BIG_Review 1.1
Fall/Winter 2019
BIG_Review is a different kind of journal, traversing disciplinary boundaries and integrating the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. Our aspiration is to make widely available academic and artistic explorations of borders in the 21st century. We seek to better understand the changing meanings, structures, and functions of international boundaries, borders and frontiers. These are no longer strictly territorial. Rather, they are increasingly noncontiguous, fragmented, mobile, and often attached to individuals and goods as they move through and between regulatory frameworks. We ask how, why, and what borders are fundamental. How do they impact people’s lives and the world we live in? These questions are increasingly important, with humankind altering global climate in ways that cannot be contained by borders, and at a time when more people than ever are on the move as migrants and asylum seekers.
Hence the primary goal of BIG_Review is to advance critical understandings of borders in globalization through new research and creative works of art. All articles and essays are double-blind peer reviewed and may be comparative, theoretical, multi-disciplinary and policy relevant; artwork includes painting, drawing, photography, poetry and fiction. Our contributors, along with our Editorial Board members, are based around the world. And the entire journal is free and available online in a variety of electronic formats as an open-access publication. We are committed to public access, quality research, policy relevance, and cultural significance.
Our inaugural issue displays this broad mandate. The following research articles explore transborder governance, identity, culture, precarity, and conflict in borderlands across the world, including the Aegean, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, the Arab Gulf, indigenous Latin America, and more. The issue also includes academic essays on border-wall graffiti, aterritorial borders, and French thinker Paul de La Pradelle. We also feature a range of artwork, including an artist’s portfolio that imagines boundary lines and movement onto canvas, plus original verses from three poets on themes and sentiments related to borders. Book and film reviews round out the first issue.
