uses performative and spatial tools to solidify a shared national narrative, transforming historical experiences into powerful symbols of resistance and sovereignty.

Alina Mozolevska is an associate professor in the Faculty of Philology at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University (Mykolaiv, Ukraine). In 2015, she earned her PhD in Linguistics, specializing in Romance languages, from Taras Shevchenko National University (Kyiv, Ukraine). She has held research fellowships at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne (France, 2017) and the UniGR-Center for Border Studies at Saarland University (Germany, 2022). Mozolevska was also a visiting fellow of the VolkswagenStiftung at Saarland University (Germany, 2022–2023). She is a member of the Prisma Ukraïna research group "War, Migration, and Memory" (Forum Transregionale Studien, Germany, since 2022) and the HEPP Research Group (University of Helsinki, Finland, since 2022). Currently, she is an academic guest fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Germany, 2024–2025). Her research interests include media studies, discourse analysis, and border studies, and she has published extensively on topics related to borders and identity in both literary and political discourse.

Panel 5-B: Travail, salaire et langues dans les régions frontalières (FR)
Vendredi, 11h30 - 13h00 | R. 0.01

Travail, salaire et langues dans les régions frontalières

Marie-France Gaunard (Université de Lorraine; Chair)

Sabine Ehrhart, Grégory Hamez, Hélène Langinier, Claudia Polzin-Haumann, Christina Reissner, Jean-Yves Trépos (WG GRETI)
La coopération policière à la frontière franco-allemande : langues et territoires de passage

Dans un contexte post-pandémique, plusieurs institutions engagées dans des relations transfrontalières ont effectué un bilan de leurs processus de coopération. C’est le cas des services de gendarmerie français à la frontière franco-allemande. Les chercheurs du GRETI, Groupement de Recherches Transfrontalières Interdisciplinaires, ont accompagné la démarche. Ils ont questionné notamment les dimensions linguistiques et territoriales, pour sonder les enjeux, obstacles et bonnes pratiques de la coopération policière. La méthodologie a consisté en la tenue de 7 réunions de type focus group, et 2 entretiens semi-directifs, dans différentes brigades et commissariats de la zone frontalière. Les documents collectés étaient outre les enregistrements, un questionnaire sur les biographies linguistiques et le dessin de cartes mentales. Les résultats soulignent l’existence d’une culture organisationnelle spécifique, le rôle clef des compétences linguistiques, mais aussi le rôle crucial des passeurs de frontière (boundary spanners) pour développer la coopération. Nous soulignons que la coopération réussie entre équipes franco-allemandes repose majoritairement sur des individus biculturels, bilingues, fervents défenseurs du franco-allemand. Nous proposons de systématiser et de reconnaitre leur rôle au niveau organisationnel pour développer la coopération franco-allemande dans toutes les unités concernées. Les discours et les cartes mentales indiquent aussi la tension relevée chez les agents entre la loyauté à leur administration de rattachement, et l’investissement dans des problématiques transfrontalières, à la manière d’une double contrainte (double bind).

Franz Clément, LISER
Rétrocession fiscale en Belgique, Luxembourg

La Belgique et le Luxembourg ont organisé entre eux depuis plus de vingt ans un système de rétrocession fiscale permettant de compenser le manque à gagner des communes belges en raison du travail frontalier. La France et l’Allemagne ne connaissaient pas pareil système mais le réclament depuis longtemps. On peut se poser la question de savoir pourquoi il existe pareille différence de traitement. Il faut expliquer que la Belgique et le Luxembourg ont conclu en 1921 un traité d’union économique et douanière (le traité UEBL) dans lequel cette rétrocession fiscale trouve place. Ceci dit, pourquoi ne pas accorder un régime similaire à France et à l’Allemagne, même en dehors de tout traité ? Pourquoi ce traitement à la carte alors que des réalités communes relient les communes frontalières belges, allemandes et françaises. Le travail frontalier induit en effet un manque à gagner conséquent ainsi qu’une paupérisation de plusieurs de ces communes. Mon intervention souhaite faite l’historique de l’UEBL et des demandes de rétrocession fiscales envers le Luxembourg en montrant l’action des différents mouvements qui s’organisent en ce sens, en France surtout. Cette problématique est à mettre en lien aussi avec la question de la représentation des travailleurs frontaliers au Luxembourg. Divers mouvements se sont créés aussi en ce sens afin de faire valoir des revendications. Ceux-ci ne manquent-ils pas toutefois de coordination pour se faire entendre auprès des autorités luxembourgeoises ? C’est le second volet que je souhaiterais aborder dans ma présentation si elle était retenue. La conclusion tournera autour de la question d’une nécessité éventuelle de mieux coordonner les revendications des frontaliers au sein de la Grande Région plutôt que de les laisser sous formes d’initiatives isolées.
 
