Modern Border Management: (Im)migration and Mobility

2023 Summer Institutes, July 10-26, 2023 | Stream 2

2023 Summer Institutes.

BIG Talk: Space, Institutional innovations, and Crossborder mobility (flows)

with Dr. Sergio Peña (Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico) | Zoom | May 17, 2023

In Person: CFGS C179 (Sedgewick) or Zoom. The meeting will take place from 10:00AM to 11:30AM PST.
Register in advance for this meeting here.

The objective of the presentation is to analyze institutional innovation related to crossborder mobility and flows. The presentation identifies different bodies of theories that have emerged in the border literatures and analyze how these theories help us understand mobility (flows) not only from the classical spatial perspective of flows of “things”, but also flows from a relational perspective. The bodies of border theory presented are: 1) the classical territoriality perspective, 2) borders in globalization, and 3) border “everywhere”. The main argument is that mobility is a policy field where institutional innovation is more likely to take place due to the convergence of interests of both sides of the border to facilitate the flows of goods and people. Also, mobility, particularly undocumented human mobility, is a very dynamic and fast changing therefore state institutions (e.g., customs and border patrol among others) must adapt their strategies. Institutional innovation is defined as the ability to “reduce distance” that would allow institutions to cooperate and collaborate to boost the development of the region. Moreover, the presentation will take a critical approach that innovation also raises ethical and moral dilemmas.

Dr. Sergio Peña holds a doctoral degree in urban and regional planning from Florida State University. He works for the Colegio de la Frontera Norte a research think tank specialized in border research and graduate education. His research agenda focused on studying crossborder planning, governance, and cooperation processes. He is the co-editor-in-chief of the Journal of Borderlands Studies. He is conducting research on crossborder mobility comparing the US -Mexico and the US- Canada.

Enhancing Labour Mobility in Alberta: The role of Immigration, Migration, and Other Factors

Richard E. Mueller | BIG Research Reports | #12

#30 & 31 BIG Podcast – Democracy, Migration Studies, and Border Studies: Bridges and/or Gaps

featuring Oliver Schmidtke, UVic European Studies Scholar, Professor, and Director of the Centre for Global Studies

Classically, Migration Studies explore all mobility regimes of human groups. There is a spectrum of public policies ranging from the migration of high-skilled workers to refugees. For the Migration Studies, national borders provide a form of social closure. Traditionally, Borders refer to issues that are fundamental to political community (state sovereignty, territorial delimitation, national security, political identity). And for this reason, borders are also instruments for regulating flows, policy tool for inclusion/exclusion. Several authors have pointed out a form of gap between Border Studies and Migration Studies. That there was a lack of cross-fertilization between these two research traditions. And some populist and nationalist discourses can exploit the ambivalence of the borders and the confusion around it. In this episode, Oliver Schmidtke joins BIG_Lab to discuss all the relations between democracy, migration, and borders and get answers to some important questions.

Listen to Part One: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

Listen to Part Two: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.

Oliver Schmidtke is a Professor in the Departments of Political Science and History at the University of Victoria where he also holds the Jean Monnet Chair in European History and Politics. He received his PhD from the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence. He taught at the Humboldt University Berlin before joining UVic in 2000 and has been a visiting scholar at Harvard University, Bonn University, the European University Institute, and Hamburg University.

BIG Talk — From Border Perplexity to Border Renaissance: A Cultural Rebirth of Borders

with Dr. Astrid Fellner (Head of the UniGR-Center for Border Studies, Saarland University) | Victoria, BC & Zoom | February 27, 2024

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.

Contesting 21st Century B/Orders

European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Germany | September 6–8, 2023

A little more than two decades into the 21st century, state borders have once more moved to the center of today’s geopolitical tensions. Russia’s war against Ukraine has brought a renewed focus on border contestations, not only in Central Europe. However, at stake in the contestation of borders is not only a territorial political order or the sovereignty of particular states. The relationship of borders to orders is also crucial in determining regulations and norms that govern different forms of inclusion, recognition and exclusion of social groups within states.

Thus, societal orders require drawing borders, whether they mark nation-state or trans-state associations or mark the contested boundaries of symbolic classifications. With migration and mobility, borders not only function as filters that selectively open or close but also as “hierarchizing machines” that produce different status categories. Territorial and material borders, as well as social, symbolic and discursive boundaries and their instantiation, play an essential role in practices of power, practices through which processes of inclusion and exclusion are legitimised and hierarchically structured. Societal orders, for example, set boundaries of belonging to national communities and European or Western civilization. Both within the territorial borders of states and transnationally, they define racially and ethnically defined boundaries and mobilise hegemonic norms of gender and sexuality. At the same time, borders and societal orders, whether economic, legal, social, or cultural, are anything but stable. It is thus crucial to investigate how borders and orders are reproduced, contested, and transformed.

