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- Convenors:
-
Janine Schemmer
(Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt)
Giustina Selvelli (Ca' Foscari University of Venice)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Mobilities
- Sessions:
- Thursday 24 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
Taking a close ethnographic look at borderlands, the panel takes a semiotic approach to dynamic margins and aims at exploring creative practices and counter-narratives challenging hegemonic discourses. It will reflect on markers of cultural diversity which challenge social and cultural orders.
Long Abstract:
The panel will consider the representational dynamics shaping the public space of marginal border areas and towns, relating them to questions of migration, mobility, identity and diversity. Marginality is not only a feature of peripheral geopolitical location and weak economic position. Margins are sites where conflicting histories and experiences converge and where centralized discourses are challenged through creative forms of alternative and counter-narratives. In borderlands, legacies and memories of unresolved conflicts over territorial demarcations, ethnicities, language use and identities assume a significance that remains foreign to the context of the national centre. Margins open up new perspectives on the endurance of the respective hegemonic discourses, and question the cohesion of social and cultural categories through practices of mobility and expressions of transnational identities.
Landscapes of borderlands tell the stories of past and present conflicts as well as resistance. We are especially interested in examples of reappropriations of dominant discourses and in the different ways these are made explicit through cultural transgressions. We would like to explore the symbolic capital and the patterns of diversity inclusion and exclusion that manifest in the materiality of the border and in sites of exchange and encounters such as squares, ports, markets, and in written and visual expressions such as (un)intentional monuments, Graffiti and murals. We want to discuss markers of cultural diversity in their function as significant reminders of "Otherness" and "multiplicity", which contribute to deconstruct the exclusivist concepts of "fixedness" and homogeneity within societies at both sides of a border.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 24 June, 2021, -Michael Thompson (University of Leeds)
Paper short abstract:
An autoethnographic account of crossing select borders in the Black Sea Region as an outsider, this research dissects the perceived homogeneity of post-Soviet borders, highlighting the differing roles of conflict, domestic politics and international relations with the EU and Russia.
Paper long abstract:
The resurgence of conflict in the Black Sea Region challenges the dominant focus of current migration research on Western European phenomena. This paper re-evaluates the notion of the ‘border’, exploring the production and enabling of the border environment within the context of re-ignited instability of the northern Black Sea littoral and the ethno-frontiers of the Caucasus.
By reading border ‘production’ in a constructivist manner grounded in personal agency, the ‘border phenomenon’ can be reinterpreted as a product of those who control and use it. To renegotiate the current paradox of border politics, we need to re-examine the production of the border institution itself: considering borders both superfluous to the design of the multinational super-state and an essential institution for national security remains deeply problematic. While the EU attempts to preserve the Good Friday Agreement and the relative harmony of its bordering processes, institutionalised corruption and conflict converge with abject poverty to create a hostile border landscape for locals and travellers alike.
The current paper uses autoethnography to redefine the everyday nature of bordering in the Black Sea Region. An analysis of micro-level borderscape hostilities across the region demonstrates the heterogeneity of modern regional borders. I demonstrate the mechanisms which enable the construction of a ‘Fortress Europe’ while highlighting the differences between democratic and autocratic regimes of border control across the Black Sea Region. Here, ethnic tensions and regional conflict highlight the toxicity of the ‘wall’ narrative, while outdated infrastructure and smuggling demonstrate the dualist nature of EU border politics.
Alenka Spreizer (University of Primorska - Faculty of Humanities) Nataša Rogelja Caf (Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts)
Paper short abstract:
The contribution presents fisheries in the Slovenian coastal towns in Istria, where many territorial, administrative and identities borders and boundaries intersect. We explore how narratives on transformation and transgression of borders are reflected by fishers and in the landscape.