Franz Clément est né en 1969. Titulaire d’un doctorat en sociologie du travail, il exerce son activité professionnelle au LISER depuis 28 ans. Ses thèmes principaux de recherche sont le travail frontalier et le dialogue social.

Rachid Belkacem (Université de Lorraine)
Niveaux et structures des Salaires au Luxembourg et en Suisse  

Cette communication vise à analyser les niveaux et structures des salaires dans deux pays (Le Luxembourg et La Suisse) très utilisateurs de travailleurs frontaliers. Elle s’appuie sur les résultats de 2 études sur les disparités salariales des métiers en tension financées par l’EURES Grande Région et l’EURES-T Rhin Supérieur. La Suisse et le Luxembourg peuvent être définis comme des small open economy (KATZENSTEIN 1985), des économies ouvertes sur le Monde. Tout comme le Luxembourg, l’Etat helvétique est souvent cité comme l’un des pays le plus globalisé au monde (KOF, 2021). Point commun, ces deux pays apparaissent de plus en plus attractifs pour les travailleurs des pays voisins parmi lesquels figure au premier rang la France. C’est ce que note d’ailleurs l’Insee dans une publication récente (2023). Mais comment expliquer cet essor du travail frontalier vers ces deux pays ? Un élément de réponse réside dans les disparités économiques et sociales qui favorisent les échanges d’où l’apparition de nombreux flux comme ceux de travailleurs frontaliers parmi lesquels figurent au premier plan les différences de salaire, différences de coût immobilier, différences du coût de la vie. Il est intéressant de voir qu’aux frontières de la France, la Suisse est de loin la première destination de ces travailleurs frontaliers. Ce pays capte en effet près de la moitié des actifs sortants résidents en France (215 178 personnes en 2020) suivi par le Luxembourg (95 838), puis de l’Allemagne (50 773). Les niveaux de salaire élevés constituent une raison du travail frontalier souvent citée dans les enquêtes auprès des travailleurs frontaliers. Mais qu’en est-il vraiment ? Et surtout comment peut-on expliquer ces niveaux de salaires élevés en Suisse et au Luxembourg ? La communication tentera d’expliquer que les différences de niveaux de salaire s’expliquent par différentes variables, économiques, sociologiques et institutionnelles. Celles-ci s’inscrivent à différents niveaux, micro (au niveau des politiques d’entreprise), macro (au niveau des politiques nationales, voire fédérales et cantonales pour tenir compte de la spécificité suisse des systèmes  sociaux et fiscaux) et, voire même, au niveau méso comme par exemple les pratiques de rémunérations sectorielles dans le bâtiment ou encore dans le secteur des services financiers intégrant les conventions collectives ou même des accords d’entreprise.

Maître de Conférences en économie à l’Université de Lorraine; Chef de département de gestion des entreprises et des administrations de l’IUT Henri Poincaré de Longwy; Membre du laboratoire Territoire, Emploi, Travail, Age et Santé (TETRAS) et du Center for Border Studies de l’Université Grande Région.
Thèmes de recherche : emploi, travail et formation dans une optique comparative internationale et transfrontalière

Panel 5-C: Cultural Heritage Practices in Borderlands as Old and New Homelands (EN)
Vendredi, 11h30 - 13h00 | R. 3.04

Cultural Heritage Practices in Borderlands as Old and New Homelands

Danielle Kopf-Giammanco (Universität des Saarlandes; Chair)

Katarzyna Marcol (University of Silesia in Katowice)
Cross-Border Relations of the Touts with their Foreign Homeland (Poland) in the Context of Cultural Heritage

