The International Research Training Group (IRTG) "Baltic Borderlands: Shifting Boundaries of Mind and Culture in the Borderlands of the Baltic Sea Region", a collaborative programme between the universities of Lund, Tartu, and Greifswald, will discuss the context and media representation of border crossing (or transgression) and the formation (or dissolution) of borderlands. The panels will feature papers from the humanities and social sciences, such as history, art history, linguistics, literary studies, political science, gender studies, sociology, and digital humanities, that examine maps, literary texts, academic accounts, biographical records, press media, film, digital productions, and their narratives, as well as the impact on conceptualisations of borders and borderlands.
Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett reflect in their 2011 work "On Borderlands" on the expansion of research approaches and the applicability of the fashionable (academic) concept of borderlands within the humanities. Although the concept had been applied with varying degrees of success, the power of borderlands as an analytical tool appears already in Gloria Anzaldúa's summary of her own stories of living in the borderlands, which she defines as spaces where two or more cultures coexist. Similarly, the observation of Etienne Balibar that "borders are everywhere" rely very much on narrativisations of experiences through different channels. These channels are particularly interesting in the context of this conference and include poetry, maps, biographical accounts and, more recently, numerous digital approaches.
Globalisation supported a perspective of borderlessness beyond any containments like national, imperial or regional spaces and opened up these centrist research perspectives on spaces and orders. Spatial mobility here implies to cross borders, but does not mean to cross them out. They continue to be part of our cognitive and physical world. They remain part of our social, cultural, political and economic world making processes not only through experiences at and across the border but particularly through debates, discourses and images embedded in a multitude of narratives. We therefore ask: What happens with borders and borderlands in the narratives about times of historical and contemporary globalisation? Do we cross or transgress borders? What does it mean when we use one or the other concept? Who has particular interest to present borders and borderlands in a specific way? Which media were used to disseminate ideas? Which of these choices confirm and which subvert the border? Do media and communication have an impact on these processes and hereby influence perceptions, constructions and dissolution of borders and borderlands?

Our keynote speakers will be Vlad Strukov (Leeds) and Kazimierz Musiał (Gdańsk).

Thursday, 28 June 2018

9.00 Keynote - Vlad Strukov: Future Borders: Media and Mediations in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

10.15 Panel I Border Challenges

13.00 Panel II Border Crossings

15.00 Panel III Border Exhibitions

Friday, 29 June 2018

9.00 Keynote - Kazimierz Musiał (Gdańsk)

10.15 Panel IV Mediating Borders

12.30 Panel V Depicting Borders

14.00 Final Remarks - Peter Borschberg (Singapore)

Conference venue: Conference Room, University Main Building, Domstraße 11, Greifswald

Reception at the Pomeranian State Museum, Rakower Str. 9, Greifswald

15.00 Baltic Borderlands - Nine Years of PhD Research in and about the Baltic Sea Region
- Career Talks