Paper short abstract:

In this paper, we use personal experiences as cross border commuters to better understand how free movement in the European borderlands transform borders and thereby requires people to juggle between emerging possibilities and the human costs of this lifestyle.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, we use personal experiences as cross-border commuters to further extend our understanding of and elaborate on how cross-border commuters practice European borders. Our work takes recourse to the notion of Borderwork, coined by Chris Rumford (2008), thus investigating the borderwork required from free movers responding to the "muddled complexity" (Jago, 2002) of the every-day life of cross-border commuters. Attention has been paid in border studies to the role non-state actors play in practicing borders but it is still little researched in relation to cross-border commuting. This stands in contrast to Rumford's claim that ordinary citizens are increasingly active in envisioning, constructing, shifting, and/or even erasing borders.

What is particularly interesting about the notion of borderwork in the context of cross-border commuting is how the figure of the cross-border commuter has come to reincarnate "the good European citizen", a true borderlander who makes active use of the possibilities opened by the Schengen border regime. Harvesting on personal experiences, the paper is a collaborative autoethnographic account (Ellis, 2007; Chang, 2013) created in dialogue between the two authors as well as others whose stories remain central to the writings but whose identities are not made explicit. Using this methodology provides the possibility of grasping the social and emotional investments of cross-border commuting. In so doing we contribute to the above-sketched academic field that seeks to better understand how free movement in a European context requires people to juggle between emerging possibilities and the human costs of this lifestyle.