Convenor
Bradley Tatar
Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST)
Abstract
This panel seeks to explore the sociopolitical and economic aspects of frontiers and borders in the making of modern societies; case studies from any geographic region are welcome. Frontiers are here loosely defined as distinctive zones of interaction in which the imbrications of national and global produce “global disjunctures” and other alterations of typical social patterns. To impose borders is a fundamental act of “place making,” because it demarcates differences in space. Nevertheless, globalization theorists argue that places and spaces are not produced by fixed borders, but by the mobilities of people and objects, and the unstoppable flows of signs, messages and money through global networks. Some claim that nation-states are becoming irrelevant, but others point out how nation-states are fighting back, trying to reassert the concreteness of borders with stricter policies and physical barriers to mobility. In some cases, walls are erected across thousands of kilometers in order to block the movement of immigrants, while in other instances efforts are made to control flows of weapons, contraband, religious practices, musical forms, images, discourses, chemical wastes or radioactive particles. The delineation and enforcement of borders is an attempt to stamp social priorities upon the landscape in line with the homogenizing projects of modernity; such projects include nation-building, citizenship, capitalist development, free trade, resource nationalism, ethnic cleansing, and other exclusivist projects intended to purge hybrid natures. Hence, borders create frontier regions, characterized by distortions and uneven variations of flows and networks caused by the efforts to control them.
Some suggested areas of research to be included in the panel:
•tradition and modernity
•national borders and citizenship
•comparative and/or historical studies
•spatial divisions of labor
• environmental problems and national borders
•deterritorialization and reterritorialization
•effect of borders on intercultural interactions
•militarization of intercultural relations
•boundaries between nature and society
•unequal exchange
•missionary activity
•insurgent cultures
•social movements
•gender and nation-states
•ecology and economy of border zones