Circulation and Locality in Critical Border Studies

Program

• 20 February 13.00-14.00
  On the times and spaces of borders
  Linn Axelsson (Stockholm University)
• 20 March 13.00-14.00
  The Öresund Bridge and Sustainable Transport: Perspectives on Its Impact on the Transport System
  Fredrik Pettersson-Löfstedt (Lund University/K2)
• 24 April 13.00-14.00
  Walking the lines: Reflections on walking methods in Jordan
  Olivia Mason (Newcastle University) - postponed to 19 February, 2026
• 22 May 13.00-14.00
  Inscribing Belonging: Creative Methods for Listening to Migration
  Erin Cory (Malmö University) 

About the series

Over 30 years ago, James Clifford wrote in Travelling Cultures that 20^th century ethnography (and one can argue the wider social sciences), as an evolving practice of modern travel, had become increasingly weary of "localizing strategies" in the identification and representation of culture. A practice, he argued, that tended to marginalise, if not erase, blurred boundary areas and historical realities encountered by researchers. The field of critical border studies is today confronting a similar crisis of locality: As theorists increasingly seek to make sense of the multiplicity of borders in their manifold spatial, temporal, social, cultural or psychological configurations, it becomes ever more important to define where such boundaries begin and end, so as to hold fast to the historical challenges before us. This year we will address the contention in two parts. In the spring with the series Circulation and locality in critical border studies, in the autumn with the series Border allies, boundary alliances.

The first part (Spring 2025), following the post-colonial historian of science, Kapil Raj, we will explore the question of Circulation and locality in critical border studies Raj’s longstanding research examines the ways that knowledge is asymmetrically constituted through processes of negotiation, appropriation, and reconfiguration across physical and social frontiers. Spaces of circulation are in this view not just an abstract container in which knowledge is created, but rather foundational to intellectual creativity and understanding itself. To this end, we will consider this notion through several different circuits and vectors of importance in current critical border research, including the spatio-temporal rhythms of border sites and circulations; infrastructures and infrastructural legacies of border mobility; ordinary practices of circulation, and; the body and embodiments of circulation and context. 

The second part (Autumn 2025), entitled Border allies, boundary alliances delves deeper into questions of boundary-spanning and intermediation that structure and sustain links between local and global spaces of circulation (Shaffer, et al., 2009; Raj 2010) and what this might mean for the pragmatics of responding to the polycrisis in/of the border as we know it. As Clifford (1992) suggests, intermediaries do not just travel; they are also guides and translators, carriers and custodians, of other worlds, temporalities, languages, and cultures. Nevertheless, a crucial aspect of intermediation requires that such actors are comparatively stationary in order to perform their role as mediators (Raj, 2016) – or what Renato Rosaldo (1996) characterises as “culturally rooted mobility.” With this in mind, we are going to consider "border allies and boundary alliances" through an assertively post-disciplinary lens of collaboration and practice in addressing key challenges confronting border studies today: climate induced landscape change, human and other-than-human relations, as well as changing life forms and modes of social organisation in and beyond the Öresund region.

The series is arranged by the Öresund Comparative Borderlands Research Group and financed by Centre for Modern European Studies (CEMES).