AN463      Half Unit
Borders and Boundaries: Ethnographic Approaches

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

How do territorial borders influence human behaviour and thinking, and how, in turn, do people create, manage and manipulate such borders? These questions have become pressing with the intensification and politicisation of global interconnectedness. While a few decades ago the tearing down of the Berlin Wall seemed to herald a border-less world, today the loudest politicians promise to create "huge, great, great, beautiful walls." This course studies the numerous tensions accompanying global interconnectedness. Why is it so difficult to make borders impermeable? How do smuggling networks operate? What does the world look like from the perspective of undocumented migrants? What are the effects of new border fortification technologies? What is it like to live in a gated community? Are people boundary-drawing creatures? Why do borders play a central role in images of utopia? Why is it silly yet productive to ask: where is the border between Europe and Asia? These and other questions will be discussed by situating ourselves ethnographically in the borderlands, potentially making us realise that "the frontier is all around us."

10 hours of lectures and 15 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

Essay (1500 words)

Students are expected to prepare discussion materials for presentation in the classes, and will have the opportunity to submit one formative essay of up to 1500 words during the course.

Students will be informed of their formative submission deadline by email by the end of Week 4 of term.

• Andersson, R. (2014). Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe;
• Brubaker, R. (2004). Ethnicity without groups;
• Berdahl, D. (1999). Where the world ended: Re-unification and identity in the German borderland;
• Ingold, T. (2007). Lines: a brief history;
• De León, Jason (2015) The land of open graves: Living and dying on the migrant trail;
• Low, S. (2004). Behind the gates: Life, security, and the pursuit of happiness in fortress America;
• Pelkmans, M. (2006). Defending the border: identity, religion, and modernity in the Republic of Georgia;
• Wilson, T. and H. Donnan (eds) (2012) A Companion to Border Studies;
• Reeves, M. (2014). Border work: spatial lives of the state in rural Central Asia;
• Van Schendel, W. and I. Abraham, eds. (2005) Illicit flows and criminal things: States, borders, and the other side of globalization.

Essay (100%, 3500 words) in Winter Term Week 4