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- Convenors:
-
Jonathan Alderman
(University of St Andrews)
Eveline Dürr (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich)
Jonatan Kurzwelly (Peace Research Institute Frankfurt)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Location:
- 6 College Park (6CP), 0G/007
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 27 July, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel will discuss the practices people adopt to deal with precarity within borderlands. This includes everyday practices of watchfulness that shape them as subjects and individual and collective projects of hopeful transformation that attempt to reshape the common lifeworld
Long Abstract:
This panel examines precarity, identity transformations and hope within borderland contexts. Feminist Chicanx scholar Gloria Anzaldúa ([1987]2012: 19) has described a borderland as where "two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy". In borderland spaces where antithetical elements mix and combine in unexpected ways, people experience the daily knocking up against one another of different cultures, ways of being and political, bureaucratic and policing regimes. They face choices about how to place themselves in relation to often fluid boundaries meant to keep people apart but which people nevertheless cross and where nationhood and citizenship may be showcased or erased.
We intend to discuss the vigilant and watchful behaviour that ordinary people incorporate into their everyday lives to deal with living in borderland contexts in which their own belonging may be denied. We are also interested in how borderland subjects attempt to transform their social reality individually and collectively through actions that assert belonging. Such actions may challenge the nature of quotidian relationships characterized by coloniality through projects that inspire hope, and in the process transform borderland subjects themselves. Papers may therefore explore how subjects are shaped in parallel with political projects that question and attempt to overturn prevailing social relationships based in inequality and coloniality, and put imaginaries of better futures into action through resistance, hope and transformation of the commons.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 27 July, 2022, -Livnat Konopny Decleve (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)
Paper short abstract:
Following fieldwork with left-wing Jewish women living in Palestine, this talk will display their strategies to avoid border agents. I claim these women live "out of sovereignty" and embody an alternative political imagination that undermines that of the nation-state.
Paper long abstract:
Very few Israeli left-wing Jews live in Palestine. However, research that has been done on some of these cases, and especially on women living in Palestine, describes the phenomenon in terms of crossing and blurring national, ethnic, political, sexual, and gender boundaries. Following field-work with Israeli left-wing Jewish women living in Palestine, this paper points to a crossing of edges from a different angle: crossing the lines of fear. The narratives informing this paper reveal that life in Palestinian localities in the West Bank and the need to pass through the checkpoints often confronted the interlocutors with feelings of fear of the army and other state apparatus, fear of the settlers, and the public opinion in Israel, but also fear of the Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority.
In my talk I will claim the West Bank, with its subdivisions of different degrees of sovereignty, is a borderland. I will demonstrate the challenges the women living in the borderland encounter and the various strategies they employ to avoid border agents. I claim these women are living "out of sovereignty" and therefore embody an alternative political imagination that undermines that of the nation-state.
Janine Schemmer (Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt)
Paper short abstract:
The transformations in the shipbuilding sector led to a new composition of workers in Italian shipyards. With the example of the border town Monfalcone, I want to engage with ethnicization of labour mobility, precarious working and living conditions and the agency of workers and citizens.
Paper long abstract:
Monfalcone is located on the Italian-Slovenian border and has around 30.000 inhabitants. The city’s shipyard strongly shapes the identity of its inhabitants since its foundation in 1908 and affects their everyday life. Labour migration has always been an essential part of the development of the shipyard as well as the city. While in the 1980s a crisis led to the closure of many shipyards in Europe, this one succeeded in reinventing itself by specializing in the construction of cruise ships, under the condition to recruite foreign workers, mainly coming from Southern Asia and Eastern Europe. Due to their high numbers, journalists describe Monfalcone “like a shipyard in Manila, Taiwan or Dacca” (Maugeri 2015) and as a social laboratory.
While conservative politics with a nationalist course challenge the border town, the ethnicization of labour migration took on a new dimension as current right-wing politics declare the worker's presence a problem and instrumentalize their precarious conditions for their own purposes. In recent years, however, inhabitants increasingly face up to this stigmatisation. Local trade unions engage and together with the workers raise their voices for their issues, and several cultural associations give evidence of open-minded social and transnational relations, creating common projects and futures.
In my talk, presenting ethnographic research, I would like to pick up the idea of the city as a social laboratory, reflect on how individuals and groups of different backgrounds shape convivial and cultural practices on site and demonstrate that the agency of workers and citizens counteracts nationalist positions.
Keye Tersmette (Harvard University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper shows how inhabitants of a town on the Omani-Emirati border defy a British-inherited imperial border epistemology by espousing border visions that clash with the Omani state’s: both as separate from modern Oman, but also as part of a larger historical formation called Greater Oman.
Paper long abstract:
A curiosity presently besets Oman’s desert borderlands with the United Arab Emirates (UAE). At a time when the Omani state has been pursuing policy to incorporate peripheral, non-coastal regions into modern Oman’s national territory, inhabitants of the Omani border town of Buraimi continue to espouse border visions that clash with those of the state. Buraimians young and old imagine the Omani hinterlands both as separate from contemporary Oman, but also as part of a historical formation called Greater Oman or the Coast of Oman. In doing so, these Buraimians defy the imperial border epistemology that the last two sultans of Oman inherited from British agents seeking to secure oil concessions in the mid-twentieth century.
This paper argues that the recent materialisation and securitisation of the Oman-UAE border, alongside discursive attempts to anchor the Omani body politic, have not diminished the strength of these border visions. It narrates and explains the history of this particular border in order to highlight the disruption and violence that imperialist borders cause from the moment they are drawn. In this case, these borders have locked Buraimians into a fixed national identity, where previous generations enjoyed greater mobility and the ability to shift allegiances with ease. Drawing on archival research conducted in the United Kingdom, and on a combined 17 months of fieldwork in Oman, this paper explodes the normality of borders in the Arabian Peninsula.
Aysen Ustubici (Koc University) Nilay Kavur (Koç University) Pınar Ensari (Koç University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reveals the relationship between the socio-economic implications of border crossings and the transformation of gender relations, based on the findings of fieldwork in the summer 2021 in Hopa, Turkey, a border town at Turkey-Georgia border, lying across Batumi.
Paper long abstract:
This paper focuses on the relationship between the socio-economic implications of border crossings and the transformation of gender relations, as part of “Aligning Migration Management and the Migration–Development Nexus” (MIGNEX) Project. The discussion is based on the findings of fieldwork in the summer 2021 in Hopa, Turkey, a border town at Turkey-Georgia border, lying across Batumi. We explain different phases of the opening of the border in the last three decades and discuss the impact of series of border-openings on regional development. Shipping, truck driving, customs operations, smuggling, shuttle trade and Georgian migrants’ involvement in tea production are some of the trends, contributing to the economic growth in Hopa. Fieldwork findings and socio-economic indicators reveal that the considerable wealth expansion experienced by the local population have not contributed to overall development in the region; it rather has increased living standards and personal consumption of luxury items. We argue that gender relations and gendered subjectivities have been shaped through these processes. The visibility of Georgian women in Hopa’s economic life and employment of Georgian workers in tea harvesting (a job predominantly undertaken by the women) have led to increasing participation of Hopa women in socio-economic life. Yet, gendered division of labour and gendered violence have persisted. Furthermore, cross-border economic activities of men; i.e. shopping, gambling, business and truck-driving; resulting in economic power have solidified the hegemonic masculinities. The paper will discuss these empirical findings in connection to migration-development nexus, borderland studies and assess these literatures from a gender lens.