Global Talk: Borders With/In Transnational Culture

featuring BIG Fellow Victor Konrad | Centre for Global Studies, UVic, Canada | April 26, 2023

Registration for virtual attendance is now open!

BIG Fellow Victor Konrad will be presenting an upcoming Global Talk at UVic’s Centre for Global Studies on April 26th at 10:30am – 12:00pm PST. The event is free. More information here.

DETAILS: Border culture is no longer culture at the margins, but rather it is culture at the heart of geopolitics. Culture has not readily negotiated the transnational turn; culture is at once driving and responding to the turn. Culture’s immutability has centred culture in transnationalism, and it has enabled the flexibility and adaptability of culture in transnational processes. There are borders with transnational culture, borders in transnational culture, and borders with/in transnational culture. In this presentation, we address how border culture is embedded in the profusion of border experience in globalization, yet also clarifies the definition and meaning of home. We examine how the “suture” of the border both separates and connects transnational space, and the nature of the landscapes that emerge in this bordered geography. We draw attention to the dispossession, violence, and gendering that occurs in transnational space. Finally, we conclude with a pre-script and post-script to address culture at the post-humanistic border.

Victor Konrad is Adjunct Research Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Recently, Dr. Konrad was visiting professor at Eastern China Normal and Yunnan Normal Universities in Shanghai and Kunming, Radboud University, Netherlands, and Karelian Institute of University of Eastern Finland, and visiting fellow at the Border Policy Research Institute, Western Washington University.

From 1990 to 2001, Dr. Konrad established the Canada-US Fulbright Program and Foundation for Educational Exchange between Canada and the United States. During the 1970s and 1980s, he was a professor of Anthropology and Geography at the University of Maine and Director of the Canadian-American Center. Dr. Konrad is past president of the Association of Borderlands Studies and the Association for Canadian Studies in the United States, and recipient of the Donner Medal.

Professor Konrad is author and editor of more than 100 books, articles and book chapters in cultural and behavioural geography, border studies and Canadian studies. Recent books include North American Borders in Comparative Perspective (2020) Borders, Culture, and Globalization: A Canadian Perspective (2021), Border Culture. Theory, Imagination, Geopolitics (2022).

Global Talks are weekly discussions/presentations where we are able to listen to presentations from researchers within CFGS, the university more broadly and also invited guest speakers. These normally take place weekly on Wednesdays from 10:30-noon.

Global Talk: Borders With/In Transnational Culture