420002 DS Contemporary Approaches in Borderlands Studies: Galicia in comparative and interdisc. perspective (2014W)

In the last two decades Borderlands Studies, drawing on a range of disciplines and perspectives, developed into a vibrant research field. Globalization, EU enlargement and integration processes in post-Cold war Europe shifted the research focus from borders and frontiers as dividing lines to borderlands broadly understood as a contact zone, a system of communication, and a social network. Galicia, the former imperial periphery, later subjected to ethnic homogenization policies, divided by the Iron Curtain and slowly growing together after 1989 seems to be an ideal laboratory for borderlands studies.
Throughout the catastrophic twentieth century, dramatic transformations - multiple border changes, large scale transfers of populations and corresponding shifts of collective identities - reshaped its political geographies. This seminar proposes to look at former Galicia, now the Ukrainian-Polish borderlands, through the lens of various disciplinary approaches, from political geography and political science to social anthropology, putting it into a comparative context. It addresses such issues as social construction of borders and borderlands, post-colonial approaches to borderlands, borders and borderlands in (post) Cold War Europe, the Schengen border and the securitization of the Ukrainian-Polish borderlands, borders and migration, everyday ethnicity, religiosity and shifting identities, borderlands as memorial landscapes, imperial nostalgia and imagined multiculturalism, cross-border cooperation and reconciliation processes.