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This article empirically maps and compares types of knowledge produced about people on the move by the European border security apparatus. Exploring two complementary analytical moments, the article addresses the stabilization of power and contingent practices within such apparatuses. We argue, first, that analyzing classification schemas implemented in data systems used within the European apparatus can reveal assumptions and limitations about people on the move—what we call "scripts of alterity." Second, the comparative mapping of scripts of alterity reveals a de facto division of labor between scales of governance that would otherwise be invisible in policy. Utilizing the new Ontology Explorer software method as well as discursive analysis, we identify four scripts of alterity, which materialize relations in data systems and are thus relatively stabilized. Third, we identify as "de-inscriptions" forms of resistance specific to scripts of alterity. These can still be contested and we account for three contingent practices of de-inscription from scripts of alterity by conducting ethnographic observation of data systems' use. Finally, we summarize three contributions that the "scripts of alterity" concept makes to the science and technology studies and to the critical security studies literature on the securitization of cross-border mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Executive Summary: This paper examines the staffing needs of the US Department of Justice's Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), as it seeks to eliminate an immigration court backlog, which approached 2.5 million pending cases at the end of fiscal year (FY) 2023. A previous study by the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS) attributed the backlog to systemic, long-neglected problems in the broader US immigration system. This paper provides updated estimates of the number of immigration judges (IJs) and "judge teams" (IJ teams) needed to eliminate the backlog over ten and five years based on different case receipt and completion scenarios. It also introduces a data tool that will permit policymakers, administrators and researchers to make their own estimates of IJ team hiring needs based on changing case receipt and completion data. Finally, the paper outlines the pressing need for reform of the US immigration system, including a well-resourced, robust, and independent court system, particularly in light of record "encounters" of migrants at US borders in FY 2022 and 2023. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nigeria is in a security quandary. The country's security debacles are impacting its socio-economic and political landscapes. Aside from the protracted Boko Haram terrorism, banditry and kidnapping have taken on momentary dimensions in the country. Many studies have attributed this menace to the porous and ill-manned status of Nigerian borders, which lend ambience to unwholesome intrusions and thus render the borders a national burden. This study unpacks the state of Nigeria's borders vis-à-vis the national security experiences of the country. It argues that, beyond the 'porosity' debates and narratives, the lingering cross-border challenges are the effects of patronage networks and internal crises that have engulfed domestic lives and state politics. It submits further that, notwithstanding the subjective colonial status and the uncoordinated management agenda of Nigeria's borders, they have inherent geo-strategic potentials and advantages capable of transforming national lives and enhancing state security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the following paper, we aim for an extended understanding of the most crucial phenomena itself, the generation of meaning in the interaction with—what we describe as reality. The cultural psychological core principles are re-introduced and connected to a new more holistic construction, elaborating the generation of new meaning. In the same context, new terminology will be introduced, crucial for the understanding of the from phenomenology generated perspective toward cognitive processes and their interrelation with the everyday life. Borders not only as separator but also as deep connector of meaning are for this purpose explored and reintroduced. A procedure that led to central understandings that go far beyond the simple definitions accessible in dictionaries. As significant organic metaphor the river and the meadow (Towards a wholistic model of identity: Why not a meadow? Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science, 55(1), 112–127. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-020-09588-3) will be used and extended by the rabbit hole, a triggered process extending the imagination of individuals by the central counter movement against streams and Gegenstände. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great War and Trianon opened a new chapter in the history, not only of the Kingdom of Hungary, but also of Western Hungary. Besides dividing up the counties of Sopron, Moson and Vas, the newly re-drawn borders also split up most of the railway lines running within them as well. From the territory sliced from the three counties, the previously non-existent province of Austria, Burgenland, was established in 1922. In many cases, the new demarcation lines followed boundaries of old districts or settlements, but it was rare to find natural boundaries among them. As a result, between the two World Wars, the use of the affected railway tracks began to change similar to several contemporary Central European cases, with the exception of GYSEV (Győr–Sopron–Ebenfurth Railway Company), which could remain in its original form. This research paper aims to examine how the shift of borders in this region affected railway transport. It is based on the local historical literature on the railway, regional history and primary resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Conflicts adversely affect psychological well-being and are associated with mental disorders. Aim: The study aims to assess the levels of perceived stress, anxiety and depression and their association with demographic factors among the youth in the border villages of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K). Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among youth aged 18 to 25 years. The sample consisted of 300 individuals from the border villages of J&K. Of these, 150 individuals were from the villages located near the International Border (IB) in the Jammu district, and 150 individuals were from the villages near the Line Of Control (LOC) in the Rajouri district. Perceived Stress scale (PSS), Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD7), and Public Health Questionnaire (PHQ9) scales were used to determine the levels of perceived stress, depression, and anxiety. Mann Whitney, Chi-square and Odds ratio analysis were performed to assess the levels of the indicators and their association with demographic factors. Results: 94% of the respondents had perceived stress, 34.46% anxiety and 31% depression. Perceived stress, anxiety and depression were significantly higher among the LOC youth than IB youth (p <.00*). The LOC youth with an educational status below graduation level were found to be more anxious (p =.034) and more depressed (p =.003) than those with the educational status of graduation and above. The youth whose main activity was that of a student were found to be more depressed than the employed and unemployed youth (p =.000). Conclusion: Perceived stress, anxiety, and depression were prevalent among the youth in border villages. These were found to be significantly higher among youth in border villages on the LOC. The findings suggest that education level has a significant impact on the mental health of the youth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing scholarship highlights the novel approaches and the capacity of northern states to control mass mobility by externalizing the border; outsource their control apparatus to migrant sending and transit countries; process and detain irregular arrivals in offshore locations; and expand the reach of sovereign powers extraterritorially. Significantly, the processes and outcomes of externalization are neither homogeneous nor uncontested. This article seeks to provide critical insights into the divergent nature of border externalization and contributes to a de-centring of northern-centric notions of the state's role in border control by comparing how border control plays out in Malaysia and Indonesia under Australia's externalization policy agenda. Their different border control outcomes reflect important intervening factors in the two countries' internal (domestic political and economic realities; attitudes towards migrants and their control) and external (interstate geo-political relations) environment in shaping the situated meanings and the realities of border security building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mexicans who migrate to the United States endure significant stressors related to the migration process and social and environmental conditions of life in the United States. Given that chronic stress exposure has been linked to the onset of health conditions, these ecological factors may expose them to increased risk for poor health. However, Mexicans have many positive health outcomes compared to those monitored nationally, making it crucial to understand possible sources of resilience in this population. Here, we investigate Mexicans’ lay health knowledge in response to stress as a possible source of health-related resilience. Health knowledge is considered a central facet of practical and traditional knowledge as well as adaptive modes of intelligence and has a tangible impact on health. Using an ethnographically grounded community-based participatory research design informed by the theory of embodiment, our hybrid team of bilingual university and community-based researchers interviewed Mexican-origin residents (N = 30) living in rural southwestern Arizona about how they experienced and responded to stress and incorporated it into their etiological frameworks. Thematic analysis revealed that participants paid close attention to how stress presented itself in their bodies, which informed their understanding of its potentially harmful health impacts and motivated them to employ multiple stress reduction strategies. Our results highlight the breadth of Mexicans’ lay health knowledge, thereby challenging dominant narratives about low rates of health literacy in this population. Findings can be harnessed to optimize potential health protective effects in home and community settings as well as to inform preventive and clinical interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International boundaries have been mainly considered as barriers in literature on the 'cross-border regional innovation system' (CBRIS), in line with their traditional understanding. In this paper, we underline that such a perspective presents limits, and argue in favour of an understanding of multidimensional borders that are subject to dynamic change over time. By mobilizing conceptualizations from the field of border studies, we examine the various functions of borders to explain the innovation-led development potential in cross-border regions. In this view, international borders can function as an interface, a marker of difference or a symbol, rather than a mere barrier that separates regions. Further, we suggest that these border functions are key factors in explaining the 'fluctuating' integration dynamics of regional innovation systems across the border. Mobilizing evidence from two case studies in European and North American contexts, the paper sheds light on the border as a potential resource for innovation and discusses implications for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proposes a critical reading of the short story, Il campo di granturco [The Cornfield], by Cesare Pavese. Methodologically and epistemologically, it tries to highlight the existing consonances between literature and geography with regards to three key concepts – the border, the landscape, and the territory – that form an indissoluble connection between human beings and the world. In geography, border, landscape, and territory are regarded as key cognitive mediators within the interaction between the Self and the world. What purpose, then, does reading Pavese from a geographic perspective serve? Why do his works matter within the context of cultural geography? Pavese's Il campo di granturco, I argue, contains an example of what Augustin Berque calls 'Thinking through Landscape', which is an essential requirement of any relationship between the self and the world. Additionally, reading Pavese from a geographic viewpoint provides us the chance to propose a reflection on the role of dialog in the self/world cognitive relationship. The paper's main objective is to contribute to current geographical debates on the self-world interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the characteristics of contemporary political geography is the transformation of international borders into resources for capitalist value creation. This has been accompanied by the emergence of new identities and practices that challenge the nationalist doxa. Borderland political regimes seek to account for this complexity as it is expressed in the way in which the nation-states perceive and