At the international conference “Contesting 21st Century B/Orders“, the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION, in cooperation with the international research networks “Borders in Globalization”– 21st Century borders (BIG) and “Transfrontier Euro-Institut Network” (TEIN), aims to discuss how societal orders in the 21st century are changing through new forms of the border and boundary drawing and to investigate how the borders of the contemporary world are shaped.

The Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION invites you to Frankfurt (Oder) on the German-Polish border to engage in vivid discussions on this highly relevant and debated subject. From September 06-08, 2023, a range of border and order concepts will be put up for discussion: What processes of inclusion and exclusion do they condition? What grey zones and liminal spaces are created by them to what effects? Building on the aspects of marking (durability), permeability, and the formation of border zones (liminality) highlighted by the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION in its founding phase, we focus on the interplay of multidimensional – social, symbolic, and material – border demarcations and their significance for societal orders. Thus, we contribute to scholarly debates in which borders are described in their complexity and multiformity and conceptualized as assemblages, borderscapes, interfaces, or border textures.

A full program can be viewed on the Borders in Motion website or in PDF.

Borders and Migration: The Canadian Experience in Comparative Perspective

Michael J. Carpenter, Melissa Kelly, Oliver Schmidtke | University of Ottawa Press | 2023

Since 2015, the cross-border movement of migrants and refugees has reached unprecedented levels. War, persecution, destitution, and desertification impelled millions to flee their homes in central Asia, the Levant, and North Africa. The responses in the Global North varied country by country, with some opening their borders to historically large numbers of refugees and asylum seekers, while others adopted increasingly strict border policies.

The dramatic increase in global migration has triggered controversial political and scholarly debates. The governance of cross-border mobility constitutes one of the key policy conundrums of the 21st century, raising fundamental questions about human rights, state responsibility, and security. The research literatures on borders and migration have rapidly expanded to meet the increased urgency of record numbers of displaced people. Yet, border studies have conventionally paid little attention to flows of people, and migration studies have simultaneously underappreciated the changing nature of borders.

Borders and Migration: The Canadian Experience in Comparative Perspective provides new insights into how migration is affected by border governance and vice versa. Starting from the Canadian experience, and with an emphasis on refugees and irregular migrants, this multidisciplinary book explores how various levels of governance have facilitated and restricted flows of people across international borders. The book sheds light on the changing governance of migration and borders. Comparisons between Canada and other parts of the world bring into relief contemporary trends and challenges.

Editors:

Michael J. Carpenter is a Post-Doctoral Fellow working on a project titled, “Beyond ‘Irregular Migration’: Civil Disobedience without Borders”. In addition to his fellowship, Michael also serves as a founding member and current Managing Editor of the Borders in Globalization Review.

Melissa Kelly is a Research Fellow with the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration at Ryerson University. She holds a PhD in Social and Economic Geography from Uppsala University.

Oliver Schmidtke is a Professor and UVic European Studies Scholar in the Departments of History and Political Science. Since 2006 he holds the Jean Monnet Chair in European History and Politics. From 2005 to 2008 he was the Director of the European Studies Program at UVic and from 2004 to 2006 he served as the President of the European Community Studies Association Canada. Since 2012 he has been the Director of the Centre for Global Studies and during the academic year 2016-17 he serves as the Acting Vice President Research.

VI Association of European Border Regions Cross-Border School

Szeged, Hungary | September 28th, 2022

The VI edition of AEBR Cross-Border School was held in Szeged, Hungary on Wednesday, 28 September 2022, in cooperation with the Euroregion DKMT, and in close collaboration with the Radboud University of Nijmegen and the Province of Gelderland (NL). From 2022 on, the CBS is also part of the 21^st Century Borders project, led by the University of Victoria, Canada.

This year’s general emphasis was on youth and CBC with a number of panels on the following topics:

1. Growing a new generation of cross-border cooperation enthusiasts
2. Education across borders
3. Youth mobility and opportunities
4. Strategies to retain young people/talent; “empty” regions
5. University cooperation for cross-border cooperation education

Each session consisted of a keynote from an academic or a practitioner/expert and a response by a practitioner/expert or an academic. A dialogue with the audience followed in each case.

BIG Director Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly and BIG Scholar Martin Van der Velde were present and presenting in-person.

More information here!