In Person: CFGS C168 (Sedgewick Building, University of Victoria) or Zoom. The meeting will take place from 12:00pm to 1:30pm PST. Register in advance for this meeting here. Registration is free but required.
Borders are once again at the center of attention. With the many bloody conflicts in the world, violence at borders and border traumas connected with the crossings of borders have increased in recent times. Particularly over the last decade, the increasing focus of Western policies on controlling migration and discipling mobility has led to a high-technologization of the border regime and a multiplication of border infrastructures, leading to a new age of borderization—a downright border renaissance—that has been exacerbated by the recent COVID-19 pandemic, during which the proliferation of new and renewed borders has reached unequaled heights. This talk will focus on the current resurgence in the importance and vitality of borders, showing that the current border renaissance has also led to a rebirth in border literature, border arts, and border theories, which offer fresh ways of conceiving borders.
Astrid M. Fellner is Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University, Germany, where she is Head of the “University of the Greater Region Center for Border Studies.” She is co-editor of a trilingual Border Glossary and a handbook of key terms in Border Studies, and she has published on the US/Canada as well as US/Mexican border. She has been involved in research and teaching projects in Border Studies with Ukrainian universities and has worked on the BMBF-project “Linking Borderlands,” for which she studies border films and industrial culture of the Greater Region in comparison with the German/Polish border.