try to govern these spaces of overlapping territorialities. An analysis of the ways in which Chile, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic perceive their borders and produce regulations and institutional frameworks based on both their particular histories and the requirements of neoliberal capitalist accumulation concludes with a series of proposals for inclusive governance systems that take the aforementioned complexities into account. Una de las características de la geografía política contemporánea es la transformación de las fronteras internacionales en recursos para la creación de valor capitalista. Esto se ha acompañado de la aparición de nuevas identidades y prácticas que desafían la doxa nacionalista. Los regímenes políticos fronterizos tratan de dar cuenta de esta complejidad, expresada en la forma en que los Estados-nación perciben y tratan de gobernar estos espacios de supuestas territorialidades. Un análisis de las maneras en que Chile, Colombia y República Dominicana perciben sus fronteras y emiten regulaciones y marcos institucionales basados tanto en sus historias nacionales particulares como en los requisitos de la acumulación capitalista neoliberal concluye con una serie de propuestas para sistemas de gobierno inclusivos que tomen en cuenta las complejidades antes mencionadas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship has sought to emphasise boundaries and borders as being complex social institutions that play a vital role in mediating national and global flows. This article examines transactions occurring along the boundary between Hong Kong and Mainland China, which experienced a sudden 'hardening' owing to travel restrictions imposed following the outbreak of COVID-19. When individuals found themselves unable to physically cross the boundary as per usual, they instead turned to mobile media to enact everyday transactions – both financial and social – between the two regions. Calling upon the notion of 'digital passages', we argue that the appropriation of digital money infrastructures for managing such transactions should act as a reminder for scholars to productively engage with the various forms of boundaries and borders emerging within online spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a theoretical approach to the study of identity narratives from the concept of the bordering process. The first section describes the theoretical concepts that sustain the proposal, in particular, the concept of border as a mediating artifact, the theoretical concept of the bordering process as a social practice, and finally, identity narratives and the dialogical perspective of the self. The second section analyzes the proposals and limitations of some studies on identity narratives in international borderlands. In the same section, we develop our theoretical proposal for studying border identity narratives, which attempts to overcome some limitations of previous studies and respond to the debate on the role of others in the construction of the self. We conclude that the inclusion of the border as a semiotic artifact and the bordering process in the construction of the self provide a new perspective of identity narratives as border narratives for the study of border experiences throughout human development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I discuss some implications deriving from different models of the notion of border, starting from interdisciplinary contributions and in particular from semiotics, psychoanalysis, cultural psychology, and topology. The starting point is a reflection on the notion of sign, as a device used to realize at the same time both a first form of discretization and to instantiate a system of relations with the environment. The article goes on to describe the importance of borders for the construction of human experience and for the processes of psychic and relational development. Lastly, the differences between three different forms of conceptualizing borders are discussed: rigid boundaries, permeable boundaries, and topological boundaries of the Möbius strip type. For each of the three models, the different implications will be presented and discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement scholars acknowledge the importance of morality in joining and shaping social movements. There is less knowledge about the content of morality that keeps social movement participants committed, once in. Moral commitments, I argue, emerge from the work conducted within social movements. By looking at everyday activities in the immigrant rights movement in El Paso, Texas, I analyze how commitment is shaped through the caregiving practices of staff and volunteers within two organizations serving immigrants and asylum seekers on the border: Compromiso and Casa Asuncion. Despite the strenuous work involved, I find care givers in these two organizations make sense of their continued participation by drawing on what I call familial moralities. At Compromiso, a legal aid office, caregivers reflect on their or others' immigrant family histories, creating an intellectual attachment to the work through family. At Casa Asuncion, a migrant shelter, caregivers draw on new familial roles with migrants and the shelter staff, creating an emotional attachment as family. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses Brian Chikwava's novel Harare North (2009) and its representations of unsuccessful border crossings from the perspective of cosmopolitanism. I argue that through the unnamed protagonist's inability or his own unwillingness to cross different material and symbolic borders, the novel gives articulation to the failure of such cosmopolitan ideals as openness to otherness, acknowledgement of one's own position in the world, and active engagement in transcultural encounters. Chikwava's protagonist seems to be constantly on the "wrong" side of any border that he encounters. As such, he is the unwanted abject figure on whose exclusion different normative subjectivities are constructed. By addressing the problematics of border crossings and cosmopolitan ideals in a globalized world which is increasingly interconnected but also marked by the proliferation and multiplication of borders, this article draws attention to the intertwined issues of mobility and the processes of transculturation that mobility should ideally entail. In so doing, this essay criticizes simplistic tendencies to equate cosmopolitanism with transnational mobility and reduce cosmopolitanism to a mere identity position — a feature that can be observed in current discussions concerning Afropolitanism. Chikwava's novel points at the fact that crossing boundaries and adopting cosmopolitan ethics is not always easy, nor necessarily even desired by those on the move. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s an increasing body of genetic studies of Roma people has been conducted and used to understand their lives. This includes research on health issues such as genetic predispositions to obesity or high cholesterol levels and the migration of European Roma from the Indian subcontinent. Such work needs to be contextualised within the wide-ranging historical oppression of Roma people including their enslavement, the Holocaust, denial of human rights and a lack of access to education. Aligning genetics research to educational policy has often been problematic in the context of discredited, 'race' science; recently more nuanced arguments have promoted 'post-genomic' solutions, such as biosocial strategies, that address social justice issues. This article argues that an economy of knowledge emerges in the 'postgenomic era' that privileges predominantly White European, majority populations and this is particularly apparent in the context of the Roma. The promotion of educational solutions framed by genetics research underpins how cultural capital, in this case scientific knowledge and its framing within social theory such as Deleuzian assemblage will, in all likelihood, maintain the status quo for the Roma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1950s of Hong Kong manifests the initiation of a communal imagination oscillating in between the sovereignty of a British colony and the reality of a Chinese territory. The influx of immigrants from the north and, as a result, the establishment of a border during the 1950s not only restructured the demographic composition of the city but also brought along new momentum for mass cultural productions. Along the contestations and reconciliations between different ethnicities, languages, and identities, Hong Kong cultural configuration has since then embarked on a trajectory of its own, including the conceptualizations of childhood, border, and national ambiguity. Whether this piece of land was once desecrated by colonialism or this reclaimed territory is now alienated by renationalization, the formation of childhood serves as a critical lens to examine the meaning of border and nation from the colonial to the postcolonial eras of Hong Kong. Capitalizing on two titles produced in the early 1950s and in the late 1990s of Hong Kong cinema, namely, Fung Fung's The Kid (1950) and Fruit Chan's Little Cheung (1999), this article aims to explore the correlation between border, community, and nationality through the life adventures of the child protagonists, whose transitions and explorations are entangled with a political and territorial border that polarizes our sinophonic imagination in the ongoing present of China–Hong Kong division. In this context, the cultural configuration of Bildungsroman, apart from manifesting Franco Moretti's "the symbolic form of modernity" or Marc Redfield's "acculturation of the self," should embody the struggles with an obscure nationality, as here exemplified from the footprints of childhood tiptoeing on and off the borders of Hong Kong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are myriad methods and tactics to study and examine Hong Kong as a former crown colony and a current Chinese special administrative region. Using the idea of border as a critical tool as well as the subject of critique, this special issue highlights and addresses a political and historical fact that the bordering, debordering and transbordering of Hong Kong, as long taken-for-granted through the media, has never been a fixed and stable boundary. If political binarism and cultural parochialism have walled up Hong Kong cultures from national or transnational transformations, the essays in this special issue seek to initiate new discussions and revisit old discovery of Hong Kong amid the ebb and flow of nationality, transnationality and globality. They respond to cross-border ventures in various ways, offering different views and engaging with one another as to shed light on how the changing borderscape might have impacts on the future development of Hong Kong culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"China has become a predicament as well as a condition for Hong Kong culture" in the age of China, especially after the signing of the Closer Economic Partnership Agreement in 2003. This has become even more acute for Hong Kong culture in the integration of the Greater Bay Area, which can be seen as incorporating Hong Kong and Macao's development into the overall development of the country. At this particular juncture, the issue of integration with the Mainland has become a topic that is of utmost importance for any consideration of the future of Hong Kong culture and the city as a whole. In this special context, the transmission of Hong Kong popular cultures in the Mainland are related topics that need to be explored. For example, what are the implications behind the success of Hong Kong directors and producers who took the helm of immensely popular Mainland television series? After Cantopop crossed the border, to what extent did the singers and the songs that they sang in Mainland music reality shows represent Hong Kong? These would be very good case studies of Hong Kong culture in cross-border ventures, and studying their transmissions would have long-term implications for not only Hong Kong culture in particular but also Hong Kong Studies in general. This essay endeavors to use these cross-border experiences as examples to offer a prolegomenon to Hong Kong (in China) Studies, which will in turn contribute to the possibility of generating a cultural studies response to the new configuration of the Greater Bay Area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As policing and threats become increasingly transnational and plural, practices of managing risk increasingly use technologies that promise certainty. Drawing on a study of the creation of a new border detection device, and ideas from Science and Technology Studies, we argue that devices deployed as objective tools for risk assessment and management in the policing of borders, and the laboratories that develop them, are not simply linear applications of scientific knowledge to control risk but rather are crucial sites in which multiple and contending conceptions and practices of risk converge. Following the interactions of scientists, border guards, policing agents and the EU shows how an official discourse of risk, a scientific conception and experiential working knowledge of risk all 'danced' together in the development of a portable detection device. In the process experiential/contextual and professional knowledge of risk were often privileged over rationalistic and statistically based risk assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay questions the rise of border humanitarianism in the North-Eastern Moroccan borderlands. The increasing presence of humanitarian organizations in contexts marked by border violence has raised the attention of a number of critical migration scholars. Observers, however, have failed to problematize the presence of humanitarian activities, traditionally connected to emergency contexts, in sites integrated in the "routinary" regulation of mobility. Building on 8 months of fieldwork conducted in 2016 and 2017, the article addresses this gap, taking the working of border humanitarianism as a vantage point to reflect on the relation of borders to the exception, on the role of violence in border maintenance and, ultimately, on the politics of life and death at the frontier. Drawing on the work of Salter and Vaughan Williams on exceptionalism and biopolitics at the border, the article makes two points. First, I argue that the ordinary functioning of the Spanish–Moroccan border is founded on the bestialization and devaluation of Black lives, often to the point of death. Second, I contend that the integration of the "exception" in border normalcy activates, challenges, and endlessly reproduces the need for emergency interventions. In this dystopian framework, humanitarianism becomes a tool for the ordinary maintenance of migrants' degraded life, transformed by the border into a less-than-citizen, less-than-human form of existence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about how people moving along state borders – I call them wayfarers – refuse the assumption that they ought to live either a sedentary or a nomadic lifestyle inside or outside states, whether as citizens or as Others. In particular, it looks at how the term saudade helps mobile people to manage friction without falling back into such binaries. The Oxford English Dictionary defines saudade as a desire 'for something' and describes it as a characteristic of the 'Portuguese or Brazilian' people. Here, we shall attend however to the saudade evoked by Venezuelans and Warao (defined by the same dictionary as 'members of a South American Indian people inhabiting Guyana, Suriname, and Venezuela'). This article patterns a contrast between two ways of evoking the term in comments about movement made by my informants: the first, Precise Saudade, asks for precision about that of which people feel saudade. The second way of evoking the term, Vague Saudade, is, as its name suggests, more comfortable with being vague. The argument put forward by this article is that scholarly and policy texts on 'migrants', 'nomads' and 'refugees' need to make more room for Vague Saudade when translating the talk of wayfarers. It may be tempting to dismiss vagueness as showing ambiguity and imprecision. Yet, as the stories that follow are meant to highlight, Vague Saudade can be useful to wayfarers in several ways: to engage in care, to protect others, to protect themselves and to engage in conversations about alternative worlds. To grant monopoly to Precise Saudade, it is argued, risks hindering wayfarers' ability to do these things. I find this is relevant to how we translate wayfarers, and I suggest it is also germane to how we translate in research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From a small area of the South West of Bangladesh, thousands of landless farmers cross the border with their family in order to work in the informal sector, mostly in Delhi and Bangalore: as waster pickers for the men, as maids for the women. Based on two ethnographic fieldworks in the villages of origin, this article intends to highlight the reasons leading to this migratory movement, the way this migration is organized and its consequences for the families. In a context where, in India, Bangladeshi migration is mostly felt as a threat, it also analyses the process of hypervisibility/invisibility to which these migrants are subjected to and the effects that deportability – or actual deportation – have on their life. At last, it examines how migrants experience the discrepancy between the way they see themselves and the way they are largely considered by the Indian authorities and broaden society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city as sanctuary is an ancient concept. As a modern practice in North America and Europe, it has entailed refuge for subjects rendered illegal and placeless by the state, be it asylum-seekers or undocumented immigrants. Sanctuary thus reveals the terms of protection through which liberal democracies recognize and include racial others. In the age of Trumpism, sanctuary jurisdictions have become a key terrain of struggle in the United States, connoting resistance to white nationalism and the defiance of federal immigration policy. However, the concept of sanctuary requires scrutiny. In this paper, I demonstrate that the current meaning of sanctuary in the United States has limited scope, relying on, rather than limiting, police power. Seeking to disrupt such forms of liberal inclusion, I turn to a more expansive ethico-political inquiry concerned with hospitality. Such inquiry demands engagement with colonial and imperial histories. At stake is a rethinking of liberal and cosmopolitan traditions of Western humanism, those that seek to provide sanctuary from the place of Europe or the free city. Once conceptualized as the threshold of empire, these territories are no longer sanctuary for the illegal and placeless but instead expressions of state violence and thus grounds for abolition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Moria hotspot in Greece as a logistical site which fulfills two different functions within the European migration and border regime. It locates, contains, and sorts individuals locally at the external borders of the EU and creates, inserts, and processes data for controlling people on the move. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Greece, including interviews with local administrators from the Registration and Identification Service, Médecins du Monde, Frontex and Hellenic Police and a collection of internal and publicly available planning, policy, and management documents and handbooks, the paper scrutinizes how both the movement of migrants and data is organized at the site. By developing an analytic lens of logistics, it outlines a specific mode of infrastructuring which aligns staff from different organizations with databases, devices, and migrants all in one place and organizes mundane practices such as filling out forms, taking fingerprints, signing, and entering datasets along a chain. That way the hotspot is able to locate, sort, and detain those who arrive at the hardened EU border and to create a data infrastructure for controlling, monitoring, and governing further movement by processing data through the bureaucratic channels of the EU's transnational control assemblages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Folly' is often used as an umbrella term for Renaissance representations both of 'idiocy' and madness, although early modern legislation and medicine described crucial differences between the two conditions. Shakespeare sometimes stages their liminality by having fools interact with lunatics, as in Twelfth Night and in King Lear. By drawing in particular from socio-legal and scientific ideas of the early modern period, the present article considers some of these interactions to discuss the ways in which fools as intellectually disabled individuals are separated from madmen as mentally ill, while also assessing how occasionally 'idiocy' borders into madness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The installation of Mark Wallinger's State Britain in the Duveen Galleries of Tate Britain recreated Brian Haw's protest opposite the Houses of Parliament, which had largely been dismantled by the police under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. Wallinger's work bisected a boundary created by the Act inside which the police could be given greater than usual powers to control demonstrations. The intersection exemplified how, when understood in terms of the performative after Jacques Derrida, art may unsettle the ways in which both the law and aesthetics work to protect the political establishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops and extends the idea of cosmopolitan solidarity to temporality through a case study of archival activism and participatory film-making. It examines mediated witnessing within the Italian online audiovisual archive Archivio delle memorie migranti, which documents and archives the experiences of contemporary migrants in Italy. The moral basis of Archivio delle memorie migranti is cosmopolitan solidarity, which is usually understood as a practice that crosses spatial and communal boundaries. However, the ethics of solidarity also bridges past, present and future generations. Through the case of Archivio delle memorie migranti, this article demonstrates the significance of temporality in the theorization of cosmopolitan solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What functions do the securitization and the militarization of the border serve under 'authoritarian neoliberalism' in Australia? Having pursued the policy of mandatory detention of all undocumented migrants since 1992, the Australian government has also increasingly sought to outsource, privatize, and offshore the construction and operation of its immigration detention facilities, whilst simultaneously engaging in increasingly authoritarian interventions via the militarization of border control. This article seeks to problematize these developments by constructing an emergent cartography of the various links between the ongoing processes of neoliberal structural adjustment, and the intensification of the policing and punitive apparatuses of the Australian border-industrial complex. Accordingly, using theoretical insights gleaned from emergent work on 'authoritarian neoliberalism' and from race critical theory as a cue, I outline in this article three functions of the border within punitive approaches to immigration control under neoliberal structural adjustment in Australia: first, as an apparatus of ongoing colonial power; second, as a technology of racial differentiation through its functioning as a 'filter' that privileges certain migrant bodies over others, and as an 'insulator' against popular dissent; third, as a site of profit and accumulation for transnational capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The researchers studied motivating factors of Latinas studying at a university extended campus. Using mixed-methods, the following research question was investigated: What cultural, familial, and financial factors motivate Latinas to pursue a bachelor's degree at a rural border extended campus? Study participants were Latina family studies students attending an extended campus of a university within a southwestern rural border community. Findings yielded familial factors to have the greatest impact on motivations, followed by financial factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkey's border with Syria today is a laboratory in which biopolitics and the spectacle coincide in new ways. As a consequence of the ongoing war between the state and Kurdish insurgents, and the state of emergency accompanying it, this border region has incrementally transformed into a "zone of indistinction" in which the spatial concepts of inside and outside interpenetrate. As exception is normalized, the logic of "the camp" (in Agamben's sense) tends to become a dispositif. Exceptional routines are being exercised in this border region both to (re)construct the figure of the "Kurd" as a citizen and to generalize the domain of the camp, while also producing bare life in the context of counterterrorism. However, the "Kurd" as a subject cannot be ambiguously constructed, neither can the region be politically homogenized. Based on multisited fieldwork in the border city of Mardin, I claim that this zone of indistinction is simultaneously the place of revolt and resistance for the Kurdish case. Against this backdrop, the article argues the practical implications of counterterrorism policies in the region by focusing on how the state of exception is enforced on the Kurdish population as a biopolitical tool while being represented as a public spectacle to the rest of Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For 30 years, the opening of internal borders in the European Union has engendered many cross-border exchanges in borderlands. European cross-border regions created within this context are thus framed and characterized by the simultaneous dynamics of bordering and cross-border integration. This paper examines these two processes and the analysis is based on the representations of stakeholders from the Eurometropolis of Lille–Kortrijk–Tournai. It highlights two main results. First, the representations of stakeholders shed light on bordering dynamics that can be combined even though they can also appear to be contradictory. In particular, the paper unveils the dimension of ‘a-bordering’, which refers to a certain status quo of and about the border. Second, the representations of stakeholders show ambivalent and concomitant visions of a ‘cross-border integration with the border’ and a ‘cross-border integration without the border’. These representations challenge the implementation of cross-border policies and schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores and unpacks the entanglements between law and geography that enable and advance the exclusion of non-citizens from entry into sovereign territory. We suggest that states manipulate jurisdiction within and beyond sovereign territory to extend enforcement. This jurisdiction applies primarily to the bodies of migrants themselves as opposed to fixed spaces. Like Elden’s (2009, 2013) imperio, or imperial power, this extension is spatially boundless, limitless in internal checks and administrative. Imperio places migrant bodies into new legal regimes with subjectivities that overlap and override existing protections, such as international refugee law. We develop our argument by considering enforcement practices in three areas: the waiting zone at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport, search and rescue areas on the Central Mediterranean Sea and Australian excision zones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Born from the ethical imperative of two sets of wounds, the open sores on the feet of a migrant who crosses the desert and the crucified feet of the One on the cross, this essay compares the U.S.-Mexico border wall and the cross of Jesus through the lives of undocumented migrants crossing into the U.S. From the “third space” of the desert, this essay develops a theology of cross/ing in which the crucified Christ challenges the status quo of state policies that promote injustice, suffering, exploitation, and poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Christmas story has been retold so often, through sermons, church plays, popular literature, and movies, that a false memory has been constructed. This memory romanticizes the birth of Jesus, thus masking the radical political implications of the event. All too often, we read the Gospels with privileged eyes, thus transforming the Christmas story into a hopeful salvific tale, if not legend. But the Jesús narratives can be read as anti-colonial literature about a native resident living under an invading colonial foreign power. This article reads the familiar story through the eyes of marginalized Latinxs (Latinos/as), who live under the consequences of colonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a spatial sociological conceptualization of the concept of borders. In relational spatial theory, borders have rarely been a theme of interest, just as relational space is all but absent within border studies. In order to understand the empirical existence of container space, without rejecting the insights and challenges of the spatial turn, a concept of borders is developed within a theory of relational space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is devoted to the analysis of literary representations of Galicia in two discourses of the region: Ukrainian and Polish. They are discussed on the basis of essays by Yurii Andrukhovych and Andrzej Stasiuk. For both writers, the narrative of Galicia, understood concurrently as a bordering and post-bordering space, is the starting point for reflection on the epistemology and ontology of Polish–Ukrainian borderlands and Central Europe. A disparity emerges from the perspectives of the two writers which can be described by way of the opposition city/province. Andrukhovych explores the palimpsestic and heterotopic character of the Galician urban sphere, while Stasiuk focuses on the most peripheral regions. The meaning generated by that difference evokes disparate ideological concepts regarding both former Galicia and Central Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses user-generated YouTube cut and mix videos of irregular migration as producing communicative memory of those who have suffered at Europe's external borders. Visual and textual analyses examine a neglected perspective on the study of media representations of migration by examining a particular practice through which people engage with news images and participate in (re)construction of collective memory in relation to irregular migration. The analysis shows that while hegemonic Eurocentric imagery prevails also in the vernacular amateur productions, re-mixing different cultural productions nevertheless complicates the representation of irregular migration and affords alternative positions. The article examines an emerging area in memory studies: practices of vernacular commemoration and its convergence with more institutionalized and professional media and memory practices. The videos are communicative reactions to emotionally disturbing news images of suffering - the public's re-articulations of migration and migration control, which nevertheless are constrained into the existing mainstream media framings and entertainment economies. This type of performative citizenship is crucial for social equality, particularly since non-performance of memory in relation to contemporary migration tragedies has dominated European public spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Euro-commentary puts the lens on the European Union (EU) North-African city of Ceuta. In so doing, it introduces the notion of EU limboscapes. In the 1990s and early 2000s the iconic twin-metal fencing of Ceuta’s borders added powerful visual strength to the metaphorical Fortress Europe. Today, Ceuta is still (or even more) central when it comes to the conceptual understanding of the socio-spatial articulation of the EU project vis-à-vis migration management. In this respect, we suggest that the limboscape profile drawn by Ceuta’s spatial dynamics is now iconic in terms of current EU b/ordering practices. The notion of limboscape helps us conceptually grasp/map the expanding archipelago of migrant confinement spaces scattered within and beyond EU space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are hills meant for Nagas and plains for Assamese? How and when did the idea of hills and plains as isolated and separated terrain get solidified? Drawing references from the tour diaries and reports of the colonial officials, this article attempts to deconstruct the binary of ‘hills’ and ‘plains’ by emphasising on networks of communication and citing instances of trade and commerce between the dwellers of hills and plains. It draws a trajectory of the policies of the colonial and post-colonial governments, which began drawing lines between people and regulated their mobility. The sedentarisation attempted by the state, finally culminated as the border. The article is therefore an attempt in understanding the politics of border which hints towards two directions: impossibility of writing history and the continuous ‘unmaking’ of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the borderland of Thailand with Myanmar and analyzes how Burmese women migrant workers are both victimized – Agamben’s homo sacer – by the exceptional space of the borderland, but also are able to actively utilize the opportunities afforded by the particular space of the border to juggle their responsibilities and life options. The article focuses on how women migrant workers arrange their healthcare, childcare and children’s education at the borderland of Mae Sot and in the centerland of Bangkok, and analyzes how they use the opportunities available at the border to manage these tasks. At the same time, the borderland leaves women with very weak protection against violence, cut off from their communities of origin, which offer both protection and control. Although borderlands can provide space for alternatives, this exceptional space compounded with a strict gender regime can pose serious restrictions on women’s agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarly work has focused on borders, both geopolitical and cultural, giving attention to border lives and identities. This article, which focuses on sociocultural practices, addresses what can be calledborder languaculture. With attention on the Texas-Mexico border in North America, the authors discuss three key features of hybrid practices on the US ‘side’: (1) code-mixing that has a strong rhetorical component; (2) cross-border continuation but transformation of ‘traditional’ forms and conventions associated historically with Spain and Mexico; and (3) creation of ‘new’ hybrid forms and cultural products that establish social affiliations and distinctions. These languacultural features support the central point of the article: that self-positioning in this borderland is characterized by the multiplicity, contradictions and syncretism now being labeledmestizaje. Although cultural change has often been explained throughacculturation, the syncretic nature of these border practices is better explained throughtransculturation, which emphasizes mutual influences and shifting power relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the interest of academia and a range of industries. Much of this appeal is driven by the obsession with military and political supremacy, and a desire to control people and their movements. This article looks at the expansion and impact of AI systems deployed along physical borders on the mobility of illegalised non-citizens and border security in the Global North. Using the case study of Silicon Valley’s Anduril, the article focuses on the US–Mexico border and assesses AI’s role in hindering illegalised mobility and reconfiguring border control. Two key contributions are made in the paper. First, AI advances must become the focus of border criminologies, examined within the milieu from which the technology emerged. Second, virtual walls are commercial, political and anti-humanitarian. They are opaque, resembling alchemy, flawed but with profound consequences. The article adds to the debate on whether AI experiments should be permitted in border control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union’s cross-border cooperation policy is regarded as a key instrument through which to promote regional cohesion, competitiveness and identity. This paper studies performances of regional identity within the framework of the EU’s INTERREG North cooperation, and especially in the Finnish/Swedish border area. The performativity approach shifts the focus from the question of whether regional identities are fixed or hybrid, and thick or thin, toward the question of how regional identities are manifested in border regions. The point of departure in the study, based on policy documents, fieldwork and interviews with local actors involved in the implementation of the INTERREG initiatives, is that spatial identity is not a feature that regions have but something that is actively performed. Performances of regional identity in this northern border region do not create continuous and parallel sets of practices. Instead, different kinds of directions and disjunctures emerge in and between different interest groups for which local, national and transnational all serve as important scales of coming-togetherness and differentiation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While globalisation unleashes forces that the Indian State1 finds increasingly difficult to stop and contain, a variety of intermediate institutions has emerged in recent years ranging between a fully securitised State and a State integrated fully into the world economy. These obviously call new configurations of border and border economy into existence as much as contribute to the production of new and hitherto unknown political subjects. Border economy produces the community and not the other way round. Border trade is one of the many instrumentalities through which the flow of persons, goods and services is sought to be contained in order to help making the nation in the border. Ethnicity and ethnic identification serve as a technology for governing the unofficial trade and contributes to the production of ethnic subject. Besides, it is important to understand how a number of people eke out a living by taking advantage of differential pricing across the border. Thus, the labouring life of the subaltern has become an agent, and a moral community thus gets produced, bringing about, in the process, mutation in the dominant discourses of national security and functional integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protected areas generally occur within a matrix of intensively human-modified landscapes. As a way to maintain the biodiversity in these areas, enclosure by fencing is often preferred. This strategy, however, is costly and little is known about the effectiveness of the alternative of unfenced borders on the vegetation and fauna. The objectives of this study are to assess whether there is a distinct difference in biodiversity and composition of plants and mammals between the protected Lake Mburo National Park and the adjacent ranchlands across an unfenced border and to determine the associations between vegetation and faunal species over the same border. We recorded herbaceous vegetation, woody vegetation, and mammal species composition in plots 300 to 500 m away from the border both inside the protected area and in the adjacent ranchlands. The species composition of herbs and mammals in the protected area differ from the adjacent ranchlands, but there is no difference for trees and shrubs. After accounting for land-use type, distance from the border did not significantly account for any additional variation. We also find a correlation between the species composition of vegetation and fauna. Our results suggest that unfenced borders around protected areas create a clear effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]