Convenors
Ilaria Giglioli, University of San Francisco
igiglioli@usfca.edu
Edgar Córdova Morales, UVSQ -Paris-Saclay
edgar.cordova@cnrs.fr
The past twenty years have seen an increase in border securitization worldwide, matched by a rise in nationalisms and a general dis-enchantment with the global. Existing scholarship on global processes of border fortification has primarily adopted a «birds-eye view», focusing on similarities in legislation and political discourse between different sites of heightened material and symbolic borders (Brown, 2011; Jones, 2012; Fitzgerald, 2019). However, it has dedicated less attention to grounded everyday processes of negotiation and contestation of borders through which global processes of bordering are constituted. At the same time, grounded scholarship on everyday negotiation of borders has generally not theorized the global nature of the phenomenon.
Comparative ethnographic research, in the spirit of Hart (2006, 2018), Burawoy (2000), and Gingrich and Fox (2002), can provide the instruments to develop an analysis that simultaneously sheds light on site-specific processes of border negotiation, but also identifies flows of people, capital and ideas between different sites of bordering, as well as networks of expertise and contestation that connect different borderlands. Drawing on a special issue on comparison published in Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa 2019(2), as well as dialogues initiated at the 2023 American Association of Geographers meeting, and the 2023 International Conference of Critical Geographies, this panel invites contributions based on comparative or multi-sited ethnographies on themes such as:
- Border violence and externalization
- Governmentality, discourses and state
- Migration, bordering and uneven development
- Networks of solidarity and/or enforcement between different sites of bordering
- Practices of resistance to borders
- Race and racialization in borderlands
We are also interested in broader discussions about how comparative and/or multi-sited ethnography may permit conceptual innovations, such as the development of new categories of analysis in the fields of critical migration and border studies (de-naturalization of taken-for-granted categories, development of theory from the global south, etc). As such, we invite both comparative/multi-sited studies and studies that are focused on one field site, but analyze it in a comparative and entangled manner. Please note that while we invite papers based on a shared method of comparative and/or multi-sited ethnography, we are primarily interested in the conceptual insight that this approach may generate, not in a simple discussion of methods.
Open questions
- How do regional or global strategies of border securitization intersect with localized practices of border policing?
- How do nationalist and/or anti-migrant movements connect and collaborate across borders?
- What networks of expertise connect different bordering sites? And, conversely, how are migrants and/or border activists organizing transnationally across different border sites?
- How can comparative methods allow for the analysis of research sites with limited access?
- What methodological challenges does working comparatively across sites characterized by violence, inequality and suffering present?
- How might we theorize across different borders to develop a better understanding of processes such as racialization / uneven development / securitization in borderland contexts?
Keywords
bordering; migration; nationalism; comparison; resistance; securitization.
Sub-disciplines or cross-disciplinary areas of concern
geography; anthropology; sociology; border studies; migration studies.
References
Brown, W.
2010 Walled States, Waning Sovereignty. London: Zone Books.
Burawoy, M.
2000 Global Ethnography: Forces, Connections, and Imaginations in a Postmodern World. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Fitzgerald, D. S.
2019 Refuge beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum Seekers. Oxford University Press.
Gingrich, A., R. G. Fox
2002 Anthropology, by Comparison. London; New York: Routledge.
Hart, G.
2006 «Denaturalizing Dispossession: Critical Ethnography in the Age of Resurgent Imperialism», in Antipode, 38, 5, pp. 977–1004.
2018 «Relational Comparison Revisited: Marxist Postcolonial Geographies in Practice», in Progress in Human Geography, 42, 3, pp. 371–94.
Jones, R.
2012 Border Walls Security and the War on Terror in the United States, India, and Israel. London: Zed Books.
Convenors’ bios
Ilaria Giglioli is assistant professor of International Studies at the University of San Francisco. A human geographer by training, she studies the creation, legitimization and contestation of borders, with a comparative focus in the Mediterranean and US southern border. In particular, she studies the social, political and economic processes that generate support for border fortification, as well as social movements that contest it. She also studies the relationship between border fortification, territorial inequality, and the production of social difference along lines of race, religion and nationality. Prior to her work on borders, she has also conducted research on the politics of water infrastructure development in the Mediterranean region.
Edgar Córdova Morales is a doctor in anthropology at the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), Mexico City. His research explores the relationships between violence, subjectivities, justice among displaced and racialized populations situated in asymmetrical contexts of power, particularly migrant populations in Mexico, Tunisia and Greece. He is a current CNRS Posdoctoral research by the CNRS (French National Center for
Scientific Research) at UVSQ- Paris Saclay University and a SPSS Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (2024-2026). He was a fellow of the British research network: Maghreb Action on Displacement and Rights (MADAR) and of the research group Temporalities of Future (a German- Mexican program), and he was a doctoral student associated at the Institute for Research on the Contemporary Maghreb in Tunis. The Mexican Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) awarded him the national “Fray Bernardino de Sahagún” prize for the best bachelor’s thesis in 2013 and master’s thesis in 2018.