Theme
Theme for 2008-2010
Global Borders
From the dawn of history, we humans have defined ourselves with borders and boundaries: markers in space, time, identity, aspiration, imagination, and as many other realms as our hopes and fears have conjured or devised. We are who we are because of the lines we draw; and we always have been.
Drawing inspiration from Texas’s location along America’s southern edge, we seek to understand how borders that are intended to separate peoples, places, and categories also function as sites of crossing and mixing. Many other communities are shaped both by the borders that define them and by border crossings that sometimes pass through and that sometimes sink deep roots. Borders are often places of contested ownership but they can also nurture the interaction and mixing of disparate cultures and peoples. They can serve as potent reminders of how much the human race holds in common and that much about this world cannot be delimited by lines drawn on maps. We are interested in global border dynamics, whether of the Pacific world, Old and New Europe, North and South, or settler and indigenous communities in Africa, to name but a few.
We also seek to understand borders as conceptual, ideological, and often porous divides that maintain systems of difference and inequality. Borders frame social and cultural spaces where different intellectual concepts, artistic styles, aesthetic movements, academic disciplines, or mass media genres encounter one another and negotiate their differences. Broadly imagined borders are functions of environments, religion, mobility, markets, citizenship, and warfare. Crossing borders can illuminate the construction of nations, communities, and intellectual categories and suggest how differing histories might be conceived.
We invite applications for resident fellows at all ranks.
