Bordering, Borderwork, Mobilities, Resilience: Conceptual and Empirical Challenges for Border Research

In the last three decades, Border Studies have faced an important analytic turn. Many studies have stressed and demanded the need for a multi-dimensional perspective in border research and the conceptualization of borders as historically contingent processes. A wide range of researchers is now engaged with the concept of bordering practices, understood as “a vast array of affective and transformative material processes in which social and spatial orders and disorders are constantly reworked” (Woodward and Jones 2005: 239). Re-thinking borders through bordering practices means understanding such practices as implicit in the construction of those borders, approachable as incomplete developments, always in process of materialization (Prokkola 2008). This panel welcomes contributions on that matter, emphasising the focus not only on new conceptual debates (such as resilience or post human bordering) but also on empirical and study cases that enhance our theoretical debates.