EUROBORDERWALKS: Walking Borders, Risk and Belonging

A group of people sitting on indoor, wooden steps

_{Project Team members at launch event 2024.}

Project Overview

Many of the associated challenges with Europe’s borders, in critical border studies, relate to border security concerns, especially in relation to ‘unregulated’ migration, increasing nationalism, the risks of soft or porous borders, as well as the impact of the war in the Ukraine, and the impact of UK exit from the EU on trade and trade routes. The enormity of the humanitarian crisis unfolding at various European borders, including the border of Poland and Ukraine, is witnessed acutely in the borderlands and in those receiving countries. The Russian war on Ukraine has led to Europe’s largest refugee crisis since the second world war, and the war in and break-up of Yugoslavia. An important contribution of this research is to open up horizons for research, knowledge, understanding and teaching and learning, from an ‘ethno-mimetic’ (O’Neill 2001, Cantwell 1993) approach (a combination of ethnographic, biographical and arts based research) that involves documenting and writing the biography of three borders ‘from below’ as well as to impact on policy, through a policy report, policy briefing, exhibition and a curriculum contribution to second level sociological education.

Working collaboratively in interdisciplinary ways across sociology, biographical sociology and arts practice (ethno-mimesis), the aim is to open up horizons and opportunities for scholarship and produce knowledge and understanding that has impact, that makes a difference, not only in better understanding the problems and challenges associated with the three borders (Croatia/Bosnia-Herzegovina, Poland/Ukraine, NI/RoI) at the edges of the European Union, and the very meaning, experience and practices of borders, but also in contributing to European policy and education. Through a radical re-envisioning of the European project and our collective European futures, we will share the findings with engaged audiences and publics, including European commissioners, policy makers, as well as students, and scholars of Europe and all those interested in borders, bordering and ‘borderities.’ The project will be launched at a symposium at University College Cork; host a mid-term learning laboratory and ‘art hack’ (Bradbury and O’Hara 2020) at the University of Lodz, (which will generate more data, knowledge and potential outcomes); and will close with an end of award conference at the University of Zagreb, where we will share the state of the art findings with communities of learning and practice. We envisage a close relationship with UNIC partners (an alliance of ten universities educating through teaching, research and community engagement, towards inclusive societies) in the consultation and dissemination of the outputs as UCC, Lodz and Zagreb are all members.

Methodology

The project will contribute new insights to the fields of Critical Border Studies and Mobilities by undertaking a biography of each border as a study of the process of bordering, and ‘borderities’- not the border as a fixed thing. The research is based on a combination of ethnographic, biographical, and arts-based methods. We use biographical methods because they are rooted in a long and diverse genealogy, developing from a focus upon a single story, a ‘life story’, to encompass autobiographical secondary and archival research and analysis. Biographical research and practices as part of human understanding help people to make sense of what has been and what is happening in their lives, cultures, communities, and societies. Arts based methods, when used in social science research, capture the complex, sensory, embodied sense of lived experience. These methods can extend the relational and connective aspects of biographical research.

The fieldwork comprises two WPs:

participant observation and ethnographic immersion in each border site followed by twenty-five walking biographical interviews at each border site. These will be a mix of autobiographical narrative interviews (Schutze 1992) for those who choose not to walk for whatever reason, i.e., immobility; and walking interview as biographical method (O’Neill and Roberts 2020) with actors (a mix of women, men, different generations over 18 years) who are working or living at/on or who need to cross the border. In doing so we critically engage with the past, through the present and into the future.
ethnographic art workshops at each site, with the artist and participants to map and develop a visual and sound cartography of each border, in order to visualise and represent the ethnographic and biographical research findings.

Data analysis will be undertaken in each work package, and in an accompanying reflective workshop during each work package, we will share, discuss, and develop the comparative analysis through the entire timescale of the research project. Interviews will be undertaken in English where possible and when in local languages will be transcribed locally and translated.

The innovative ethno-mimetic methodology of EuroBorderWalks will lead to ground breaking results/insights in Border studies and Mobilities, methodologically, theoretically and also in the application of the walking method to doing ‘mobility justice’ and thus producing ‘praxis’ as purposeful knowledge with our participants, civil society actors, people living, working and crossing the borders.

Research Team

The research team include the PI Professor Maggie O’Neill, Dept. Sociology & Criminology, ISS21/CSF and collaborating academics Dr Krešimir Žažar, Dept. Sociology, University of Zagreb; Professor Agnieszka Golczyńska-Grondas and Professor Katarzyna Waniek Dept. of Sociology of Culture, Institute of Sociology, Faculty of Economics and Sociology, University of Łódź, Professor Tomasz Ferenc, Department of Sociology of Art, University of Łódź, and artists Dr Michael Mcloughlin, Limerick School of Art & Design, Dr John Perivolaris, and Professor Marek Domański, Academy of Fine Arts, Władysław Strzemiński in Łódź.

Two postdoctoral researchers will join the team ( Dr Vladimir Ivanović and Aleksandra Sobańska) to conduct research on a) the Polish/Ukrainian Border and b) the Bosnia-Herzegovina Border.

Conach Gibson-Feinblum is undertaking a PhD project in this research area.

Advisory Board

Jane Arnfield, Associate Professor Northumbria University, Artist, Actor, Director and Visiting Position in Lodz, Poland.
Prof. Małgorzata Bieńkowska, Faculty of Sociology, University of Bialystok, Poland.
Prof. Victoria Canning, Lancaster University (Border Criminologies/ Border Zemiologies)UK
Amanda Dunsmore, Artist, Limerick School of Fine Art and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland.
Dr Ian Hughes, Senior Policy Advisor in Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) Policy for the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation and a Senior Research Fellow, UCC leading DSIS project.
Prof. Robert Miller, Emeritus Prof in Sociology, Queens University Belfast, NI
Prof. Dr. Tijana Trako Poljak, University of Zagreb
Prof. Ilaria Riccioni, University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy.
Prof. Dr. Gerhard Riemann, Technische Hochschule Nuremberg Georg Simon Ohm, Germany.
Prof. Mimi Sheller, Worcester Polytechnic Institute Massachusets, US.
Dr Anne Thevenet – Assistant Director Transfrontier Euro-Institut Network, Germany.

Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century (ISS21)

Top Floor, Carrigbawn/Safari Building, Donovan Road, Cork, T12 YE30