Beyond Situated, Everyday, Intersectional Bordering: Translocation, Transcalarity & Transtemporality in Dover-Calais Border Narratives

Dr Kathryn Cassidy (University of East London)

Based on work package 9 of the EU Borderscapes project, entitled ‘Borders, Intersectionality and the Everyday’, this paper seeks to move beyond a general framing of the situated, intersectional, everyday approach to a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which theoretical insights in these fields can be grounded in research on bordering.

Taking borders themselves or processes of bordering as their focal point, research in these fields has often failed to situate itself in broader theoretical and empirical contexts, thus limiting the reach of the findings. As such, bordering from a situated, intersectional, everyday purview is a product of translocational, transcalar interactions, which are not merely connected and co-produced in everyday spaces, but which can be elucidated and understood through rigorous, qualitative research design. It is also a result of trans-temporality in which traces of the past (and imaginary futures) affect ongoing everyday practices and experiences.

Therefore, a situated, intersectional approach enables discussion to move beyond the acknowledgement of bordering as an ‘everyday’ process, to explore the specific nature of the intersection and contested constructions of borders by people differentially positioned along varying axes of power in the context of state borders whose situated gazes emanate from separate experiences of bordering even of the same time/place borders. This paper explores the translocational, transcalar and trans-temporal dimensions of situated bordering via the narratives of a Kurdish Iranian and a Romanian migrant to the UK.

Beyond Situated, Everyday, Intersectional Bordering

Organiser: Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies

Contact email: ch37@soas.ac.uk