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.

#17 BIG Podcast – “Border Film and Border Studies”

featuring Michael Dear – Professor Emeritus of City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, California, United States

Borders are legal constructs: conventional lines on maps, landmarks on the ground, zone of cooperation, control and violence. But borders are also an artistic object. Sometimes, it is the border itself which is the support of a work of art. Other times, they appear in works of photography, comics, and in movies. Today we are going to talk about “Border Film” with Michael Dear who has just published a book called « Border Witness, Reimagining The US-Mexico Borderlands Through Film ». It is an opportunity to learn more about the construction of mental, cultural and artistic representations of borders and their complex links with reality.

Michael Dear is Professor Emeritus in the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, and Honorary Professor in the Bartlett School of Planning at University College, London. He is the author/editor of fifteen books, and many scholarly essays. His work has been translated into many languages, and he has lectured in over twenty countries in four continents. He has also written widely for non-academic publications, including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, National Geographic en español, the Huffington Post, and Politico Magazine. Michael has been a Guggenheim Fellowship holder, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a Fulbright Specialist, and Fellow at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, Italy. He has received the highest honors for creativity and excellence in research from several organizations, as well as numerous undergraduate teaching and graduate mentorship awards. In 2014, he was elected as a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales (his country of birth).

Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and the Podcast App!

Patterns in Border Security: Regional Comparisons

Christian Leuprecht, Todd Hataley, Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly | Routledge | 2022

How do security communities transform into security regimes? This book compares the construction of cross-border security regimes across five regions of the world to illustrate how trust emerges from the day-to-day relations of coordination, cooperation, or collaboration. Patterns in Border Security: Regional Comparisons studies the way borderland communities develop, implement, and align border policy to enhance their sense of security. Borders have been evolving rapidly in direct response to the multifaceted challenges brought on by globalization, which has had a nuanced impact on the way borders are governed and border security is managed. Taking a methodical comparative regional approach, this book identifies and contrasts determinants of nascent, ascendant, and mature border security regimes, which the book documents in seven regional case studies from across the globe. The findings identify conditions that give rise to cross-border and trans-governmental coordination, cooperation, or collaboration. Specifically, pluralistic forms of communication and interactions, sometimes far from the actual borderline, emerge as key determinants of friendly and trustful relations among both contiguous and non-contiguous regions. This is a significant innovation in the study of borders, in particular in the way borders mediate security. For six decades international security studies had posited culture as the bedrock of security communities. By contrast, the book identifies conditions, a method, and a model for adequate and effective cross-border relations, but whose outcome is not contingent on culture.

Editors:

Christian Leuprecht is Class of 1965 Professor in Leadership, Department of Political Science and Economics, Royal Military College of Canada; Director of the Institute of Intergovernmental Relations, School of Policy Studies, Queen’s University, Canada; Adjunct Research Professor, Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security, Charles Sturt University, Australia; and Munk Senior Fellow in Security and Defence at the Macdonald Laurier Institute. A former Fulbright Research Chair in Canada-US Relations at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC (2020) and a former Eisenhower Fellow at the NATO Defence College in Rome (2019), he is a recipient of RMC’s Cowan Prize for Excellence in Research and an elected member of the College of New Scholars of the Royal Society of Canada.  He is Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Military Journal.

Todd Hataley is Professor in the School of Justice and Community Development at Fleming College in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada; Adjunct Associate Professor at the Royal Military College of Canada; and a former Fulbright Research Chair in Canada-US Relations at Johns Hopkins University. He is a retired member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. During his tenure as a federal police officer, he conducted investigations into the smuggling of drugs, weapons and humans, money laundering, organized crime, national security, and extra-territorial torture investigations. His research focuses on managing of international boundaries, public safety, Indigenous policing, and transnational crime.

Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly is Professor in the School of Public Administration, Jean Monnet Chair and Director of the Jean Monnet Centre and the Borders in Globalization Laboratory at the University of Victoria, Canada. He is Editor of the Borders in Globalization Review.

Borders in Flux and Border Temporalities In and Beyond Europe

Belval, Luxembourg | December 15-16, 2022

Find more information on the event and a detailed programme on the C²DH website.

Border studies is an interdisciplinary field of research in which existing scholarship has primarily been spatially oriented. The conference Borders In Flux and Border Temporalities In and Beyond Europe shedded light on research that focuses on the temporality of borders. The conference connected leading researchers as well as established and early-stage researchers to present, share and discuss their research on borders, borderlands, and border regions in and beyond 19th and 20th century Europe.

The conference invited scholars whose research sheds light on the temporal dimension of borders by exploring border practices, border discourses, and analyses of border regimes and life at the border in Europe. The conference included papers that focus on topics that are related to identity, historical memory, minorities, cross-border experiences, cross-border cooperation, and regionalism. The conference also highlighted methodological and conceptual considerations of researching borders in and through time and space.

The conference was organised by the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH) and the Transfrontier Euro-Institut Network (TEIN) in collaboration with BIG, the UniGr Center for Border Studies and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Keynote Speakers:

Carolin Leutloff-Grandits: “Of being stuck or moving on: border temporalities along the EU’s external border in the Western Balkans.” Leutloff-Grandits, PD Dr. phil., is a social anthropologist and works as a senior researcher at the interdisciplinary Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION at the European University Viadrina. Her research interests include migration, borders, temporality, social security, and family. She is particularly concerned with the countries of the former Yugoslavia and with Germany.

Alena Pfoser: “Remembering as bordering: Using memory studies to understand border temporalities.” Pfoser is Senior Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies at Loughborough University, UK. Her main areas of expertise include memory in contested settings, heritage and tourism industries, borders and borderlands, and qualitative and arts-based methods. For her doctoral and postdoctoral projects, she conducted research on the Russian-Estonian borderland, exploring the interrelations and tensions between official and vernacular memories in two border towns as well as questions of spatial peripheralisation.

Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly is a Professor of Public Administration, and the director of Borders in Globalization (BiG) and 21st century borders research projects at the University of Victoria, Canada. His research interests are comparative border and migration studies, policy governance as well as policy relevant research. He has published over 100 articles and book sections, and 12 books/sections of academic journals.

A World Anthology of Border Poetry

Natasha Sardzoska and Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly

This multilingual anthology presents the works of poets from around the world, showcasing the state of the art and distinct contributions of poetry to literary criticism and dissent. Beyond the social sciences and humanities, the book points to the importance of poetry for the fields of inquiry into borderlands and frontiers as intersectional and relational human experiences. The poems invite the reader to explore innovative approaches to reading and writing borders, those that transcend language within their conventional semiology of boundary transgression.

A World Anthology of Border Poetry
Edited by Natasha Sardzoska and Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly.
BIG_Books Series, #2, 2022