Imaginary Boundaries Research Articles

Granice wyobrażone i rzeczywiste – ewolucja i transgresja

Imaginary and Real Boundaries – Evolution and Transgression: The Change of an Organizational Model’s Paradigm Based on the Example of Leance – a Teal Organization from Krakow The article discusses issues related to the real and imaginary limitations of the functioning of teal organizations. Both categories of boundaries are thought constructs, and the proposed distinction is determined by the process of transgression. A crossed barrier becomes an imaginary boundary, the one to be defeated remains real. The analysis of boundaries and transgression was based on the theory of psychotransgressionism by Józef Kozielecki, and the case study concerned the Krakow teal organization – Leance. The primary focus was on the area of communication, relations and interactions.

Kształtowanie granic rzeczywistych i wyobrażonych Jerozolimy Wschodniej w kontekście konfliktu izraelsko-palestyńskiego

Shaping the Real and Imaginary Boundaries of East Jerusalem in the Context of the Israeli‑Palestinian Conflict The article discusses selected goals of Israeli policy regarding East Jerusalem, presenting them as phenomena constituting the process of constructing real and imaginary city boundaries. The author analyzed two following research problems. How did Israel create the actual and imaginary city boundaries? What were the consequences of Israeli boundaries‑forming policy? The above questions were analyzed by looking at Israeli facts on the ground policy aimed to unify Jerusalem territory and consolidate its de facto jurisdiction. The investigation of the above questions allowed to draw a conclusion that Israeli policies in East Jerusalem contributed to the maintaining of the Israeli‑Palestinian conflict.

"Za Krakowską Bramę rzadko się człowiek wypuszczał…"

"One Would Rarely Venture behind the Krakowska Gate…": Imaginary Boundaries of the Jewish District in Lublin in Memories of Pre‑war Inhabitants
 Up until the World War II, Jews played an important role in the history of Lublin. At least since the 16th century, Jews had lived in the segregated district of Podzamcze, called the “Jewish Town”. Although they started to inhabit the Old Town in 1862 and eventually lived in all parts of Lublin by the interwar period, the former boundaries between the “Jewish” and “Christian” parts of the city remained strongly imprinted in social memory, affecting everyday existence. This article analyses the imaginary boundaries that delineated the “Jewish” district of Lublin in the pre‑World War II period. Drawing on oral testimonies of Christian residents of the city recorded in years 1998‑2005 and archival materials such as articles from local papers, documents of communal institutions, and photos from the 1920s and 1930s, the opposing categories of “ours” and “theirs” have been used to describe social relations in urban space. The author of the article argues that the persistence of segregation in shared memory is expressed not only in visual forms, but it also has sound, smell and taste dimensions.

The ocean exceeded: Fish, flows and forces

The ongoing conceptualisation of oceans and the hydrosphere by Peters and Steinberg is to be welcomed. They continue to challenge geography’s historical tendency to focus on and from terrestrial spaces, exploring how oceans exceed their material, discursive and imagined boundaries along with their liquid form. This short commentary responds specifically to their assertion that ‘The ocean is fish’. Using the example of Atlantic salmon, it questions the directionality at the heart of Peters and Steinberg’s paper. It focuses particularly on the complex spatialities of salmonid life, and the ability of salmon to blur aquatic boundaries. The commentary argues that if oceans exceed, they are also exceeded, whether through the extra-planetary forces that guide salmonid migration and affect tides, or the inward flows of water from rivers. It ends by questioning the space given to non-human life in the more-than-wet ontology, asking how such actants might be implicated in oceanic excess, particularly when the ocean’s intrinsic voluminous excess renders them beyond human awareness or understanding.

Communicating resilience in actual and imagined boundaries: narrative plots and meanings of retention in organizations

ABSTRACTThe paper examines the narratives of STEM (Science, technology, engineering and mathematics) career pathways constructed by women scientists and engineers through the theoretical lens of resilience. Based on in-depth interviews conducted with 45 women who are currently employed in STEM organizations in Singapore, I explore the narrative actions women deploy to survive in largely masculine STEM organizations. Using narrative analysis, I explore the stories women craft as strategies of resilience when negotiating STEM career pathways. Given the critical role of storytelling in resilience, the study points to the role of communication in enabling networks, and in making available opportunities for circulating stories. Moreover, the cultural and structural challenges to women’s work in STEM suggest the key role for communication interventions that are directed at changing sociocultural attitudes toward women’s work in STEM.

