Association of Borderlands Studies Meeting on

"Communicating Borders"

September 27-29, 2002
Nijmegen, The Netherlands

On 27-29 September of 2002, the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research and the Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS) held a discussion meeting on borderlands at the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands. The meeting was organised by the Nijmegen Centre for Border Research.

GOAL

The goal was to bring together scholars from different backgrounds and different states/regions. One of the major intentions was to contextualise and broaden a dialogue between borderland scholars from different parts of the world, notably, but not exclusively, American and European borderlands scholars. Such a dialogue expresses the wish of the ABS to broaden and geographically enrich the research and policy horizon of borderland scholars.

OVERALL THEME

The meeting topic focused on the theorisation and conceptualisation of the social and economic context and intentions of the meeting between people from adjacent borderlands. The theme on this 2-day meeting was be: Communicating Borders The two major questions that were discussed at length and in depth, both theoretical and empirical, were:
1. Why and how do people meet across and/or at borders and communicate borders? What is the context of their (non-)meeting? How and if so, why does the context differ and matter in the meeting and interaction between people in borderlands?
2. And how do differences in contexts (e.g. modern vs. postmodern, American vs. European) influence our own academic thinking and traditions about (cross)borderlands? We felt that these issues were important and increasingly have become so in the months before the meeting.

TOPICS

Communicating borders and ...
.. (cross)border political governance and democracy
.. (cross)border identity, commuting, migration
.. (cross)border security and control
.. (cross)border environmental concerns
.. (cross)border narratives, ideologies, representations and images
.. (cross)border economics and co-operation

FORMAT

The idea was to have subgroup round-table discussions on themes (rather than long paper sessions) on four subthemes. The participants prepared five minute-statements about a topic, which were inspired by, related to or referring to his/her academic work and fitted within the general framework of the conference.

SPECIAL ISSUE OF JBS

We intent to make a theme-issue out of this meeting for the Journal for Borderlands Studies, the prime academic journal of the Association of Borderlands Studies. The principal idea is to make a bundle of progress-reports on the academic borderland debate inspired by the discussions on the various themes.

ORGANISATION:

Henk van Houtum
Martin van der Velde
Department of Human Geography
and Nijmegen Centre for Border Research
University of Nijmegen,

in collaboration with:

Association of Borderlands Studies

Contact:

M.vandervelde@fm.ru.nl
Tel.: +31 (0)24 361 30 34
H.vanHoutum@fm.ru.nl
Tel.: +31 (0)24 361 27 25
E.Hulskorte@fm.ru.nl
Tel.: +31 (0)24 361 19 24
Fax: +31 (0)24 361 18 41
Thomas van Aquinostraat 3
P.O. Box 9108
NL - 6500 HK Nijmegen,
the Netherlands