Border areas are spaces for exchanges and networking – cultural, linguistic, historical and economic. The latest research on the teaching and learning of neighbour languages in the German-French border regions of SaarLorLux and the Upper Rhine shows the important role of border regions as laboratories for European integration. The articles in this collection address a wide range of aspects of the academic debate around cross-border issues in foreign language teaching. It therefore contributes not only to a deeper scientific debate on this complex topic, but also provides inspiration for a greater integration of the border (area)-related educational aspects of (language) teaching on both sides of the border.
For a decade now, borders in Europe have been back on the political agenda. Border research has responded and is breaking new ground in thinking about and exploring borders. This book follows this development and strengthens a perspective that is interested in life realities and that focuses on the everyday cultural experience of borders. The authors reconstruct such experiences in the context of different forms of migration and mobility as well as language contact situations. In this way, they empirically identify everyday cultural usage or appropriation strategies of borders as vastly different experiences of the border. The readers of this volume will gain insights into current developments in border research and the life realities in Europe where borders are (made) relevant.
The UniGR-Center for Border Studies Border Textures working group was set up in 2015 to pursue and further develop the cultural orientation of Border Studies in the Greater Region. This research orientation focuses on the symbolic-social dimension of borders, which it addresses from both high and popular cultural angles and everyday cultural angles. To do this the working group has developed the Border Textures approach, which, as a methodology and heuristic, addresses the practises and discourses around borders with their actors, media, materialisations, effects, places and the complex interactions between them. The approach forms an instrument for analysis and refection that helps to understand the social and cultural workings and mechanisms of border (de)stabilisation.
The article illustrates the very different developments of the subregions making up the Greater Region, but also the similarities (e.g. guest worker migration in the 1960s and 70s in the Greater Region, ethnic Germans who migrated to Germany in recent decades or American forces in Rhineland-Palatinate. The article looks in depth at each subregion, sets out the specificities of the regions and analyses the reasons behind them. The development of the subregions is also examined in the context of their historical and economic development and the removal of the borders under the Schengen Agreement and the emergence of simplified cross-border migration (e.g. also atypical cross-border commuters) within the Greater Region. The different approaches to integration are also described.
The aim of the TEIN network, led by the Euro-Institut in Strasbourg, is to contribute to the process of European integration by training the actors involved in cross-border projects. Its members are different research and training organisations from more than 10 European Union countries. Its activities focus on the sharing of good practices and knowledge of cross-border issues and well as producing and disseminating educational tools for cross-border practitioners.
The Longwy cross-border area provides a fertile ground for discussing theories on the transformation of social issues into spatial issues, from the past domination of the steel industry and the brutality of the changes that have occurred over a thirty-year period to the sharp increase in cross-border working. Various representations of the notion of the cross-border rub shoulders here. The discourses of the institutions propose readings that are more and more focused on going beyond borders and moving further and further away from contradictory social relations. Yet researchers are reasserting the fact that it is social relations that define a territory, which, in return, inscribes them in its territory. But they do not agree on whether or not the class struggle has disappeared.
This collective and multidisciplinary publications questions the notion of the border, whose realities and existence are today being challenged under the effect of globalisation. Four disciplines come together here: law, history, sociology and economics. The publication offers historical and epistemological reflections arising out of analyses of European border situations. It highlights the recent changes in the border situations in the European space and the social dynamics running through them.
The publication looks at the diverse representations mobilised in connection with cross-border populations and the contradictions that these representations reveal depending on the actors or institutions that produce them. It identifies the different actors that produce such representations and offers some insights into how they are perceived among the inhabitants of border regions and how they have evolved in the recent history of European integration.
At a time when Europe is facing a migration crisis, the Schengen Border Art site provides an insight into the vision and work of many artists around the issue of European borders, the way they are experienced by migrants and newcomers and the violence, injustice or vulnerability of their situation. These different works help to raise awareness among European citizens of the reality and scale of the problem.