The cultural heritage of the Tout ethnic group, inhabiting the village of Ostojićevo in the Serbian Banat, became the basis for creating a sense of Polish national identity and, as a result, for the formal establishment of a Polish minority in Serbia in 2018. The Touts are descendants of migrants who left their native Wisła in the Duchy of Cieszyn, in the Austrian Silesia (today in Poland), in the 19th century, to seek work and a better life in the southern borderlands of the Habsburg Monarchy. Until the beginning of the 21st century, they did not have a developed sense of national identity, although they were recorded as Slovaks in censuses, mainly because of their affiliation with the Slovak Evangelical Church in Serbia and because they used the Vistula dialect, which has many lexemes borrowed from Czech and Slovak. The ethnonym "Tout" comes from the Hungarian term "Tōth", used specifically for settlers from Upper Hungary (today's Slovakia). Since 2007 - i.e. since the time of intensive official contacts between Poles and Touts, the creation of the zone of influence of the Polish Embassy in Belgrade in Ostojićevo, the activities of institutions and non-governmental organizations for the Polish minority, as well as scientific research conducted among the Touts - the process of changing identity from ethnic (Tout) to national Polish has been taking place. The formation of a new cultural memory by Touts is associated with the acceptance of the Polish symbolic universe referring to the nation, the creation of new emblems (e.g. "Polish" folk costumes, the stage repertoire presented by "Polish" children's groups) and still requires active actions to confirm Polishness. The new national identity is shaped by the belief in the continuity between communicative memory, transmitted in the home language in narratives from generation to generation, and cultural memory, preserved in the system of national symbols. Cross-border relations with the "foreign homeland", which is currently Poland, have led to the fact that traditional folklore - which is part of the communicative memory of the Touts as a known, repeatable and acceptable system of meanings and symbols and judgments about the world - through the actions of activists from non-governmental organizations, has been "transferred" to the plane of the system of national symbols, which until then had been incomprehensible and alien. In this way, in the experience of the Tout community, the family dimension of the transmission of memory has been connotatively equalized with the national dimension of the "foreign homeland", which has led to its reification, familiarization, positive valuation, and even becoming an object of desire. The basis for constructing ideas about the "foreign homeland" began to be the poetics of folklore, which not only provides aesthetic experiences, but through the repetition of patterns and formulas shapes the image of the world, transmits patterns of thinking and validates legitimization strategies. Organizations working for the "Polish minority in Ostojićevo" caused traditional folklore, which until then had not been associated with any imagined community, and was simply a part of the cultural behaviors of the Touts as a transparent and obvious element of their own culture, to become a determinant of the emerging Polish nationality.

Katarzyna Marcol - Assoc.Prof. at the University of Silesia in Katowice (Poland), Institute of Cultural Studies.
Scientific and Educational Areas of Interest: ETHNIC GROUPS AT THE BORDERLANDS / MULTI-ETHNIC SOCIETIES - language, cultural and identity aspects in multi-ethnic societies; "linguistic and cultural ecology" in ethnically diverse environments, for example in what way people with a different way of thinking (which is after all the effect of using different language codes or professing different religions) build a sense of belonging to the local community.
CULTURAL ECOLOGY - how people adapt to social and physical environments; how culture is changing with changes of environment, for example people from villages come to big urban agglomerations because of industrialization and they have to adapt to new circumstances / or big coal mines become unprofitable and people return from a city to the countryside; it is also a question about the distribution of wealth and power in a society.

Zohar Iancu (Universidade Católica Portuguesa)
On the Borderlands of Culture: Israeli Migrants Beyond the Tejo

In recent years, a notable trend of Israeli citizens immigrating to Portugal has developed, influenced by lifestyle, political, and economic factors. This paper examines the emergence of Southwest Alentejo as a diasporic space for Israeli migrants. Like other rural Portuguese regions, this area has become associated with the ‘lifestyle migration’ of individuals and communities advocating sustainability, anti-consumerism, and post-national values. Grounded in migration, cultural, border, and diaspora studies, this research highlights the multifaceted nature of border crossings. The study employs an interdisciplinary qualitative approach, including participant observations, in-depth interviews, and the Photovoice method, to document the daily lives and cultural practices of Jewish-Israelis in Alentejo. Data was collected over three years, from August 2021 to May 2023, through observations of holiday ceremonies, gatherings, and cultural events, 21 in-depth interviews with Jewish-Israeli residents, and a focus group of Jewish-Israeli women. Findings reveal that after crossing the border, participants have dialectic and conflictual relationships with their Israeli-Jewish culture of origin, yet maintain close connections to it and forge meaningful relationships with other Israelis in the region. This dynamic creates a ‘cultural borderland’—a liminal space that draws on Israeli cultural practices while challenging the boundaries of collective Israeli-Jewish identity. The research suggests that the Israeli diasporic space in Alentejo illuminates how ex-Israeli communities are constructed and reimagined beyond Israeli national and cultural borders. In that way, transcending the border is not just a physical movement but also a symbolic one, challenging concepts of sovereignty, identity, and belonging. This study amplifies voices often excluded from discourses on Israeli migration. Its contributions enrich the literature on diasporas, particularly Israeli diasporas, and provide insights into current migration patterns to rural Portugal, enhancing understanding of how physical and symbolic boundaries shape collective identities and experiences of belonging.

Zohar Iancu is currently a doctoral candidate at Universidade Católica Portuguesa (UCP) in Culture Studies. Her PhD research focuses on the recent wave of Israeli immigration to rural Portugal, combining ethnography with visual and performative research methods. In recent years, she has been exploring the theme of symbolic boundaries and their influence on cultural, political, mental, and physical realities. She holds a B.A. in Psychology and Sociology from The Academic College of Tel Aviv-Yaffo and an M.A. in Culture Studies - Performance and Creativity from UCP, graduating with honors. Additionally, she has a diploma in Research and Documentary Screenplay from the Open University of Israel. Her work involves intellectual and artistic projects aimed at creating innovative projects and methodologies that bridge the gap between cultural research and practice.