The UniGR-CBS is strengthening its network with the international border studies community. Over the past few years, the UniGR-CBS has hosted many guest professors across its six locations in the Greater Region. Further activities regarding international visibility and cooperation are presented here.
The UniGR-Guest Professorship Border Studies supports the short-term mobility of professors and post-doc researchers to the six UniGR partner universities. Candidates are selected on the basis of a research project developed in cooperation with the researcher(s) of the host university.
The Europe Conference 2016 of the Association for Borderlands Studies was organised from 4-7 October 2016 by the University of Luxembourg in conjunction with the UniGR-Center for Border Studies. During the four-day conference, the approximately 100 attendees discussed borders, differences and discontinuities in their different manifestations at 18 different sessions, whose work was structured around four key themes: Mobility and Multilocality, Multilingualism and Diversity, Growth and Sustainability, Instability and Change.
The assault on Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is an attack on Eastern Europe and on relations between the so-called West and Ukraine. In this situation, it is once again increasingly the mission of border research to uncover the instrumentalizations of culture and history in the course of border shifts and border violations and to strengthen cooperation. Therefore, the UniGR-CBS welcomes at its sites Belval and Saarbrücken two colleagues from Ukraine, who are specialized in spatial and cultural border studies.
The UniGR-Center for Border Studies was the partner of the second Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS) World Conference. The 5-day event on the theme “Border-Making and its Consequences” was held from 10-14 July 2018 at the University of Vienna (AT) and the Central European University in Budapest (H) and was attended by 450 border researchers from over 50 countries.
The 6th annual KWG conference was organised by the Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION (Frankfurt (Oder)) in cooperation with the KWG Section “Cultural Border Studies” set up at the initiative of the UniGR-Center for Border Studies. The UniGR-Center for Border Studies participated in the conference by organising four panel discussions.
The Centre Georg Simmel at EHESS Paris (School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) organised, in conjunction with the UniGR-Center for Border Studies, a workshop at the Moulin d’Andé (Normandy) from 3-5 June 2019. The starting point for the discussions was the concept of the border with its different aspects as well as their operationalisation in research practice.
Over 250 border scholars from around the world met in Eilat, Israel, from February 13-18, 2023. There, the third World Conference of the Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS) took place on the Eilat Campus of Ben-Gurion University in the tri-border region of Israel, Jordan, and Egypt.
The UniGR-CBS was once again present at the annual conference of the Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS). The world’s largest association of border scholars gathers researchers from all continents. In addition to individual lectures by colleagues from the University of Luxembourg, the UniGR-CBS presented the “Bordertextures” approach at the international online conference.
At the 2022 annual assembly of the Transfrontier Euro-Institute Network (TEIN), the University of the Greater Region (UniGR) with its Interdisciplinary Center of Expertise UniGR-Center for Border Studies (UniGR-CBS) was appointed full member of the European network.
The “Cultural Border Studies” Section of the KWG (Kulturwissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft, Society for cultural sciences) was set up at the initiative of the UniGR-Center for Border Studies. Culturally oriented Border Studies critically analyse border areas and in doing so consider borders as the result of complex spatial, temporal, social and cultural processes, which are dynamic and changeable.
In 2017 academics at the UniGR-Center for Border Studies invited their colleagues from Switzerland to a conference in Luxembourg. The academics therefore decided to join forces in 2018 in a German-French-Swiss research group, “LABOR SwissLux – Labour Across Borders”. The group currently consists of ten researchers, who exchange regularly, present their results at conferences and conduct joint projects.
