Border Experience Research Articles

Borders from the Cultural Point of View: An Introduction to Writing at Borders

This introductory article to the special issue Writing at Borders suggests that cultural studies and the humanist point of view have significant explanatory potential concerning various borders and border crossings in multidisciplinary border studies. Cultural and human understandings of borders and border crossings grow from the research of ethnographic particularities on one hand, and of universal and culturally expressed human experiences of borders and border crossings (however culturally expressed) on the other. In this article, this explanatory potential is made visible by examining the history of cultural anthropology, where borders and border crossings have been recognized in research since the late 19th century. The aim of this concise introductory article is to outline through selected examples how territorial, social, and cultural borders and border crossings have been acknowledged and understood conceptually in the history of Anglo-American and European anthropology. The selected examples illustrate the gradual evolution of the conceptualization of the border from a territorially placed boundary and filter, to a semantically constructed, ritualized and performed symbolic border, and finally to a discursive (textual) construction.

Preface: Writing at Borders

No abstract available.

Development of No Más Hambre (No More Hunger), an innovative promoter‐driven nutrition education and skill‐building curriculum to reduce the risk of hunger in Mexican‐origin older adults in Texas border colonias (273.3)

Mexican‐origin older adults who live along the Texas‐Mexico border experience high rates of poverty, food insecurity and hunger, and health disparities. Among this hard‐to‐reach population, promotoras de salud (community health workers) serve as a cultural bridge, provide outreach, and are recognized as respected health advocates and peer health educators. The purpose of this study was to design, develop, and pilot test curricula and instructional materials that provide promotoras with knowledge and skill‐building training to target seniors at risk for hunger through tailored and culturally appropriate education and skill building on food acquisition and preparation using community food resources. 95 Mexican‐origin seniors from four Texas border areas and 25 promotoras participated in focus groups to determine educational and skill needs. Emergent themes included desire for home‐based nutrition education and guidance regarding food acquisition and food preparation, given limited resources. No Más Hambre (No More Hunger) consists of seven modules of instruction that engage and empower promotoras to deliver evidence‐based education and skills. This Spanish‐language curriculum was developed and delivered by employing Adult Learning Theory and applying strategies and techniques such as interactive instructional modules and case‐based discussions to guide resource‐dependent education. The curriculum includes strategies to overcome barriers to food insecurity and encourages seniors to engage in collaborative networks to locate resources within the community. Pre‐ and post‐tests comparisons were assessed for each module. This project constitutes a major new effort to enhance nutrition knowledge and skills among Mexican‐origin older adults and to effectively apply the science of human nutrition to meet the needs of this vulnerable and food insecure population.Grant Funding Source: Supported by AARP Foundation and CDC's PRC Healthy Aging Research Network

Review: Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women’s Food Writing, by Alice L. McLean

Review: <i>Aesthetic Pleasure in Twentieth-Century Women’s Food Writing</i>, by Alice L. McLean

Negotiating second-language identities in and through border crossing

In this article, I describe the ways in which two British university students negotiated their identity as second language learners during a year abroad in Italy and the extent to which their struggles helped them to ‘fit in’ into the new social and cultural contexts. Building upon the lived experiences of the two participants, I follow a poststructuralist discourse on identity, which considers identities as dynamic and in continuous evolution. In this article, I argue that the extent to which individuals are prepared to negotiate second-language identities, or conversely to resist them, can be directly influenced by the ways in which they perceive their relationships to the new contexts and by the ways in which such relationships are constructed over time and across space. I also argue that the continuous evolution of identities tends to change more rapidly in new sociocultural contexts, such as those embedded in specific experiences of border crossing.