Introduction

Introduction Jane Bryce (bio) If a close-up is a tight shot that focuses on detail to the exclusion of background, is it possible to have a close-up of something as amorphous and sprawling as Caribbean cinema? Ongoing attempts to define it seem only to testify to the simultaneously centrifugal/centripetal dynamic of Caribbean culture itself—the push-me, pull-you tension between national borders and diasporic connections, between official institutions (all those international airports stuck in out-of-the-way places and named for past prime ministers) and multifarious unofficial pathways and signs of diversity that sometimes jostle for attention and sometimes choose to stay out of sight (like Haitian veve, intricate Vodun symbols drawn in powder on the ground later to be obliterated, or pre-Colombian Kalinago petroglyphs and Taíno paintings hidden in caves). The very first (hence foundational) issue of Black Camera carried an article by Gilberto Blasini proposing that "Caribbean cinema needs to be understood in relation to the concept of créolité," which "not only documents the continual transformations of the Caribbean but also reinvents its geocultural scope by expanding beyond the Antilles to include … the southeastern coast of the United States, and the northeastern rim of South America (including Brazil), as well as the Caribbean diaspora's host countries (UK, France, Canada)."1 A broad sweep, indeed. The five films chosen to illustrate this Caribbean cinema—all made between 1976 and 1992—are symptomatic of a view of Caribbean (or should that be diasporic, or post-slavery?) cinema shaped by a particular aesthetic—one that privileges a nostalgic and mythic construction of the past. These films—Daughters of the Dust (dir. Julie Dash, 1991, United States), set on the Gullah Islands of Carolina, Quilombo (dir. Carlos Diegues, 1984, Brazil), set in Brazil, along with La última cena / The Last Supper (dir. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1976), from Cuba, Almacita di desolato / Almacita, Soul of Desolato (dir. Felix de Rooy, 1986) from Curacao, and Rue cases nègres / Black Shack Alley (dir. Euzhan Palcy, 1983) from Martinique—are foundational texts of revisionary [End Page 123] history. But that isn't all there is to Caribbean cinema, as one contributor to the present Close-Up attests. According to Antonio Enrique González Rojas, "The idea of Cuban cinema among world audiences and film critics is limited to historical feature films and documentaries from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, with romantic perspectives of Cuban social and political reality," and as a result, he sees his role as being to correct this misconception. This Close-Up, which sees Caribbean cinema as a cross-border dialogue, is not about to dispute its geocultural extensiveness or the centrality of créolité to a Caribbean aesthetic. But it may raise a few questions: Is the Caribbean more than a set of tropes that can be traced to different locations? Isn't it also a physical space occupied by gendered and racialized bodies, a space of complicated and specific histories, of landscapes imprinted with memories of peculiar forms of violence and resistance? But if it is, where does that space begin and end? In 2015, the Jamaica-based cultural journal Caribbean Quarterly published a special issue, Visions and Revisions: Film/in(g) the Caribbean.2 In this Close-Up of sorts, the Caribbean incorporated Haiti, Jamaica, Curacao, Cuba, and Trinidad, alongside Francophone and Anglophone diasporas—a polylingual Caribbean, that nonetheless stayed within the ambit of the Antilles and its diasporic offshoots. Pondering what constitutes Caribbean cinema, one of its authors puts her finger on the push-me, pull-you button when she asks: "How can one project the specificities of a nation and go beyond imagined boundaries?"3 The contributions to the present Close-Up all, to some extent, address this question. Whether in terms of form and genre, aesthetic and audience, signifying or, as Caribbean philosopher Sylvia Wynter puts it, "counter-signifying," they explore the tension between nation and imagination—between borders and transnational relationalities, but also between official versions of history and unofficial stories that testify to another reality. This is why, no doubt, close-ups are useful. In this Close-Up, the Caribbean that comes into...

Colonial Policy, Chieftaincy and Land Politics in Ghana: The Case Study of Gyaman

The partition of Africa in the late nineteenth century destabilized some societies in Africa. In West Africa, the imaginary territorial boundaries divided the Nzema between Ivory Coast and Ghana, the Dagaaba between Burkina Faso and Ghana, and the Ewe between Togo and Ghana. The partition exercise also caused protracted disputes and neglect of existing ethnic groupings. Using information from oral, archival and secondary sources, this article examines the impact of the partition of Africa on Gyaman, a traditional ethnic setting in modern Ghana in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The paper blames current Gyaman problems on the Partition exercise.