Paper long abstract:
This contribution presents industrial fisheries in the Slovenian coastal towns in northwestern Istria. As a multicultural, multi-ethnic and multilingual region where many territorial borders transect and administrative and identity boundaries intersect, Istria is actively involved in the processes of inventing/innovating material and intangible "natural and cultural heritage". After the end of industrial fisheries and transformation to small-scale fisheries, coastal towns with ports faced transformation of the fishing economies.
This ethnographic exploration analyses narratives of former industrial fishers following the exodus of former Italian-speaking inhabitants after WW2. Interviews were collected as oral histories on industrial fishery focused on work migration to towns, everyday movements and work routine in the ports and in the sea.
Proposed paper deals with identity boundaries between “us” and “them”, those “connected with fishing” and “other activities”, boundaries of past migrations (exodus) from Primorska, Slovenia and new migrations to Primorska to pursue education and work in SFRY, vague boundaries between education for fishing and seafaring, implicit delimitations between the soldiers of the Yugoslav army and fishermen, boundaries on the sea for "foreigners" and "us", as well as the line between the end of socialism and the “crisis”, up to the end of industrial fisheries in Izola. Special interest will be on the questions, how these multiple processes of movements and narratives about transformation and transgression of borders are reflected in nowadays landscape of the towns, especially in the fishing ports.
Marion Hamm (University of Klagenfurt)
Paper short abstract:
Based on encounters with the material culture of an alpine border landscape and with permanent or intermittent dwellers, this contribution reflects on the convergence of everyday experience and artistic performance through the lens of semiotics and liminality.
Paper long abstract:
Carinthia ticks all the boxes of a marginal region. Situated at the southern edge of Austria in the Eastern Alps and with a Slovene-speaking minority, it is one of the border areas where bitter memories of a historical conflict continue to shape the present. However, it is also a place where a divisive narrative is challenged by everyday practices and performances; a cultural frontier (Peter Burke) where notions of mobility and settledness, belonging and exclusion, stasis and dynamism, language and silence are profoundly put into question.
Based on encounters with the material culture of an alpine border landscape, and with permanent or intermittent dwellers who know how to "read" it, this contribution reflects on the convergence of everyday experience and artistic performance. Reading buildings, interiors, access routes and the landscape itself through the lens of semiotics and liminality helps to discover how memory work and everyday activities at the margins are, in fact, challenging hegemonic narratives in ways that crucially contribute to central debates on globalisation, conviviality, inclusion and exclusion.
Kailey Rocker (Lawrence University)
Paper short abstract:
Negative heritage sites like prison camps that have been on the geopolitical margins represent symbolic and material nodes for Albanians to confront their socialist past today. Narratives about and actions at these sites pressure the state to acknowledge its responsibility in facing Albania’s past.
Paper long abstract:
This past decade has seen renewed efforts by Albanians to face the socialist past of the twentieth century, while simultaneously trying to create a viable future for themselves and their country in Europe. Sites of memory, notably those conceptually identified as negative heritage like former labor camps akin to Gulags, serve as symbolic and material nodes for confronting the past in today’s political climate. While not geographically located on the borderlands of the country, these large state complexes of the 20th century are located at the borderlands of contemporary towns, intentionally tucked away from contemporary life. Sites such as Spaҫ Prison and Labor Camp in north-central Albania and the Tepelena Internment Camp in southern Albania are recognized by the media today as “infamous”, but little of the information circulating about them, largely personal testimonies, has been officially adopted. These former prisons and labor camps – borderland objects of the 20th century that continue to be borderland objects today – are fertile grounds for understanding the productive and destructive nature of state-officiated memory practices in Albania. In this paper, I explore competing narratives produced by shifting coalitions of state and non-state actors working in an environment where a hegemonic narrative about Albania’s socialist past is not clearly established. As the cases of Spaҫ and Tepelana camps show, narratives from the margins and larger pan-European ones, concerning the memory of totalitarian regimes, pressure the state to acknowledge their own responsibility in shaping how Albania deals with the socialist past.