Beyond Borders. Culture, Language, and Identity in European Integration
Beyond Borders. Culture, Language, and Identity in European Integration
Organized by Universitat de Girona (UdG) | Transfrontier Euro-Institut Network (TEIN)
October 21 and 22, 2025
Girona. Faculty of Arts, Universitat de Girona.
The conference Beyond Borders: Culture, Language, and Identity in European Integration will bring together experts, politicians, academics, and community members to reflect collectively on the following aspects:
- How broad cultural expressions (from languages, literature, history, tourism, gastronomy, landscape, etc.) can foster mutual understanding and cooperation between neighboring regions.
- Success (and failure) stories where culture has been a driving force for cross-border cooperation.
- How different identities can enrich cooperation initiatives.
- Strategies to promote, question, hybridize, and preserve cultural and linguistic identities in border regions and throughout Europe.
- The role of languages as a vehicle for communication and cultural exchange.
- The role of shared cultural heritage. Successful cross-border cultural projects.
- Educational programs that promote multilingualism, intercultural understanding, and cross-border cultural exchange.
- How local, regional, and national identities can coexist with a broader European identity.
The conference is jointly organized by the University of Girona (UdG) and the Transfrontier Euro-Institut Network (TEIN), with the support of the Borders in Globalization-21st Century project.
#3 Frontlines Are Everywhere — Sacred Rage and Love for Land, Culture, & Community
featuring ‘Cúagilákv / Jess H̓áust̓I of Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) Nation (Executive Director of Qqs Project Society and the Co-Lead of Right Relations Collaborative)
Jeff Corntassel, citizen of the Cherokee Nation, sits down with ‘Cúagilákv / Jess H̓áust̓I of Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) Nation. Jess is a parent, poet, and land-based educator living in Bella Bella. They are the Executive Director of Qqs Project Society and the Co-Lead of Right Relations Collaborative.
Jess talked about leadership, the inseparability of body & land, and sacred role of rage in activism. They also talked about the impact of the 2016 Nathan E. Stewart tugboat oil spill that released 110,000 litres of diesel and oil into Haíɫzaqv Nation’s harvesting territory, and their healing in relation to land & waters. They also talked about the resurgence of language initiatives and local food revitalization happening in their community.
Jess concludes the podcast by reading from their debut poetry collection, Crushed Wild Mint.
You can find copies of Crushed Wild Mint here.
Listen to Episode Three of the Frontlines Are Everywhere podcast on YouTube.
The Frontlines Are Everywhere podcast takes a critical look at world politics and Indigenous nationhood by discussing Indigenous-led resurgence and activist movements, Indigenous trade networks, Indigenous climate action and the formation of new alliances that transcend colonial state borders among other topics. Dr. Jeff Ganohalidoh Corntassel will be interviewing Indigenous scholars, activists, artists and knowledge holders from across Turtle Island and around the world in order to gain insight into how Indigenous peoples practice their own forms of Internationalism through intimate connections to land/water, culture and community.
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.
Border Culture: Discussing the Centrality of Peripheral Issues to Renew Border Studies
featuring Dr. Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary (Grenoble-Alpes University, France)
This session was held virtually on March 28th, 2023, at 9AM PST. You can now watch the full presentation for free here!
Borders are spatial signifiers and culture is a process of semantization of human environments: border culture is a site where the perception of meaning is made spatially available. “Border culture is an evolving framework for encoding the meaning of border” (p.9). Based on the recent book co-written by Victor Konrad and myself (Border Culture: Theory, Imagination, Geopolitics. Routledge 2022), the webinar will address the nexus between culture and borders, trying to enhance the centrality of culture in the understanding of border dynamics. If border cultures are most evident at border crossings and in borderlands — however, border cultures that appear at the edge of national space reveal themselves to be also in the centre of transnational spaces — they are essential to understand the complex territorialities that shape contemporary geopolitics at its very heart. Borders were defined as international lines of divide at the same time as the Occidental world was framing the fundamental division between culture and nature. At a time where this duality is profoundly challenged by relational thinking in the context of the Anthropocene, “borderculture,” an expression recently coined by Astrid Fellner in a roundtable discussing the book at the ABS conference in Eilat (Feb. 2023), should allow us to open new conceptual developments in critical border studies.
