This group is dedicated to the study of borders and borderlands through a cultural studies lense. As such, Cultural Border Studies cover a vast inter-/transdisciplinary field of activity mainly in the humanities, but also in social sciences and related disciplines. Instead of considering borders primarily as geographical or political structures, Cultural Border Studies approaches focus on performative, temporal, cultural, and linguistic aspects and carve out their interconnectedness and their influences and impact on processes of border production. In Cultural Border Studies, the traditional take on borders as static, fixed and stable entities or as dividing boundary lines has given way to a understanding of borders as fluid, mobile, and ubiquitious phenomena, processes, and practices. Against this backdrop, the ‘border’ amplifies its potential in research, away from a mere object of research to a subject position, a research perspective, from which analyses are carried out, and thus unfurling the playground for using border as method (Mezzadra & Neilson 2015). This development is reflected in recent theoretical conceptualizations and figures of thought such as borderscapes (amongst others, Brambilla) and bordertextures and bordertexturing (Weier et al. 2018; Fellner, Wille, & Nossem forthcomig).
Collaborations, projects, and working groups with a focus on Cultural Border Studies:
– Working Group Bordertextures (bordertextures.org, UniGR-Center for Border Studies)
– Sektion kulturwissenschaftliche Border Studies of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft (https://kwgev.wordpress.com/kulturwissenschaftliche-border-studies/)