Increasing Cervical Cancer Screening in the United States‐Mexico Border Region

AbstractPurposeHispanic women living on the United States‐México border experience health disparities, are less likely to access cervical cancer screening services, and have a higher rate of cervical cancer incidence compared to women living in nonborder areas. Here we investigate the effects of an intervention delivered by community health workers (CHWs, known as lay health educators or Promotores de Salud in Spanish) on rates of cervical cancer screening in Hispanic women who were out of compliance with recommended screening guidelines.MethodsHispanic women out of compliance with screening guidelines, attending clinics in southern New Mexico, were identified using medical record review. All eligible women were offered the intervention. The study was conducted between 2009 and 2011, and data were analyzed in 2012. Setting/participants—162 Hispanic women, resident in New Mexico border counties, aged 29–80 years, who had not had a Pap test within the past 3 years. Intervention—A CHW‐led, culturally appropriate, computerized education intervention. Main outcome measures—The percentage of women who underwent cervical cancer screening within 12 months of receiving the intervention. Change in knowledge of, and attitudes toward cervical cancer and screening as assessed by a baseline and follow‐up questionnaire.Results76.5% of women had a Pap test after the intervention. Women displayed increased knowledge about cervical cancer screening and about HPV.ConclusionsA culturally appropriate promotora‐led intervention is successful in increasing cervical cancer screening in at‐risk Hispanic women on the United States‐México border.

Towards a Cosmopolitan Cinema: Understanding the Connection Between Borders, Mobility and Cosmopolitanism in the Fiction Film

This paper argues that the cosmopolitan cinema has been largely un-theorised, and should be understood as a mode of production and a cross-cultural practice. It starts by probing the connection between mobility, borders and cosmopolitanism across a range of approaches in the social sciences. Using a cultural sociology lens, it then goes on to explore how images and experiences of borders and mobility matter for the constitution of cosmopolitan cinema as a mode of production, which invites structures of feeling (i.e. care, compassion and empathy) that enable new affective and intellectual engagements of the audience with ‘others’ whose access to cultural dialogue is severely limited. Looking at two film examples (In This World and Kandahar), and their conditions of production and reception, the paper concludes by showing how particular aesthetic and narrative options are consequential for the creative ways in which human dignity and its violation can be made ‘representable’ and personalized so as to inspire public dialogue – among film-makers, film critics, journalists, interested citizens and viewers – in a transnational public sphere.

Shahram Khosravi, “Illegal” Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders

To say that Khosravi’s “Illegal” Traveller: An Auto-Ethnography of Borders is a book about border crossing is an understatement. This is a book about sensory and embodied experiences of borders from different standpoints, where current debates on the regulation of human mobility are approached through the author’s own. Auto-ethnographies have often been criticised for being too emotional and unscientific, but in fact the value of an auto-ethnography is indeed in its ability to convey to the r...

FRONTEIRAS, SIGNIFICADO E VALOR - A PARTIR DO ESTUDO DA EXPERIÊNCIA DAS CIDADES-GÊMEAS DE RIVERA E SANTANA DO LIVRAMENTO.

A partir do estudo de duas cidades-gêmeas de fronteira o autor identifica dois diversos tipos de definição de fronteira, juntamente com os possíveis motivos da integração de fato entre as cidades de Rivera e Santana do Livramento. O autor conclui refletindo sobre os possíveis níveis qualitativos de integração social que se pode esperar numa experiência de fronteira urbana binacional.

Biometric citizenship

The article considers the issue of citizenship in light of the recent developments in biometric identification techniques. It aims to answer the question as to what kind of citizenship is the ‘biometric citizenship’. Drawing on several empirical examples including the Iris Recognition Immigration System scheme, identity cards and current citizenship reform plans in the UK, I argue that biometric citizenship is at once a ‘neoliberal citizenship’ and a ‘biological citizenship’. The neoliberal aspect of biometric citizenship is demonstrated through the rearrangement of the experience of border crossing in terms of the neoliberal ethos of choice, freedom, active entrepreneurialism and transnational expedited mobility. At the same time, these are enacted alongside the exclusionary and violent measures directed at those who are considered as risky categories illustrating the constitutive relationship between the ‘biometric citizen’ and its ‘other’. As regards its biological aspect, biometric citizenship is embedded within rationalities and practices that deploy the body not only as a means of identification but also as a way of sorting through different forms of life according to their degree of utility and legitimacy in relation to market economy. This aspect also carries a racial and national dimension exemplified in both the national identity card scheme and the very technical infrastructure of biometric technology. Overall, what these two features have in common is the reduction of the principle of citizenship to processes of identity management and technical procedures without, however, purging it altogether from its all too familiar national and race-based components.

