What Comes to Matter as Border: On Parisian Borderness Dynamics

ABSTRACT

Even though it is now established within the field of border studies that bordering experiences vary depending on who you are, a less investigated problem has to do with how differentially border-ed/ing realities and knowledges relate, emerge, and matter. Therefore, this paper unpacks, in dialog with feminist sciences studies, what Sarah Green calls “borderness dynamics” as a cosmos-politics, a complicating ecology of situated knowledges on and of border(ing)s. The argument builds on an ethnographic investigation of the processes through which initially “borderless” White European volunteers from pro-refugee initiatives in Paris come to sense and know borders in the city as they encounter other border-ed/ing versions of Paris through their practices. The paper demonstrates how these shifts in volunteers’ border sensibilities and knowledges matter ethically and ontologically. The shifts in their (not)knowing/sensing, animated by processes of complication, multiplication, and texturization, contribute to re-shaping what comes to matter as border, as well as to de-re-territorializing the city and its inhabitants as a borderland and as borderlanders. Attending to borderness dynamics enables one to map encounter-induced positionality changes that contribute to “rescaping” at once borders, borderlands, and borderlanders.

KEYWORDS:

• Borderness
• situated knowledges
• feminism
• welcome cultures
• perspective
• multiplicity
• complexity

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the member of the editorial board for their very helpful comments and suggestions for improving the submitted versions of this paper. I also would like to thank Dorte Jagetic Andersen, Joris Schapendonk as well as all the participants to the FRONTEM doctoral seminar (2021, Strasbourg) for their comments on previous versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 See Barad (2007) and Haraway (2016).

2 Here matter is to be understood as both significance and substance. Matter and meaning are entangled.