Identity

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.

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.

This collective publication offers an insight into some of the many and varied social and political practices emerging in the border regions of the Western world as a reaction to the phenomenon of globalisation. It proposes to qualify these practices with the notion of "B/ordering space". One thing they all have in common is that they are processes linked to the existence of borders which manifest on a spatial and territorial level.

The book essentially questions the way spaces can be described and empirically studied within or as cross-border relations. To do this, the author focuses on border dwellers in the Greater Region of SaarLorLux, insofar as its circular mobility structure and its presence in multiple neighbouring areas may be considered exemplary for cross-border life realities. The book hypothesises that spaces, rather than being pre-existing, allow for the development of subjectively significant spatial relations through cross-border activities. The concept of space therefore describes the significant social relations developed through border dweller practices, which are partially operationalised and studied empirically through socio-cultural questions.

Located in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the interdisciplinary Centre for International Border Research deals with border reconfiguration and conflict transformation at various levels. The academic staff involved comes from anthropology, geography, political science and sociology. The network represents an opportunity for scholars worldwide to network and exchange research outputs on borders. It does so by a wide range of activities: organization/supporting seminars and conferences, running a visiting fellowship programme, publishing working papers, hosting a well-documented multi-media resource platform. The website provides free access to a large extent of the network. The website documents mainly activities that ran in the 2000s and early 2010s.

This article examines the concept of boundaries, by putting an emphasis on the utility of the concept for the study of relational processes. Literatures on collective and social identity; ethnic/racial, class, gender/sex inequality; knowledge, professions and science; as well as national identities, communities and spatial boundaries are discussed. The similarity of processes that are at work across different social worlds and locations as well as in a range of institutions are highlighted. Finally possible development paths for the future elaboration of the concept are proposed.

The EUBORDERSCAPES project analyzed the conceptual changes in the study of borders that have taken place in the past decades. The project focused on the social significance and subjectivities of state borders. “Objective” categories of state territoriality were critically interrogating. Parallel to the study of conceptual change, the main research question was “how [do] different and often contested conceptualisations of state borders (in terms of their political, social, cultural and symbolic significance) resonate in concrete contexts at the level of everyday life”.

The edited collection offers a practical-theoretical perspective. It is assumed that “spaces and identities emerge from social practices” (p. 9). A reconstruction of media, institutional and everyday cultural practices in border regions is carried out on the basis of various research projects. Luxembourg and the neighboring regions in Belgium, Germany and France form the empirical research context for the individual contributions. Analytically, a distinction is made between three intertwined “border practices” “(1) the establishment of borders as differentiation or self-/foreign regulation to the outside; (2) the crossing of borders as an affirmative and/or subversive act with transformation potential; and (3) the expansion of borders as an ‘in between’ of manifold relations and intersections” (p. 10).

In “Contribution B/Ordering in the Greater Region. Mobilities – Borders – Identities” Christian WILLE questions the quadrangle inhabitants' sense of belonging as predicted in the model for regional-political cooperation in the Greater Region. The author examines “which orders of self/other are apparent in the self image of the inhabitants of the Greater Region and to what extent they suggest a cross-border identity” (p. 52) and elaborates on three central features of identity constructions.