Marking “Men of Iniquity”: Imperial Purpose and Imagined Boundaries in the Qing Processing of Rebel Ringleaders, 1786-1828

Abstract This essay explores the administrative and ideological context of Qing borderland pacification through examination of the imperial response to apex rebel ringleaders. Presented are five cases of bureaucratic “discourse” (official description and physical management) processing Lin Shuangwen (1786-1788 Lin Shuangwen Revolt), Shi Sanbao (1795-1797 Miao Revolt), Liu Zhixie (1796-1804 White Lotus Rebellion), Lin Qing (1813 Eight Trigrams Revolt), and Khoja Jahāngīr (1826-1828 Jahāngīr Uprising). Considered comparatively, we find common procedures of identification, deposition, sentencing, and execution that established the challengers as “men of iniquity,” reinforcing imperially preferred understandings of rebel organization, culpability, Qing legitimacy, and martial success. This procedure was also adjusted to fit differing conditions and state goals. As the empire entered its final century, shifting boundaries were asserted between rebel lords and war-zone populations, suggestive of both military efforts to exploit social divisions and expanded embrace of peripheral peoples as compliant and border-defending imperial subjects.

Illusion of inclusion: challenging universalistic conceptions in international children’s rights law

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the nexus between two allegedly contesting objectives of international children’s rights law: protection and empowerment. It focuses on child labour movements as a case study to examine this tension. The paper shows that when children make demands that exceed imaginary boundaries of protection, their voices are dismissed on the basis of immaturity. Therefore, the paper argues that the failure of international children’s rights law to acknowledge the ways in which childhood can unfold in more than one way results in the dominance of paternalistic approaches to children’s agency. These approaches inherently limit this body of law from providing comprehensive rights protection for every child.

The Geographies of Prevent: The Transformation of the Muslim Home into a Pre-Crime Space

AbstractThe Prevent Duty is part of the UK’s counter-extremism strategy, which aims to prevent individuals from becoming involved in ‘extremism’ and ‘radicalisation’. As a pre-crime measure, the duty is now enforced in public institutions in the UK, from schools to healthcare provisions, and relies on frontline staff to monitor and report on ‘signs’ of extremism and radicalisation. The discussion around Prevent has focused on its implementation and impacts in the public sphere, notably in schools. However, this article aims to disrupt the imagined boundaries of the Prevent Duty and demonstrate how, as a result of this policy, the home—primarily the Muslim home—is treated as a pre-crime space, thus broadening the reach of counter-extremism measures into the private sphere.

Scholarship, space, and strategies of belonging in al-Maqqarī’s (d. 1031/1632) literary and historical writings

ABSTRACTThis article explores two key literary and historical texts, Rawḍat al-ās (The Garden of Myrtle) and Nafḥ al-ṭīb (The Breeze of Perfume), by the tenth-/sixteenth- and eleventh-/seventeenth-century North African Muslim scholar al-Maqqarī (d. 1031/1632) in order to show that, contrary to popular understandings of the period, these were times of robust Islamic scholarly activity. In order to explore the nature and dynamics of such activity, this article addresses the following overarching questions: (1) How did al-Maqqarī write about North Africa and North African landscapes in relation to those in the eastern Mediterranean and also in relation to historically resonant landscapes, namely Muslim Iberia (al-Andalus)? (2) What can this author’s conceptualisation of places tell us about how texts shaped the category of North Africa as well as its imagined boundaries? In response, this article examines excerpts from al-Maqqarī’s texts in order to show that he not only engaged in scholarly activity, but he also used rhetorical strategies to inscribe himself into his articulation of this activity. Using Antrim’s ‘discourse of place’ theory, which proposes a consideration of a broad variety of Arabic texts as a means to unearth how land and place figured into the lives and imaginaries of premodern Muslims, along with their understandings of identity and belonging, my paper hones in on the autobiographical sections of both works, which have commonly been overlooked by scholars. An examination of these sections demonstrates how al-Maqqarī both participated in perpetuating an understanding of land and space and helped to produce it.

