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CULTURAL PRODUCTION AND NEGOTIATION OF BORDERS
EXTENDED CALL FOR PAPERS: 15 APRIL 2008 The 2008 European Conference  
of the Association of Borderland Studies
University of Tromsø/Barents Institute, Kirkenes 11-13 September 2008


Confirmed plenary speakers:

David Newman (Political Geography, University of the Negev)

Mieke Bal (Cultural Theory, University of Amsterdam)

Einar Niemi (History, University of Tromsø)



Increasing focus has been given recently by geographers and  
historians to the role of cultural production and negotiation in  
social and territorial bordering processes. The ongoing spate of  
movies, documentaries, art projects, novels, websites, festivals and  
even tourist attractions concerning borders has given this aspect of  
bordering renewed topicality and economic importance, and has  
attracted research both in the humanities and in the social sciences.  
The stories such cultural practices and artifacts tell, and the  
images they project, give extra weight to questions about the  
location of borders and of border populations. In some cases, the  
border itself – a wall or a fence – becomes a cultural icon of great  
significance in the media and in everyday discourse. In a world of  
mobilities and securities, the outer peripheries of states are  
clearly linked to their hybridized urban landscapes and even to the  
bodies of immigrants and other border-crossers themselves. The  
cultural negotiation of contested borders is a crucial element in  
ongoing problems of security, freedom of movement, trafficking, fear  
of the other, etc. and the processes of negotiation also promises the  
possibility of a creative refiguring of borders and cultural border  
zones into economically and symbolically productive sites of  
dialogue, crossing, hybridity and creativity. All these phenomena are  
the product of historical processes and take place in a shifting  
historical landscape which both creates a framework for and is formed  
by cultural practices. Borders are also a central metaphor in  
cultural theory, and there is need to reflect over the reasons for this.



This interdisciplinary conference will cross the academic divide  
between “border studies” in the social sciences and “border  
theory”/“border poetics” in the humanities in examining the ways  
cultural practices use discursive and semiotic strategies in order to  
imagine and negotiate the border in its social and historical  
context. It will attempt to further our understanding of the role of  
culture in subjective interactions with the border by border-crossers  
and by border zone dwellers. The conference aims to place cultural  
processes of bordering in historical contexts and show the role of  
cultural memory in the formation of borderscapes.



The conference will address many different border contexts, but one  
special focus of will be the region in which it is set: the Norwegian- 
Russian-Finnish borderland and the wider contexts of the North  
Calotte, Barents and Arctic regions. The Arctic is an area in which  
the borders of the environment and energy production are being  
changed and are changing the geographical, historical, imaginative  
sense of place and space. This is a region of a layered, complex  
border history, of pressing social and environmental problems and  
possibilities involving many different cultural identities and ways  
of life, and of high importance today as a political and cultural hot  
point of “Western”-Russian relations within the Artic and Sub-Arctic  
context. Kirkenes, an old mining town, lies at a point where the  
interests of many nations and indigenous/minority groups meet, and  
has been a place of social, economic, environmental, military and  
cultural confrontation; now it is a site of economic and cultural  
creativity involving the aspirations and self-narratives of local,  
national and global elites in an atmosphere of hybridity. It is  
centrally placed in relationship to the ongoing construction and  
contestation of territorial and symbolic borders in the Arctic sea  
against a background of rapid economic development of oil and gas  
resources. The conference will also include a final summing-up panel  
made up of scholars working from different perspectives on the  
Norwegian/Russian/Sámi/Kven/Finnish borderscape.



Suggested themes for panels or papers:

• cultural border practices and sociological concepts of cultural  
belonging

• historical processes of cultural border-marking and negotiation

• economic and political importance of cultural borderings and border  
zone culture

• discursive, narrative, and symbolic strategies in border culture  
and border poetics

• the cultural turn in socio-geographical border studies

• cultural practice and social agency in border regions

• Kantian “borderology” in a cultural frame

• culture as a source of critical perspectives on borders, justice  
and exclusion

• psychoanalytic understandings of cultural articulation of border  
subjectivity

• reflexivity in cultural border discourses and policy

• gender in the cultural production of borders

• the role of media as place of border dialogue

• external and internal borders in culturally mediated migration  
narratives

• new forms of art in the cultural negotiation of borders

• cultural borderscapes and historical memory

• border festivals, border art projects, border museums and border  
tourism

• Arctic and Sub-Arctic borders

• the cultural history of the Norwegian-Russian-Finnish borderland



Papers on both theoretical questions and on border zones worldwide,  
and particularly on the Norwegian-Russian-Finnish borderland, are  
welcome. The conference will be held in Kirkenes, in cooperation with  
the Barents Institute, and will include a field trip to the border  
and to cultural sites on both sides of the border, along with a visit  
to the Borderlands Museum in Kirkenes.



Please send abstracts for papers by 15 APRIL 2008 to Johan Schimanski  
([log in to unmask]). Abstracts and papers should be in  
English, or an English translation should be provided. Confirmation  
on accepted proposals will be sent before the end of April.



The registration deadline is 1 MAY 2008. The full registration fee of  
NOK 4640 includes hotel with full board for the length of the  
conference, and the field trip. Flexible registration fees will be  
available. For more information, registration form, and updates, see  
http://uit.no/humfak/borderpoetics/3.



Arrangers:

• Johan Schimanski & Stephen Wolfe, Border Poetics working group,  
University of Tromsø <http://uit.no/humfak/borderpoetics/>.

• Einar Niemi, History Department, University of Tromsø <http:// 
uit.no/historie/>

• Urban Wråkberg, Research Director, Barents Institute, Kirkenes  
<http://www.barentsinstitute.org/> & participant in the project “The  
Construction and Negotiation of Borders”, Finnmark University College/ 
Barents Institute/Research Council of Norway.