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 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.
The Border Culture/Border Poetics group is an international research group led by members of the Arctic University of Norway (UIT). They propose a new border aesthetics serving to better grasp the representations of borders in the artistic and academic domains. They focus their activities on the scientific and educational fields.
This book summarizes the articles presented in the cross-border research workshops of 2008-2009 organized by the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme of the University of Lorraine in collaboration with the University of Luxembourg. The researchers from different disciplines, such as political science, information or communication studies, history, geography and sociology, came together to exchange ideas about the different approaches to the research object of the border. The questions that form the basis of the empirical investigations deal with the stability, persistence, and traces of the border; representations of territories and borders as well as the dynamics of transcultural and cross-border exchanges.
The three main subjects of study are (1) the border areas visited (political dispositives and social perceptions), (2) media construction and information practices at the level of the Greater Region and (3) the impact of cultural events on transnational representations. The sources used are biographies, questionnaires, surveys and discourse analyses.
