B/ORDERS IN MOTION – Current Challenges and Future Perspectives

In 2018, the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION celebrates its fifth anniversary as a host and hub for b/order-related research with an international conference. With this conference, we offer a platform to consider current challenges and future perspectives of Border and Boundary Studies. B/ORDERS IN MOTION outlines a conceptual perspective and a heuristic research agenda: The conceptual perspective emphasizes a volatile but inevitable interdependence of dynamic bordering practices which both rest on and are constitutive for past and present political, legal, economic, societal, and cultural orders. As a heuristic research agenda, B/ORDERS IN MOTION invites varying disciplines to integrate the research perspective ‘from the border’ as an innovative and prolific approach. In a world of different speeds, complex overlaps of structures, fragmentations and pluralization of temporal horizons, as well as new processes of differentiation and heterogeneities, the theme of B/ORDERS IN MOTION has advanced to encompass both an existential societal challenge and a fundamental question of the humanities that is a key to the future.

Emanating from completed and ongoing research at the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION as well as from current and future-oriented developments within border and boundary studies, the conference offers space for exchange and enhancement of conceptual and theoretical approaches and their application in empirical research.

Four topical foci will inform the discussions:
-    Un/Making Borders and Boundaries
-    Borderless Labor – Labor across Borders
-    Migrating Borders & Boundaries
-    Territorial Borders: The Institutionalization of Crossings.

Additionally, the questions of current challenges and future perspectives of the B/ORDERS IN MOTION research agenda will be discussed at two round tables. The contributions of international and Viadrina-based researchers will add to an appraisal of ongoing and completed research projects hosted by the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION while exploring future directions in b/order-related research.