Managing the undesirables: refugee camps and humanitarian government

List of acronyms Introduction: From Vulnerable to Undesirable Part One: A World of Undesirables, a System of Camps Chapter 1. Refugees, Displaced, Expelled: the Itinerary of the Stateless Chapter 2. Refugee Camps Today. An Attempted Inventory Part Two: Everyday Life in the Twenty-First Century's Refugee Camps Chapter 3. An Ethnologist in the Refugee Camps Chapter 4. The Interminable Insomnia of Exile. The Camp as an Ordinary Exceptionalism Chapter 5. Experiences of Wandering, Borders and Camps: Liberia, Sierra Leone, Guinea Chapter 6. Surviving, Reviving, Leaving, Remaining. The Long Life of Angolan Refugees in Zambia Chapter 7. The Camp-Towns. Somalia in Kenya Chapter 8. In the Name of the Refugees. Political Representation and Action in the Camps Chapter 9. Who Will Speak Out in the Camp? A Study of Refugees' Testimony Part Three: After the Camps Chapter 10. If this is a town Chapter 11. If this is a world Chapter 12. If this is a government Conclusion Bibliography

Erlebnis und Ereignis – Scham als Bruchstelle zwischen Innen- und Außensicht

Shame is playing an important role in personal relationships and in the development of self-consciousness of a person. Already 1925, Victor von Weizsacker stated that the feeling of shame contributes to the construction of an “inner room” but, at the same time, also integrates a person in a social community. Shame is a border experience, a kind of “tearing the coherence” (von Weizsacker). Shame may contribute to the development of subjectivity but also hinder it, if the abashment happens continuously. This topic gets illustrated and deepened by an example and references.

Dai limiti del luogo alle barriere dello spazio

Renaissance travel literature does not include the experience of the geometrical border yet: it tells about positioning in zones, transitional areas where everything happens. Thus these textual traces increasingly tend to fashion themselves according provisional negotiations between map indicators and route indicators, between description and narration, leading to a balance or a tension between strategies and tactics. The features of the modern map, its formalization and its newly acquired autonomy, depend on this very polarization, on a binarism emerging between spatial setup and material experience of places. Referring to this crucial historical context, this paper would like to consider some apparently divergent definitions of space and place. In the last decades two main trends, respectively oriented to the theoretical redemption of the notion of space (the spatial turn of cultural studies) and place (the humanistic turn of geographical disciplines), seem nonetheless to convey towards a shared critique of the rigidity and stability of the concept of place when confronted to the polysemic category of space. If the Aristotelian place as a qualitative limit worked as an authoritative foundation unit for the medieval space of localization, during the Renaissance a quantitative space willing to be an “unlimited place” challenges this well established organization. Considering this process, this paper suggests the possibility, in order to suit a distinction rendered influential by Yi-Fu Tuan in geographical studies, to invert the promising philosophical terms employed by Michel de Certeau to describe the radical changes undergone by geographical imagination in these critical centuries.

Perceptibility and Experience of Inner-European Borders by Institutionalised Border Protection

Perceptibility and Experience of Inner-European Borders by Institutionalised Border Protection The article concentrates on institutionalised border protection as a special indication of border areas that are demarcated by the existence and operations of specific authorities. This kind of border protection with its control and monitoring measures serves different purposes, including crime fighting and protection against threats, fiscal aspects (customs), migration control, traffic safety, and environment protection. Furthermore, it is an expression of state sovereignty. In this way borders and border areas can be experienced and perceived, which the article suggests can have different dimensions: a cognitive, an affective, a visual-haptic, and an aesthetic one. Under the Schengen Agreement, systematic border control between the participating states has been removed. This implies, not the end of border protection, but perhaps a loss of a manifestation and perceptibility of borders and border areas.