Our aim in this book was “to decode the meaning of border culture,” and this Webinar will articulate two major questionings:
1. How are cultures bordered? Answering this first question takes us into a journey beyond simplistic views of culture territorialization, revealing that if cultural phenomena have borders, those are complex and indeed, that it takes all the literacy of critical border studies to understand their spatiality. I will thus try to guide the audience “out of the border culture trap”.
2. How are borders cultured? Making sense of this second fundamental question relies on the understanding that all borders are cultural productions, anchored in imaginaries. We have worked with a notion of culture that encompassed all that gave meaning to human lives, this allows us to question the multiple ways in which borders give meaning to our existences, through multiple layers, in an intersectional approach
Dr. Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary is full Professor at Grenoble-Alpes University, France and honorary member of the ‘Institut Universitaire de France’, former head of the CNRS Pacte research unit, a pluridisciplinary social sciences research centre. She is a political geographer dedicated to border studies, and her comparative analysis of the border dynamics in Latin America and in Europe has led her to formulate the notion of “mobile borders.” Her recent research concerns the interrelations between space and art, in and about contested places. She is a founding member of the ‘antiAtlas of borders’ collective, a science-art project, and she has animated the Performance Lab dedicated to structuring Practise Based Research in France.
Find more information on Border Culture: Theory, Imagination, Geopolitics (With V. Konrad, Routledge, 2022) here!
Border Culture: Theory, Imagination, Geopolitics
Victor Konrad, Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary | Routledge | 2022
This book introduces readers to the cultural imaginings of borders: the in-between spaces in which transnationalism collides with geopolitical cooperation and contestation.
Recent debates about the “refugee crisis” and the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic have politicized culture at and of borders like never before. Border culture is no longer culture at the margins but rather culture at the heart of geopolitics, flows, and experience of the transnational world. Increasingly, culture and borders are everywhere yet nowhere. In border spaces, national narratives and counter-narratives are tested and evaluated, coming up against transnational culture. This book provides an extensive and critical vision of border culture on the move, drawing on numerous examples worldwide and a growing international literature across border and cultural studies. It shows how border culture develops in the human imagination and manifests in human constructs of “nation” and “state”, as well as in transnationalism. By analyzing this new and expanding cultural geography of border landscapes, the book shows the way to a fresh, broader dialogue.
Exploring the nature and meaning of the intersection of border and culture, this book will be an essential read for students and researchers across border studies, geopolitics, geography, and cultural studies.
Authors:
Victor Konrad is Adjunct Research Professor at Carleton University, Canada, and formerly Director of the Canadian-American Center at the University of Maine, USA, and founding Director, Canada-U.S. Fulbright Program.
Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary is Professor at Grenoble-Alpes University, France, and head of the CNRS Pacte research unit, a pluri-disciplinary social sciences research centre.
Borders, Culture, and Globalization: A Canadian Perspective
Victor Konrad, Melissa Kelly | University of Ottawa Press | 2021
Border culture emerges through the intersection and engagement of imagination, affinity and identity.
It is evident wherever boundaries separate or sort people and their goods, ideas or other belongings. It is the vessel of engagement between countries and peoples—assuming many forms, exuding a variety of expressions, changing shapes—but border culture does not disappear once it is developed, and it may be visualized as a thread that runs throughout the process of globalization.
Border culture is conveyed in imaginaries and productions that are linked to borderland identities constructed in the borderlands. These identities underlie the enforcement of control and resistance to power that also comprise border cultures.
Canada’s borders in globalization offer an opportunity to explore the interplay of borders and culture, identify the fundamental currents of border culture in motion, and establish an approach to understanding how border culture is placed and replaced in globalization.
BIG Theme – Culture
The culture we produce – in its absolutely widest sense – comes out of specific geographical spaces but also transcends them, meeting and crossing borders. This much is hardly controversial. But in an ostensibly borderless world, these cultural landscapes can also become matters for preservation. Culture can be something to preserve or cling onto in the face of expanding flows of ideas, people and capital.
Thus teasing out this precise interplay of border and culture, how culture alters borders and how borders alter culture must be central to any investigation of borders and globalization.
