Memory and Everyday Borderwork Understanding Border Temporalities.pdf (549.01 kB)
Download fileMemory and everyday borderwork: Understanding border temporalities
The field of border studies has traditionally paid little attention to questions of
temporality, leading to criticisms over its presentism and lack of historical reflexivity.
A number of recent publications have brought temporal questions more centrally into
border research, examining the changing and historically contingent nature of borders.
This article intervenes in this body of scholarship, using memory as a means of
studying the past and present of borders. Bringing border studies scholarship into a
more systematic conversation with memory studies, the article shows how memories
of the past play an important part in the symbolic construction of borders, and that
processes of remembering are central to how citizens produce borders in everyday
life. The focus on memory and everyday borderwork allows to go beyond linear and
uniform conceptions of time that have shaped the writing on border temporality. It
draws attention to how time is ordered and interpreted in non-linear and multiple
ways and how these temporal orderings confirm, extend or question the meanings of
borders. The usefulness of studying memory in everyday borderwork is exemplified
through an analysis of memory narratives in the Russian-Estonian borderland, based
on extensive fieldwork and the analysis of 58 narrative life-story interviews.
Funding
Tourism as memory-making: heritage and memory-wars in post-Soviet cities : ES/R011680/1
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- Communication and Media
Published in
GeopoliticsPublisher
Taylor & Francis (Routledge)Version
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The AuthorsPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Taylor & Francis under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY 4.0). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Acceptance date
2020-07-08Publication date
2020-08-22Copyright date
2020ISSN
1465-0045eISSN
1557-3028Publisher version
Language
- en