Canadian border resident experience of the “smartening” border at Niagara

Much of the writing on the post‐9/11 Canada/U.S. border analyses (supportively or critically) the border‐related projects of economic and political elites. This paper focuses instead on local residents’ experiences of a changing border. Drawing on interviews and press reports from the Niagara region, the paper provides a grounded account of Canadian border life both at and after 9/11. Local experiences of altered cross‐border mobilities, intensified border inspections and reworked political subjectivities complicate dominant claims of straightforward congruence between a “smartening” Canada/U.S. border and border resident interests and concerns.

Border Experience and Knowledge Cultures

The article at hand deals with the influence of a milieu-based culture of knowledge for mastering the future of cities and complex organizations in border areas. In two case studies on urban and university development in Frankfurt (Oder), Germany, and Słubice, Poland, the authors discover that “misfits” on the institutional level, and between different milieus as well, can be effectively handled by providing an institutionalized framework for contact and discourse on development that methodologically goes beyond traditional network relations.

`Over the River'

Drawing on interviews with Canadian borderlanders, this article examines childhood experiences with the Canada—US border in the mid-1980s to early 1990s. The retrospective accounts of childhood border experiences demonstrate how childhood was produced and experienced in border crossings and how the production of childhood intersected with a stratified border to reinforce forms of privilege and exclusion associated with class, citizenship, gender and racial/ethnic positionings.

State frontiers: borders and boundaries in the Middle East

This book deals with a very topical issue in an innovative multidisciplinary approach. It deals with borders that are always a hotly debated and controversial issue. Do borders still define the limits of states? How do communities change when a border is put between them? Is the physical border more important than the conceptual boundary? In recent times, the question of borders in the Middle East has assumed an importance unknown since the collapse of the Ottoman empire. In this fresh examination of the issue, Inga Brandell draws together a variety of disciplinary approaches, and takes the classic debates forward into the 21st century. Casting its net wide from the Anatolian plateau to the mountains of Cyprus, State Frontiers brings a number of key issues to light. Brandell brings to our attention the idea of 'straddling' populations, looking at the Syrian-Lebanese business community which has historically shuttled across the border between the two countries as a result of civil war in one and successive economic diktats in the other. Another case study examines the lived experience of borders in Cyprus, detailing not only the physical but also the mental and cultural effects of separation. The usefulness of the discourse of borders is highlighted by looking at the disjunction between Turkish politicians' rhetoric of border inviolability and the Turkish army's regular violation of the South Eastern border with Iraq. Brandell provides rich empirical illumination of the psychological function of borders in creating (and keeping out) an imagined 'other'. She also explores practical dimensions of borders in the context of boundary transgressing resources such as water. Brandell offers important new theoretical insights, discussing the validity of the assumptions which underlie border studies. In the Middle East, borders are widely believed to be arbitrary and ultimately external to the organic development of societies. In its multifaceted portrayal of border life, State Frontiers restores the balance and contributes towards a more sophisticated understanding of these issues.

Risky Geographies: Teens, gender, and rural landscape in North America

Young Vermonters living along the Canadian border experience cultural, spatial and material marginalisation, as well as historically high rates of death due to alcohol‐related motor vehicle accidents. This research examines the relationship between teens' place in society, their material geographies in a rural setting, and the strategies they employ to create social opportunities and produce ‘cultural gateways’. As active cultural producers, young people, especially older boys, are successful in building socio‐spatial networks that extend beyond their local area, across the US–Canada border, and into Quebec bars. The research reveals that teens live in a highly gendered social environment, one that encourages risk‐taking for boys and closes down social opportunities for girls. This study opens up new directions for further research into the social and environmental conditions under which North American teens craft their lives in rural places.

Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century (review)

Reviewed by: Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century Julia María Schiavone Camacho Decolonial Voices: Chicana and Chicano Cultural Studies in the 21st Century. Edited by Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñonez. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. Decolonial Voices is a critical, interdisciplinary volume which blends cultural, social, and economic methodologies. Centering multiplicity, it highlights the ways Chicana and Chicano cultural production since 1848 has interwoven gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class. The past, present, and future are deeply tied in this creative political and academic work in Chicana/o cultural studies. As this volume shows, there are strong connections between culture and colonialism for Chicanas and Chicanos. The drawing of the boundary between the United States and Mexico in 1848 is a crucial moment in Decolonial Voices. Borders, both physical and symbolic, are central in this collection. One of its strengths lies in the ability of the editors and contributors to analyze borders as both constricting and potentially freeing. As a violent force, the geopolitical division between Mexico and the United States has caused severe physical, psychological, emotional, social, and economic distress for Mexicanas and Mexicanos, Chicanas and Chicanos. Yet, the bordered realities people have lived since 1848 have fostered creative and resistant cultural productions. Arguing that border cultural aesthetics are based in physical realities, Arturo J. Aldama and Naomi H. Quiñonez are interested in the cultural creations that arise from unique Chicana and Chicano situations. Working toward decolonization, this collection offers politically and culturally viable analyses of Chicana/o experience. Concerned with both oppression and resistance, Decolonial Voices develops deep critiques of power systems, while also reflecting on the creative and risky ways Chicanas and Chicanos challenge United States dominant culture. In their introduction, Aldama and Quiñonez situate Decolonial Voices within the field of Chicana and Chicano cultural studies. They argue the essays in this volume build on several important works and further current trends in the field. By moving beyond nationalism, calling for cross-cultural relationships and discussion, and offering comparative frames, this work aims to forge alliances across social divisions. Further, it adds to the dialogues between feminist, cultural, subaltern, and postcolonial studies. The essays in Part I, “Dangerous Bodies,” focus on Chicana and Chicano embodied forms of oppression and resistance. Jonathan Xavier Inda looks at the dominant culture’s preoccupation with ridding the United States of immigrants and punishing those who remain. Using Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower,” he argues the state’s control over life and death becomes especially salient vis-à-vis immigrant women’s bodies. For Inda, the state justifies inhumane actions against immigrants by arguing women and their potential children pose threats to the nation’s social body. As ideas around death have changed, ending the lives of some has become tied with preserving the lives of others. The essays in this section vividly describe the ways gendered and racialized oppression is entwined. Offering important political critiques and alternatives, the essays in Part II, “Dismantling Colonial/Patriarchal Legacies,” chart the ways cultural critics have challenged racialist and gendered historical legacies. Anna M. Sandoval’s work compares Chicana and Mexicana discursive and practical resistance to dominant norms. Pointing to a key difference between the two groups, she argues Mexicanas are part of Mexican national discourse, while Chicanas are not included in dominant visions of the nation in the United States. Sarah Ramirez examines the resistant digital photography of Alma López. She argues López’s work offers a fluid, alternative woman-centered indigenous/spiritual Chicana aesthetic space which works against nationalism and damaging physical and symbolic borders. The essays in Part III, “Mapping Space and Reclaiming Place,” develop critical visions of Chicana and Chicano cultural production. José David Saldívar offers profound readings of the works of various cultural critics. As he shows, Chicana/o cultural forms provide important insights into border experience. Moving beyond the nation-state frame, these productions develop alternate definitions of culture and identity which are in constant flux. Alberto Ledesma’s work outlines a provocative critique of Chicana and Chicano cultural representation. He argues Chicana/o literature has not fully incorporated undocumented immigrants as “constitutive components of...