BorderWork(s) draws together critical perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, and policy studies to explore the acts of division and demarcation — cartographic and representational, material and physical, political and economic, social and cultural — that have parceled up the inhabited world into bounded communities. These walls, borders, and partitions serve to shape, redirect, arrest, and interrupt flows of people, goods, ideas, resources, information, and even imagination itself. Whenever frontiers change or disappear altogether, human security is affected. The very act of slicing and dicing territory, whether on the ground or on paper, has been, in essence, the fundament of modern states and empires. This Lab is concerned with the making and unmaking of borders and their boundless effects on our understanding of state, imperial, and corporate power, environmental rights and engagement with the natural world, the mobility or immobility of human communities (such as refugees), and their creative expression in a variety of artistic and visual media. For complete information on the Lab’s teaching and research projects, please visit http://sites.fhi.duke.edu/borderworks/