The dynamic relationships between borders and culture are what create and sustain “cultural islands” that are spatially distinct. Put another way, we cannot speak of distinct cultures without reference to borders. But this relationship at the same time is always in motion, and in borderlands, we see simultaneously cultural continuity and discontinuity. Furthermore, the zone of borderland transition is increasingly extended.
Yet despite this fluidity, this dynamism, specific cultural representation clearly is highly resonant, often stridently so, amongst individuals and communities, and can at times provide expressions of resistance or antagonism. The interplay between border and culture is what forms a sense of identity amongst those who claim indigeneity, but also amongst those excluded from that identity.
The contradictions are multiple however, as border and culture both push toward singular sense of belonging – pressing toward homogeneity in cultural identity – and plural expressions of identity.
At the same time, which cultural products and practices manage to and do not manage to cross borders suggests an underexplored selectivity in these processes. And the array of cultural expressions of course often plays differently at or near the border, and at different scales.
Concretely, the research looked at border culture and its relationship with globalization. The Culture theme focused on processes of cultural integration and disintegration; indigenous culture; and cultural continuity across borders.
Quite naturally, this will also involve an exploration of arts and literature on the border and in the borderlands, whether the meaning of the border happens to be expressed in writing, poetry, music, film, art, theater, dance, painting, graffiti, or architecture, or any other form of border art.
Dr. Victor Konrad at Carleton University leads the Culture theme.
Networks of Hate: The Alt-right, “Troll Culture”, and the Cultural Geography of Social Movement Spaces Online
Edwin Hodge, Helga Hallgrimsdottir | Journal of Borderlands Studies | 2019
The “alternative right” or “alt-right” is a quintessentially twenty-first century phenomenon: a radicalized far right ideology that is proliferated and disseminated almost exclusively online with members drawn from all over the world. This paper argues that online debates within alt-right online communities about the acceptability of alt-right language and imagery are claims-making exercises that constitute examples of bordering processes. These debates establish cultural borders around online communities and foster new virtual geographies of counter-hegemonic movements of the far right, that transcend and challenge the role and relevance of the physical border as a container for these movements. The paper concludes by placing these findings within current theoretical framings of the a-territorial border, with particular attention to what implications these have for the Pacific Northwest.
Hodge, Edwin., Helga Hallgrimsdottir. “Networks of Hate: The Alt-right, “Troll Culture”, and the Cultural Geography of Social Movement Spaces Online.” Journal of Borderlands Studies (2019).
Firepower: Geopolitical Cultures in the Anthropocene
Simon Dalby | Geopolitics | 2018
The human control of fire is a relatively neglected part of the discussion of the contemporary transformation of the planet. Thinking about it in terms of geopolitics is a way to link climate adaptation, extinction and the possibilities of extending traditional analyses of political ecology to the global scale. Such thinking is explicitly rejected as the appropriate premises for foreign policy action by the Trump administration which poses American greatness in terms of traditional understandings of firepower. This clash of geopolitical cultures is now key to global politics, where dramatic landscape transformation, related species extinctions as well as climate change results directly and indirectly from human control of combustion. Firepower is a matter of military technology as well as, in the form of fossil fuel combustion, the essential energy source that fuels the global economy. Focusing on combustion as a key geophysical force in contemporary geopolitics offers useful insights into the Anthropocene discussion and, in particular, the two planetary boundaries of climate change and biodiversity loss, which are key to contemporary efforts at global environmental governance.
Dalby, Simon. “Firepower: Geopolitical Cultures in the Anthropocene.” Geopolitics 23, no. 3 (2018): 718-742.
Bringing Border Security and Mohawk Culture Back Together? Akwesasne, between Aboriginal Sovereignty and National Security
Laetitia Rouviere | BIG Research Reports | #84
Based on the case of the Mohawk territory of Akwesasne located between Ontario and New York State, this papers aims to analyze the links between the affirmation of cultural specificities and the implementation of security policies on borderlands. Its focus extends beyond political conflicts over border issuesto include the way in which aboriginal sovereignty is affirmed within processes of negotiation and cooperation in the matters of identification requirements, border agents’ cultural sensitivity and law enforcement. We find that the enhancement of border security can paradoxically be a political opportunity for local leaders to reaffirm indigenous sovereignty; this reaffirmation through cooperation is at the same timebecoming a key factor in the implementation of border security policies.
Laetitia Rouviere
