Presidential Address: Crossing Borders: Community Activism, Globalization, and Social Justice

Abstract

Borders are among the most ubiquitous features of social life. They help to define who we are, shape our sense of the world, and contour our surroundings. Borders and boundary maintenance can serve both negative and positive goals, for example, serving as both sites for the reproduction of, and resistance to, inequalities. On the one hand, creating and maintaining borders between nations, communities, and groups form the basis for some of the most violent conflicts both historically and in our present time. While capital flows freely across national borders, people are subject to systematic and oppressive social control that limits or channels their movement. Militarism, violence, and nationalism, along with the less tangible politics of fear, function to enforce borders and raise further questions: who gets to define borders? Who controls these borders? Who can cross, and under what circumstances? Boundary-drawing processes are also at work in the construction of social problems, as distinctions are made between deviancy and normalcy, illegitimate and legitimate acts. On the other hand, demands for the protection of the physical integrity of self, community, or nation include the goal of ensuring personal, social, and cultural freedoms. These appeals for the respect for borders include calls for the right to self-governance by native peoples and the right to bodily integrity by feminist, transgender, intersexed, antiviolence, and anti-sexist activists. Borders between academic disciplines are also policed and hotly contested. Boundaries between what counts as academic work and what is defined as nonacademic also informs the ways in which scholars can engage with activism and how students are socialized into academia. Like many members of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), I situate my work at the border of scholarship and activism and disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge and practice. Locating myself in these academic borderlands (to borrow from Gloria Anzaldúúa [1987]), the scholar activist whose work has contributed most to the development of what is now called border theory), I have been interested in understanding how to link local organizing with extra-local and transnational movements for social and economic justice, as well as to understand the ways in which activists draw on transnational organizing frames and documents and extra-local organizing to support local struggles. In exploring these processes, I tried to cross as many intellectual borders as possible, including sites of knowledge production outside the academy.