Challenging Borders Contingencies and Consequences

Borders are known for their paradoxical qualities.  Sometimes they are shifting and porous, lines in the sand constituted more by subjective experience than by legal definition; at other times they harden into walls, are heavily securitized, and their primary function becomes keeping the unwanted out. Challenging Borders: Contingencies and Consequences sets out to explore the concrete, complex effects of borders on human aspirations and lives, while at the same time underscoring the diversity of individual encounters with these deceptively invisible lines. 

Drawing on insights from history, geography, Indigenous studies, political science, refugee and migration studies, the visual arts, and even physics, contributors to the collection examine the role of borders in the ongoing negotiation of national identities, in contested claims of sovereignty and belonging, in the tensions between freedom of movement and restrictions on entry, and in the use of violence in the name of security. As the essays illustrate, in the context of migration, borders are inherently a site of struggle—at once a source of hope for those seeking sanctuary and an excuse for others to deny it. Indigenous nations, migrants, and refugees have long known how destructive colonial boundaries can be, and this volume offers compelling new angles from which to map the geographies of oppression and resistance.

About the Editors

Paul McKenzie-Jones is a settler associate professor of Indigenous studies at the University of Lethbridge and an external research affiliate with the Purai Global Indigenous and Diaspora Research Center of the University of Newcastle, Australia. He is the author of Clyde Warrior: Tradition, Community, and Red Power. Sheila McManus is a settler professor of history and author of Both Sides Now: Making the Alberta-Montana Borderlands, Choices and Chances: A History of Women in the U.S. West, and Both Sides Now: Writing the Edges of the North American West. They are co-editor of One Step Over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the North American Wests. Julie Young is associate professor and Canada Research Chair (Tier 2) in critical border studies in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Lethbridge.

With contributions by Aliya Amarshi, Lori Barkley, Claudia Donoso, Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen, Ryan Hall, Marilyn James, Evan Light, Anne McNevin, Michael P. A. Murphy, Sarah Naumes, Heather Parrish, Ramon Resendiz, Rosalva Resendiz, Lou Stone, and Chloe Wells.

Table of Contents

1. Acknowledgements
2. Introduction: Pushing Boundaries
3. Part 1. Visualizing Borders
   1. 1. Toward a Decolonial Archive: A Reflection on the Operationalization Process of Critical Transborder Documentary Production Practice / Ramón Resendiz and Rosalva Resendiz
   2. 2. Working the Border: Interdisciplinary Encounters Across Intellectual, Material, and Political Boundaries / Heather Parrish and Leslie Gross-Wyrtzen
   3. 3. The Line Crossed Us? Remapping the Geo-body of a Nation: How Young People in Finland Understand Shifting Borders / Chloe Wells
   4. 4. From Lines in the Sand to the Wave/Particle Duality: A Quantum Imaginary for Critical Border Studies / Michael P. A. Murphy
4. Part 2. Cuttings and Crossings
   1. 5. Sinixt Existence in “Extinction”: Identity, Place, and Belonging in the Canada-US Borderlands / Lori Barkley, with Marilyn James and Lou Stone
   2. 6. Seeking Safe Harbour: Indigenous Refugees and the Making of Canada’s Numbered Treaties / Ryan Hall
   3. 7. Keeping Them Vulnerable: Female Applicants and the Biopolitics of Asylum in Texas / Claudia Donoso
   4. 8. Experiences at the New Canadian-US Frontier: “I Just Assume That No Laws Exist . . .” / Evan Light, Sarah Naumes, and Aliya Amarshi
5. Afterword: On Being Unsettled: Discomfort and Noninnocence in Border Studies / Anne McNevin
6. List of Contributors
7. Figure Descriptions

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