Language – Culture – Identity

Lille, Strasbourg and Basel are powerful cities situated close to national borders.  Fuelled by economic, political and symbolic functions, their influence creates regions that are both metropolitan and cross-border. Thanks to interviews, cartographic work and textual analyses, this thesis looks at how cross-border metropolitan regions are constructed. This emerges as a process whereby the local actors have to mobilise together and with the European Union to negotiate with the States. This European scale recomposition generates areas subject to tensions where the cross-border conurbation is also part of other, larger regions.

The symbolic role of national borders for cross-border regionalisation remains little-known. In order to broaden our understanding of the meaning-making capacity of borders, this paper looks at what happens when the border is apparently not the object of a symbolisation strategy. The case of Greater Geneva appears particularly informative as this cross-border cooperation seeks to develop an integrated urban agglomeration marked by the ‘erasure’ of the Franco-Swiss border. Rather than an absence of symbolisation, the border is recoded as a ‘planned obsolescence’ through its ‘invisibilization’ in the Genevan borderscape. However, the dissonance between this recoding by cross-border cooperation elites and existing popular imaginations weakens the cooperation project. To the extent that borders are powerful symbols which are intended to stimulate emotions and empathy, the ability to mobilize their meaning-making capacity is at the heart of symbolisation politics, as much for the proponents of open borders and cross-border cooperation as for the reactionary forces that emphasize national interests and ontological insecurity.

‘The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialism(s)’ sets into relation U.S. imperial and Indigenous conceptions of territoriality as articulated in U.S. legal texts and Indigenous life writing in the 19th century. It analyzes the ways in which U.S. legal texts as “legal fictions” narratively press to affirm the United States’ territorial sovereignty and coherence in spite of its reliance on a variety of imperial practices that flexibly disconnect and (re)connect U.S. sovereignty, jurisdiction and territory.

At the same time, the book acknowledges Indigenous life writing as legal texts in their own right and with full juridical force, which aim to highlight the heterogeneity of U.S. national territory both from their individual perspectives and in conversation with these legal fictions. Through this, the book’s analysis contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the coloniality of U.S. legal fictions, while highlighting territoriality as a key concept in the fashioning of the narrative of U.S. imperialism.

In the article three dimensions of border of aesthetic are discussed: firstly, the border as a place where aesthetic phenomena develop, secondly, the aesthetic representation of borders and thirdly, concepts of border aesthetics. While these three dimensions are explained and their different constituent elements and developments are traced by means of examples and conceptual discussions, the "special creative potential of representation" (p. 451), that the border offers is explored. At the same time, it cannot be overlooked that the different dimensions of border aesthetics neither follow on from each other in linear fashion, nor contradict each other, but rather they are connected to each other by means of fluid transitions and intersections.

High unemployment rates on one side of a border and training opportunities on the other, the lack of training programmes for specialised jobs on the one side of the border and well-defined vocational programmes on the other side: cross-border vocational education and training (VET) is an increasingly used tool to accommodate the differing needs inside the European Union in recent years. This paper present explains and analyses the diverse approaches and concepts of tailor-made as well as more standardised cross-border VET programmes in the Greater Region SaarLorLux (DE, FR, LUX, BE) and explain the different mobility types.

The six contributions to this forum on feminist border theory offer different perspectives on the relations between gender, borders, power, identity, difference and solidarity. The authors use feminist theory to illustrate and analyze gendered border politics, violent border struggles, and practices of bordering at and beyond national borders. They illustrate their arguments using examples from the US-Mexican border and Italian borders, referring to domestic workers’ movements, racist politics of division and family separations. Furthermore, they show as well how bordered identities, Neplanta activism and coalitions across differences in border(land) spaces can lead to new forms of solidarity, identity and resistance.

In recent decades, Border Studies have gained importance and have seen a noticeable increase in development.  This manifests itself in an increased institutionalisation, a differentiation of the areas of research interest and a conceptual reorientation that is interested in examining processes.  So far, however, little attention has been paid to questions about (inter-)disciplinary self-perception and the methodological foundations of Border Studies and the associated consequences for research activities.  This thematic issue addresses these desiderata and brings together articles that deal with their (inter-)disciplinary foundations as well as method(olog)ical and practical research questions.  The authors also provide sound insights into a disparate field of work, disclose practical research strategies, and present methodologically sophisticated systematizations.