Constructing a Relational Space between ‘Theory’ and ‘Activism’ , or (Re)thinking Borders (original) (raw)
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Crossing Borders: Community Activism, Globalization, and Social Justice
Borders are among the most ubiquitous features of social life. They help to define who we are, shape our sense of the world, and contour our surroundings. Borders and boundary maintenance can serve both negative and positive goals, for example, serving as both sites for the reproduction of, and resistance to, inequalities. On the one hand, creating and maintaining borders between nations, communities, and groups form the basis for some of the most violent conflicts both historically and in our present time. While capital flows freely across national borders, people are subject to systematic and oppressive social control that limits or channels their movement. Militarism, violence, and nationalism, along with the less tangible politics of fear, function to enforce borders and raise further questions: who gets to define borders? Who controls these borders? Who can cross, and under what circumstances? Boundary-drawing processes are also at work in the construction of social problems, as distinctions are made between deviancy and normalcy, illegitimate and legitimate acts. On the other hand, demands for the protection of the physical integrity of self, community, or nation include the goal of ensuring personal, social, and cultural freedoms. These appeals for the respect for borders include calls for the right to self-governance by native peoples and the right to bodily integrity by feminist, transgender, intersexed, antiviolence, and anti-sexist activists. Borders between academic disciplines are also policed and hotly contested. Boundaries between what counts as academic work and what is defined as nonacademic also informs the ways in which scholars can engage with activism and how students are socialized into academia. Like many members of the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), I situate my work at the border of scholarship and activism and disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge and practice. Locating myself in these academic borderlands (to borrow from Gloria Anzaldúúa [1987]), the scholar activist whose work has contributed most to the development of what is now called border theory), I have been interested in understanding how to link local organizing with extra-local and transnational movements for social and economic justice, as well as to understand the ways in which activists draw on transnational organizing frames and documents and extra-local organizing to support local struggles. In exploring these processes, I tried to cross as many intellectual borders as possible, including sites of knowledge production outside the academy.
Borderlands Studies and Border Theory: Linking Activism and Scholarship for Social Justice
This article traces contemporary trends in borderlands studies and border theory and argues for a feminist revisioning of border studies as a mode of praxis, linking activism, and scholarship. I trace the trends from early borderland studies and Gloria Anzaldu´ a’s analysis of la frontera to the institutionalization of border theory in the academy. Scholars influenced by Anzaldu´ a’s work view borderlands as sites that can enable those dwelling there to negotiate the contradictions and tensions found in diverse cultural, class, and other settings. Critical perspectives of this view include concerns that there is ‘the tendency to construct the border crosser or the hybrid … into a new privileged subject of history’ (Vila 2003. Ethnography at the Border, University of Minnesota Press). I examine tension between social science based borderlands studies and cultural studiesoriented border theory, address the limits and possibilities of an interdisciplinary border studies, and discuss the dilemmas associated with academic institutionalization and interdisciplinarity. I illustrate the feminist revisioning I recommend with three case examples chosen from contemporary feminist and queer border studies that link local struggles with cross-border organizing against violence against women, labor rights, and sexual citizenship.
Sociology Compass, 2010
This article traces contemporary trends in borderlands studies and border theory and argues for a feminist revisioning of border studies as a mode of praxis, linking activism, and scholarship. I trace the trends from early borderland studies and Gloria Anzaldúa's analysis of la frontera to the institutionalization of border theory in the academy. Scholars influenced by Anzaldúa's work view borderlands as sites that can enable those dwelling there to negotiate the contradictions and tensions found in diverse cultural, class, and other settings. Critical perspectives of this view include concerns that there is 'the tendency to construct the border crosser or the hybrid … into a new privileged subject of history' (Vila 2003. Ethnography at the Border, University of Minnesota Press). I examine tension between social science based borderlands studies and cultural studiesoriented border theory, address the limits and possibilities of an interdisciplinary border studies, and discuss the dilemmas associated with academic institutionalization and interdisciplinarity. I illustrate the feminist revisioning I recommend with three case examples chosen from contemporary feminist and queer border studies that link local struggles with cross-border organizing against violence against women, labor rights, and sexual citizenship.
Examining activist trajectories across fluid borders: three most welcome analytic shifts
Revue internationale de politique comparée, 2018
This themed issue is very welcome because it invites analysts of activism and collective action to move beyond their area of comfort, and because it invites comparativists to question national boundaries and contexts. It also adopts a most welcome self-critical angle, taking two steps back: questioning the role of scholars as one type of stakeholder among several others, and questioning the use of languages (e.g. Arabic as a ‘language of testimony’ v/s English or French as a ‘scientific language’?) and scholarly concepts in a non-Western environment. Such a cautious approach is very much to be recommended for any social scientist, especially when examining societal contexts that are remote from those contexts that gave birth to most of the established (read: Western) scholarly literature.
Border thinking and disidentification: Postcolonial and postsocialist feminist dialogues
Feminist Theory, 2016
In the context of the continuing dominance of delocalised Western feminist theoretical models, which allow the non-Western and not quite Western 'others' to either be epistemically annihilated or appropriated, it becomes crucial to look for transformative feminist theoretical tools which can eventually help break the so-called mere recognition patterns and move in the direction of transversal dialogues, mutual learning practices and volatile but effective feminist coalitions. Speaking from the position of postcolonial and postsocialist feminist others visa -vis the dominant Western/ Northern gender studies mainstream, and drawing on examples from a broad range of social contexts (from the Armenian queer social movement to a recent Indian gang rape controversy), the authors of this article address the validity of two such trans-formative feminist tools: border thinking that operates on a more general theoretical level, and disidentification that offers a more praxial operational realisation of the border principle.
Rosalba Icaza proposes re-thinking IR by considering how modernity (as an international regime of knowledge) and coloniality (as an international regime of power) are mutually constitutive. Decolonizing IR, her contribution shows, would require a fundamental departure from Western epistemological paradigms such as the un-bodied rational choice actor, proceeding both from non-Euro-centric systems of thinking (i.e., Indigenous cosmologies) and different modes of knowing and being, such as the corpo-realities created through experiences of vulnerability. Following Maria Lugones, Icaza argues for ‘dwelling in the border,’ for ‘an emphasis on a knowing that sits in bodies and territories and its local histories in contrast to disembodied, abstract, universalist knowledge that generates global designs.’ Offering field notes from research trips along the Mexican migrant trail with her students, Icaza reflects on practical examples of such a decolonial approach to IR through the epistemologies of affect and the corporeal.