Border Seminar 2020 “(Re)Thinking Border Studies”
Call for Papers
Border Seminar 2020 “(Re)Thinking Border Studies”
May 6-7, 2020
Institute of English and American Studies
Faculty of Languages University of Gdańsk
Border Seminar is an interdisciplinary conference organized by the Border Studies Group (BSG), an international team of literary scholars, linguists, historians, sociologists, artists and educators interested in research and pedagogy centered on the notion of the border.
Border Seminar 2020 is the third edition of the conference. As the title – “(Re)Thinking Border Studies” – suggests, our purpose this year is twofold.
On the one hand, we want to inquire about the governing paradigms of the discipline of Border Studies. Today, Border Studies scholars agree on the need for a multidimensional approach to borders and borderlands, one that accounts for political, institutional, economic, spatial, symbolic, narrative and imaginary, and other dimensions and processes (Opiłowska 2019). Borders are understood now as socially-constructed by practices and discourses, “dynamic geographical and social spaces that appear and disappear and are constantly negotiated and contested” (Paasi 2003), technical and discursive landscapes or “borderscapes” (Paasi 2019), that is, “landscapes produced, across and along the boundary lines” (Brambilla 2015), as well as circuits of images and narratives determined and negotiated by nationalist and transnational flows (dell’Agnese and Amilhat Szary 2015). Founded in the summer of 2019, the BSG wants to sustain dialog with and draw from the discipline of the Border Studies, including the American Borderlands Studies, Critical European Studies as well as the long tradition of the Border Studies in Poland. What is the current state of the Border Studies debate? What can geographers, political scientists, sociologists and other Border Studies scholars teach us? What are their methods and conceptual apparatus?
On the other hand, Border Seminar 2020 wants to think creatively about the border in order to reevaluate and expand the Border Studies’ disciplinary focus. What vocabulary or practices can we contribute to the field? Possible alleys of inquiry: literary theory, philosophy, epistemology, axiology, linguistics, hauntology, aurality, ritual, cognitive science, legal theory, artistic practice/pedagogy, etc.
The above areas of inquiry are not mutually exclusive. Papers in one or both categories are welcome.
Please submit proposals by March 09, 2020 to grzegorz.welizarowicz@ug.edu.pl