Migration and Diaspora Cultural Studies Network (MDCSN)
Border Studies/Contact Zones
Convenors: Stefan Berger, Yaron Matras
Over the past decade borders have become an important focus for research over a wide range of humanities and social science-based disciplines. Scholars have sought answers to the paradox that, on the one hand, we witness the declining relevance and greater porosity of borders under the impact of globalisation, while, on the other hand, the trend towards decentralisation and devolution has led to a proliferation of national and sub-national frontiers. Increasingly the importance of border regions for cultural transfer between nations has been recognised, as has the impact of such transfers on the identities of border regions. Borders are now widely appreciated as the products of discursive interaction between powerful elites and the peoples living at the borders. They are not exclusively political, nor are they necessarily static: they are socially and culturally constructed, integrative and dynamic, and can be invested with radically divergent ethnic and political meanings that generate a fluidity not captured by the notion of the border as simply a line on a map. Geographical borders are not necessarily coterminous with symbolic boundaries. We should therefore be aware of the diverse types of material and mental borders, and their related territories and identities; such a programme should therefore underline the multidimensional and multidisciplinary character of border studies. Borders and identities should be studied as dynamic phenomena in their own right and should be approached historically and comparatively as part of a wider process, rather than as a collection of unrelated unique case studies. The network will attempt to draw these diverse strands of thought together in order to create a stronger conceptual and theoretical basis for investigating and understanding boundaries.
Among the phenomena that interest us under this heading are the overlap of borders (as in politically contested zones, or cultural and linguistic transition areas), clusters of borders (such as confessional, political, linguistic), borders as classification constructions and symbols, border zones as refuge zones and borders as contact zones.