Atmospheric Borders
What kinds of atmospheres do borders produce? What kinds of borders do atmospheres produce? Recent scholarship on borders has focused on abstract and conceptual implications of bordering practices and explored notions such as thresholds, tensions, im/mobilities, and multispecies concerns. Discussions have demonstrated the affective power of borders by focusing on how their inherent violence produces bodily affects. Recent work on posthuman and more-than-human borders has also shown how bodies entangle one another on the border (Pallister-Wilkins, 2022; Ozguc & Burridge, 2023; Youatt, 2020). And scholarship on biosecurity alerts us to the many scales at which borders operate, which are often invisible and outside of the human frame of attention (e.g. Barry, 2021; Liu & Bennett 2020). Despite such emphasis on mobility of borders, their affective power and more-than-human entanglements, how such violence is produced through economic and political atmospheres remains unanswered. In this symposium we seek to contribute to ongoing debates on borders through interrogating the notion of the atmospheric.
While the notion of “atmospheres” is widely used in literature on ‘affect’ (Anderson, 2009), border atmospherics (Dijstelbloem & Walters, 2021) and the bordering processes that political atmospheres are implicated in have received less attention (Closs Stephens, 2022). There are, however, numerous examples revealing such atmospherics. The border industrial complex, for example, relies on political atmospheres of crisis that propel an ongoing upholding of state-sanctioned or offshored bordering practices, that reach beyond the eyes of the general public. Then there is the nationalism that seeps through public debate, or the radicalisation that sweeps people away, which manifest as political atmospheres.
There are also ecological forms of bordering that have atmospheric qualities. In conjunction with the slow violence of climate change, borders are taking shape in unexpected environmental affects. 2022 was another year of unprecedented weather and climate events, as disasters divided communities in cities and regions around the world. The devastating floods in Pakistan saw millions of people displaced, as watery borders isolated and segmented off the landscape. Similar widespread flooding across the continent of Australia saw bordering enter public discourse again, as communities were “cut off” by temporary borders on an immense, continental scale. The recent earthquakes in Turkey and Syria caused large scale displacement and forced migration, again raising questions about how geologic borders take shape, and questions around whether politics and planning take responsibility for such devastation. These are only a few examples of how social, political, economic, and ecological atmospheres are produced through bordering processes and practices while revealing the ways in which borders maintain such slippery, ephemeral presence around the world.
In this symposium we seek conversations about atmospheric borders to think more deeply about when bordering occurs due to atmospheric conditions in widely varied social, political and ecological contexts. How is research in contemporary border studies grappling with the multifaceted and extreme kinds of atmospheric events that manifest borders in such “unprecedented” ways? How do everyday political atmospheres contribute to bordering processes? What do atmospheric borders teach us about more-than-human borders? How can the conceptualisation of atmospheric borders contribute to ongoing conceptual and empirical debates in critical border studies?
We call papers on the following topics:
– Natural disasters and bordering
– Weather, climate change, and borders
– Bordering through nationalism, populism, and other potent yet slippery political affects
– Pollutants, particles, or toxic borders
– (Revisiting) the materiality and mobility of borders
– More-than-human atmospheres in bordering
– Feeling borders – attention to the sensory, elemental, material affects of borders
- Conceptual innovation on bordering: thresholds, elements, atmospheres, affects
- Future borders – Anthropocene implications
- The relationship between art and atmospheric borders
Empirical, conceptual, creative, or speculative papers are encouraged. Alternative formats for presenting are also welcome, please indicate in your abstract submission.
▻https://acbsworking.group/2023/03/01/atmospheric-borders
Program :
Wednesday 4th October – DAY 1 (please note, all times are listed in AEST)
2:00pm-2:15pm Opening
by Australian Critical Border Studies Convenors
2:15pm-3:45pm PANEL 1 – DAY 1
Xiaofeng Liu
Bordered atmosphere: Cattle smuggling boom and suppression at the borders of China and Southeast Asia
Angela Smith
Air’s Infrastructural and Elemental Power at the Border
Emily House
Making a Case for Sonic Methodologies
4:00pm-6:00pm PANEL 2 – DAY 1
Gary Slater
Interrogating Planetary Boundaries: Planetary Systems Ecology and Political/Ecological Borders
Bas Spierings
The ‘unwanted tourist’ phenomenon and the atmospheric politics of selecting, spreading and scapegoating
Eman Alasah
Colonial Borderlines and Spatial Liminalities in Post-Oslo Palestinian Narratives
Ingrid Boas, Carol Farbotko, Taukiei Kitara, Delf Rothe
Digital Tuvalu: State sovereignty in a warmer world
Thursday 5th October – DAY 2
2:00pm-4:00pm PANEL 1 – DAY 2
Suzan Ilcan
Migratory Journeys, Migrant Politics, and Mediating Atmospheric Bordering
Zacharias Valiantzas, Panos Hatziprokopiou
Living on the edge: transcending atmospheric borders through urban commoning practices in Thessaloniki port
Sonja Pietiläinen, Eeva-Kaisa Prokkola
Atmospheric bordering through the language on nature: the anti-immigration discourse of the Finnish radical right
Charalampos Tsavdaroglou, Panos Hatziprokopiou
Decolonising urban atmospheres. Migrants’ commoning solidarities in Thessaloniki
5:00pm-6:30pm PANEL 2 – DAY 2
Madhurima Majumder, Ingrid Boas
Tracing colonial roots of present-day climate (im) mobilities in Bengal borderland
Madelaine A. Joyce
Sensing the sky’s edge: Atmospheric insights into the Korean Demilitarised Zone
David Kendall
Other Lines: Visualising shifting horizons and atmospheric pollution through the photographic lens of mobile SMART phones and time-based thermal imaging technology
07:00pm-8:20pm PANEL 3 – DAY 2
Emma Marshall
‘Walking around in invisible chains’: Everyday experiences of risk, immigration control and the coercive state
Woodren Brade
Technologies of the Immigration Bail Hearing: Incarceration and Deportation through Everyday Law
Mohan Li, Lisheng Weng, Peter Adey
The Quarantine Window: atmospheres and anguish in the COVID-19 borderlands
Friday 6th October – DAY 3
8:00am-09:40am PANEL 1 – DAY 3
Margath (Maggie) Walker
Discordant Atmospheres on the US’s many borders
Paola Jirón Martinez, Ricardo Jiménez Palacios
Bordering as a method. Constructing territories through mobility practices in Chile
Juan Carlos Skewes, Gabriel Espinoza Rivera
Chilean central Andes dwellers and the reorganization of the State limits
Kaya Barry, Peter Adey
Ordinary atmospheres, climate insecurities and speculative fictions
10:30am-11:30pm PANEL 2 – DAY 3
Taylor Miller
Seeing Optics Valley: A counter-mapping of Tucson’s border-security-industrial complex
Roxana Rodríguez Ortiz
Tijuana’s Little Haiti: The Other Border
1:00pm-3:00pm PANEL 3 – DAY 3
Beryl Pong
Volumetric Immediations: Humanitarian Drone Documentaries of Forced Migration
George Burdon
The affective biopolitics of attention: digital media and the psychotechnologies of bordering
Samantha O’Donnell, Alexandra Ridgway, Ana Borges Jelinic
Hazardous Conditions: Partner Visa Holders and the Affective Atmosphere of Waiting
Benjamin Lucca Iaquinto, Lachlan Barber, Po Sheung Yu
Grounding mobility: Protest atmospheres at Hong Kong International Airport
3:00pm-3:15pm Closing and final remarks by ACBS convenors
▻https://acbsworking.group/atmospheric-borders
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