Beyond Borders?Interrogating Boundaries in our Twenty-First Century WorldIntroduction
Editor:
Kate RoyFranklin University Switzerland
This intervalla Volume 6 Beyond Borders? Interrogating Boundaries in our Twenty-First Century World takes a multidisciplinary approach to the way we understand, shape, negotiate, and engage with borders and boundaries today. Beginning with an acknowledgment that borders are always already multifaceted and multidimensional, and that our volume, which gathers papers from authors with backgrounds in International Relations, Communication and Media Studies, Literary and Cultural Studies, and Psychology, can only scratch the surface, Beyond Borders? mines the papers themselves for emphases, and uncovers some thought-provoking resonances. Despite our contemporary world’s communications technologies, transnational networks and institutions, and the easy mobility of international travel – for those of us in positions of privilege (such as academia itself) – the papers of Beyond Borders? in fact demonstrate that the articulation of difference, and the creation of a multitude of “us” and “them” subject positions in a variety of spaces (in all senses of the word) is still very much a part of our twenty-first century lives. The way in which various actors negotiate – or become responsible for – the creation, management, and potential breaking down of a range of borders and boundaries, from the conceptual, to the communicational, to the textual, to the real, lived experience of the border, then, forms this volume’s impetus. Our papers themselves seek to shape, reshape, and shape anew an understanding of the inherently plural and unstable borders and boundaries that striate the spaces we move in, both literally and figuratively.