Borderscaping: Imaginations and Practices of Border Making (Border Regions Series)

Using the borderscapes concept, this book offers an approach to border studies that expresses the multilevel complexity of borders, from the geopolitical to social practice and cultural production at and across the border. Accordingly, it encourages a productive understanding of the processual, de-territorialized and dispersed nature of borders and their ensuring regimes in the era of globalization and transnational flows as well as showcasing border research as an interdisciplinary field with its own academic standing. Contemporary bordering processes and practices are examined through the borderscapes lens to uncover important connections between borders as a ’challenge' to national (and EU) policies and borders as potential elements of political innovation through conceptual (re-)framings of social, political, economic and cultural spaces. The authors offer a nuanced and critical re-reading and understanding of the border not as an entity to be taken for granted, but as a place of investigation and as a resource in terms of the construction of novel (geo)political imaginations, social and spatial imaginaries and cultural images. In so doing, they suggest that rethinking borders means deconstructing the interweaving between political practices of inclusion-exclusion and the images created to support and communicate them on the cultural level by Western territorialist modernity. The result is a book that proposes a wandering through a constellation of bordering policies, discourses, practices and images to open new possibilities for thinking, mapping, acting and living borders under contemporary globalization.

Chiara Brambilla is Research Fellow in Anthropology and Geography at the Centre for Research on Complexity (CERCO), University of Bergamo, Italy. Jussi Laine, DSocSci, is a senior researcher at the Karelian Institute of the University of Eastern Finland and Executive Secretary and Treasurer of the Association for Borderlands Studies James Wesley Scott is Professor of Regional and Border Studies at the Karelian Institute at the University of Eastern Finland. Gianluca Bocchi is Director of the Centre for Research on Complexity (CERCO) and Full Professor of Philosophy of Sciences and Global Sciences at the University of Bergamo, Italy.