Our annual theme for 2021-2022 will be “Borders” understood broadly as relating to spatial, temporal, ontological, epistemological, and existential domains.
Our world-historical conjuncture is characterized by planetary processes that simultaneously disregard and establish borders such as finance capitalism, labor migrations, neoliberal imperialisms, war and displacement, global pandemics, and climate change. It is also characterized by a resurgence of bordering practices that seek to anticipate, contest, or disavow such planetary processes. Such bordering practices are related to the reactionary power of security states, national economies, capitalist private property, xenophobic nationalism, official and popular racisms, authoritarian populism, neo-fascism, anti-democratic cultural or religious fundamentalisms, military occupations, and border walls. They are also related to the resistance struggles and emancipatory hopes related to popular democracy or democratic socialism in one country, autonomous political communities, experiments in occupation and assembly, indigenous sovereignty, refusals of extraction, gentrification, assimilation, anti-racist and minoritarian identity politics.
Geopolitical borders delimit, demarcate, and circumscribe territory, state sovereignty, legal jurisdiction, and political communities in ways that are concrete and abstract, material and symbolic, real and imagined. Borders do not only mark geographic or political boundaries or limits. They are dynamic elements of systems and practices of regulation, domination, subjectivation. Borders constitute subjects: citizens, nationals, autochtones/indigènes, migrants, refugees, exiles, the undocumented, stateless people, objects of humanitarian intervention, enemies, comrades etc. Borders often exist within social formations. They simultaneously exclude categories of people and include them as excluded. Borders do not only separate, they also connect; they produce borderlands marked by ongoing processes of entanglement, interdependence, mixture. Borderlands are variously characterized by conflict, violence, hierarchy, inequality but also reciprocity, mutuality, creative transformations. The question of borders might be usefully thought in relation to the adjacent issue of (voluntary and involuntary) human mobilities. The geopolitics of borders opens onto questions of place, home, homeland, and lifeworlds on the one hand, and the world, the planet, and the planetary on the other.
We welcome proposals from mid-career CUNY faculty members working on any aspect of these issues as well as any of the other ways we might treat borders as concept, object, or orientation. These might include, but are not limited to:
Political economy of borders
enclosure, rent, extraction, land grabs, special economic zones, property regimes, labor markets, tariff zones, norms and standards
Ontological, epistemological, and existential borders
categorical, identitarian, and binary thinking as a border/ing practice (regarding race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, secularity, gender and sexuality, human and non-human animals, humans and nature, life and non-life) to be considered in connection to relational thinking that questions, displaces, interrupts such border/ing practices (whether queer, deconstructive, dialectical).
borders that constitute and separate scholarly disciplines or forms of knowledge (scientific, philosophical, aesthetic/poetic, affective, embodied).
limit experiences (i.e., violence, trauma, precarity, displacement, transcendence, collective effervescence) that may differentiate the normal or mundane from the exceptional, however construed
Temporal borders
explicit and implicit processes that periodize, posit borders between supposedly disparate historical epochs, and make categorical distinctions between past, present, and future
Aesthetic borders