Imagologija u nastavi srpskog jezika i književnosti sa stranim studentima

In this paper, we explore the ways in which we can present imagology to foreign students of Serbian language. The first part is theoretical and sheds light to the concepts that are deeply connected with the formation of the image of oneself and other's identity. We are dealing with imaginary boundaries, literature as identity, imaginary Balkans, imagological criticism and Balkanisation, all this through the prism of literary texts. Research into the representation of the Balkans symbolically represents in the popular literature of the West, analyzing the image of the other, are all-important tasks of imagological research, as well as the key research tasks nowadays. In this paper, we will discuss some of these issues in the field of comparative literature. We researched the cultural context and the process of forming the author's perceptions and stipulating the establishment of stereotypes on homo balcanicus etc. Self-image and the image of the Other in literature are very important not only for understanding the national character and the preservation of cultural identity, but also for the release from ideological reading and stereotyping. The other part is the practical application of theoretical work and offers a methodical framework for working with foreign students. Specifically, through the analysis of literary works, we have come to conclusions on how to form an image of yourself and others. Given that the survey was conducted at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, we analyzed primarily Andric's work in which we can see the way we view ourselves and others, but we also studied how the Balkans are symbolically presented in the popular literature of the West. This kind of teaching is important because it allows foreign students to perceive a problem from multiple angles and to understand our mentality, traditions, history, art, literature, and all the layers of our reality.

Illusion of Inclusion: Challenging Universalist Conceptions in International Children’s Rights Law

The paper examines the nexus between two allegedly contesting objectives of international children’s rights law: protection and empowerment. It focuses on child labour movements as a case study to examine this tension. The paper shows that when children’s make demands that exceed imaginary boundaries of protection, these demands are ignored, and their voices is dismissed on the bases of immaturity. Therefore, the paper argues that the failure of international children’s rights law to acknowledge the ways childhood can unfold in more than one-way results in domination of paternalistic approaches to children’s agency. This inherently limits this body of law from achieving its main objective: providing comprehensive rights protection for every child.

Memories of Europe in the Art From Elsewhere

At a time when the boundaries of European citizenship are challenged from both the inside and the outside, those boundaries cannot be equated with the imaginary boundaries of European memory. The rights to citizenship are usually defined administratively and politically. European memory cannot be. It cannot be culturally fortressed. For what is European memory if it does not include memories of Europe’s role in the world at large? It must reciprocally acknowledge the memories of Europe as they circulate elsewhere, and now even inside Europe itself. Some years ago, conference titles such as “Europe and its others” abounded—still fundamentally Eurocentric in spirit, with its possessive pronoun and the globalizing discourse of othering. Then the language changed, acknowledging the implicit problem and turning to phrases such as “Europe in other cultures.” The altered phrasing recognizes counterstrategies of writing back to Empire: Europe itself was being othered by “its” others, or as Dipesh Chakrabarty has called it, provincialized.[1] From my point of view both perspectives are inadequate today in capturing how the imaginary relationship between Europe and non-European parts of the world is structured in the work of contemporary artists. It is particularly the transnational and by now globally extant discourse of political memories of violence, state terror, and genocide that has produced artistic memory practices in which the European and the non-European are indissolubly folded into each other. Neither the discourse of othering nor that of provincializing makes much sense any longer.

“Perfectly Positioned”: The Blurring of Urban, Suburban, and Rural Boundaries in a Southern Community

In this article, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork and formal interviews from a community study in Rockdale County, Georgia, to illustrate the social construction of place-based identity within the rural-urban interface. Given decades of growth and expansion in metro Atlanta, Rockdale has become an object lesson of the boundary shifting and crossing typical of places located along the rural-urban fringe. A sustained pattern of demographic and ecological change in Rockdale has resulted in a lack of consensus about how to imagine the community’s location on the rural-urban continuum. I show how symbolic and social boundaries between urbanity and rurality are blurred within the community as residents draw on local resources to construct alternatively urban, suburban, and rural identities. Additionally, I illustrate how local boosters take advantage of this blurriness to portray Rockdale County as a “perfectly positioned” community and how community members disregard the official rural-urban boundaries of governments or scholars and instead invest their own imagined boundaries with significant meaning.

Technology-related transformations of imaginary body boundaries: Psychopathology of the everyday excessive Internet and mobile phone use

Background. In line with the approach of Larkin et al. (2006), we consider technological dependence in the context of the interaction between personality, environment, and culture.

