Borderlands Workshop 2024

Borderlands Workshop

Our third workshop focused on Borders and was held in collaboration with the Centre for British Research in the Levant in Amman, Jordan. The workshop explored borders and bordering practices in arid and semi-arid regions. Facilitated by Farhana Ibrahim, this closed workshop included presentations of work in progress from Eman Alasah, Sahana Ghosh, Radhika Gupta and Mansour Nasasra. Eman and Mansour focused on Palestinian contexts, while Sahana and Radhika discussed borders and bordering practices in South Asia. Questions with which the workshop engaged included the following:

  • What does it mean to decolonize the study of borders? 

 

  • How do borders – political, ecological, affective – generate new forms of methodologies and scope for research? 

 

  • How might research on borders consider engagement with the non-human: animals, plants, insects and other native inhabitants of border regions? 

 

  • How does surveillance, policing, and militarization operationalize borders? 

 

  • Do rural and urban populations respond differently to the challenges posed by borders? Are borders generative of certain kinds of communities even as they restrict others? 

 

  • How does technology affect the experience of borders in a highly mediatized world? 

 

  • To what extent do questions of indigeneity intersect with questions of borders? 

Speakers

Eman Alasah is a researcher in postcolonial studies. She holds a PhD from Northumbria University and an MA from Durham University. Her work focuses on Palestinian life writing and settler colonialism. 

Sahana Ghosh is Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. Her primary research interests are borders and borderlands, mobility, gender and sexuality, critical security studies, ethnography of the state, transnational and postcolonial feminism, South Asia, space and value, labor studies, and feminist and decolonial pedagogy.  She is the author of A Thousand Tiny Cuts: Mobility and Security across the Bangladesh-India Borderlands (University of California Press, 2023). 

Radhika Gupta is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology & Global Sociology at Leiden University. Her research lies at the intersection of the anthropology of borderlands, transnational Islam and postcolonial politics in South Asia. She is the author of Freedom in Captivity: Negotiations of Belonging along Kashmir’s Frontier (Cambridge University Press, 2022).    

Mansour Nasasra is senior lecturer in Middle East politics and international relations in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is the author of The Naqab Bedouins: A Century of Politics and Resistance (Columbia University Press, 2022) 

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