The lines that continue to separate us Borders in our ‘borderless’ world

“What we have come to call a globalized world harbours fundamental tensions between opening and barricading, fusion and partition, erasure and reinscription”

-Wendy Brown (2010)

What's in a line?

• Borders as territorial edges

• Borders as walls

• Borders as transition spaces

• Borders as architects of identity formation

• Borders as institutions of knowledge

Borders make territories

• If a border is a line, a series of closed lines create a territory. We read maps as a series of borderlines.

• As critical political geographers, we will challenge those lines, and in doing so, what matter-of-fact position those lines have in the way space is made.

Border spaces: there are seemingly different borders at work in Israel/Palestine, the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, and Wall Street to organize, manage, and exclude, but they are borders nonetheless.

• Often thought of as ‘check points’ or security apparatuses (i.e. ‘the Green Zone’, Israel-Palestine).

• Still more often those borders are not policed or patrolled but produced through a range of activities, organizations, and actors.

• Borders, then become a spatial power that gives order to our daily lives.

Border spaces

Borders as metaphor, as framing knowledge and identity:nationalism, religion, gender