Unconventional gas developments and the politics of risk and knowledge in Australia

Australia could become the world’s largest liquefied natural gas (LNG) exporter by 2021. Especially the unconventional coal seam gas (CSG) reserves in the state of Queensland are developed at an unprecedented scale and pace. This rapid growth has intensified land use competition and, combined with concerns over associated extraction techniques such as hydraulic fracturing (‘fracking’), the CSG industry has prompted heated debates about its impacts. In this paper we present findings from our ethnographic fieldwork within Queensland’s gas fields and demonstrate how various actors respond differently to questions of risk and existing levels of knowledge. Highlighting this contingent nature of risk and knowledge, we caution against reductionist scientific understandings that suggest imaginary boundaries between knowledgeable experts and uninformed citizens. Rather, we argue for an anthropological perspective that allows to carefully think through the ways in which contentious subterranean resources such as CSG become known and how risks are socio-politically negotiated. This focus on the underlying politics of risk and knowledge is highly relevant to public debates over unconventional hydrocarbon developments and can address a central issue for the energy production in industrialized societies: the challenges of environmental change and the resulting socio-political negotiations of knowledge in the contemporary ‘risk society’.

Re-discovering Alessandro Spina’s Transculture/ality in The Young Maronite

Alessandro Spina, né Basili Shafik Khouzam, was born in Benghazi in 1927 into a family of Maronites from Aleppo and spent most of his life between Libya and Italy, speaking several languages and writing in Italian. He may be described as the “unsung” writer of Italian colonial and post-colonial past in North Africa. Spina’s oeuvre—collected in an omnibus edition, I confini dell’ombra. In terra d’oltremare (Morcelliana)—charts the history of Libya from 1911, when Italy invaded the Ottoman province, to 1966, when the country witnessed the economic boom sparked by the petrodollars. The cycle was awarded the Premio Bagutta, Italy’s highest literary accolade. In 2015, Darf Press published in English the first instalment of Spina’s opus with the title The Confines of the Shadows. In Lands Overseas. Spina always refused to be pigeonholed in some literary category and to be labeled as a colonial or postcolonial author. As a matter of fact, his works go beyond the spatial and imaginary boundaries of a given state or genre, emphasizing instead the mixing and collision of languages, cultures, identities, and forms of writing. Reading and re-discovering Spina in a transcultural mode brings to light the striking newness of his literary efforts, in which transnational lived life, creative imagination, and transcultural sensibility are inextricably interlaced.

A comparison of specularly reflective boundary conditions and rotationally invariant formulations for Discrete Ordinate Methods in axisymmetric geometries

In simulations of periodic or symmetric geometries, computational domains are reduced by imaginary boundaries that exploit the symmetry conditions. Two boundary conditions are proposed for Discrete Ordinate Methods to solve axisymmetric radiation problems. Firstly, a specularly reflective boundary condition similar to that is used in Photon Monte Carlo methods is developed for Discrete Ordinate Methods. Secondly, the rotational invariant formulation is revisited for axisymmetric wedge geometries. Correspondingly, a new rotationally invariant boundary condition specially designed for axisymmetric problems on wedge shape is proposed to enforce the rotational invariance properties possessed by the radiative transfer equation (RTE) but violated by three-dimensional conventional Discrete Ordinate Methods. Both boundary conditions have the advantage that the discretization and linear equation solution procedures of conventional three-dimensional DOM are not affected by changing to a reduced geometry. Consistency, accuracy and efficiency of the new boundary conditions are demonstrated by multiple numerical examples involving periodic symmetry and axisymmetry. A comparison between specularly reflective boundary conditions and the rotationally invariant formulation shows that the latter offers several advantages for wedge geometries. In other symmetry conditions, when the rotational invariant formulation is not applicable, specular reflective boundary conditions are still effective.

Specular reflective boundary conditions for Discrete Ordinate Methods in Periodic or Symmetric Geometries

In simulations of periodic or symmetric geometries, computational domains are reduced by imaginary boundaries that present the symmetry conditions. In Photon Monte Carlo methods, this is achieved by imposing specular reflective boundary conditions for the radiative intensity. In this work, a similar specular reflective boundary condition is developed for Discrete Ordinate Methods. The effectiveness of the new boundary condition is demonstrated by multiple numerical examples including plane symmetry and axisymmetry.