Bodies. Borders. Becomings

In times marked by irreversible climate catastrophe, proliferating far-right politics and regimes of surveillance, war and genocide, and unprecedented migratory movements, borders remain urgent sites of investigation. As junctures of encounter, division, and control, borders produce and maintain conditions of crisis, while also generating emergent forms of solidarity, healing, and resistance that challenge the fixity of boundaries between self and other, body and world.

This seminar explores the transformative potential that arises in the points of contact between bodies and the multiple border worlds — geopolitical, digital, spatial, and affective — that shape contemporary life. We consider bodies not only as entities that traverse borders, but as crossed by borders themselves: sites where power, vulnerability, and desire intersect. How are bodies marked and gendered, surveilled and disciplined as they move across borders? What potential do they hold for becoming spaces of subversion, sites of crossing and reconfiguration?

We explore the material and symbolic inscriptions of borders on bodies, but equally bodies’ capacity for renewal and becoming other(wise) over time. Through an interdisciplinary approach of embodiment, the seminar aims to resituate borders as dynamic thresholds of transformation, where new forms of relation, political imagination, and collective life may yet emerge.

Seminar Convenors: Dr Ruxandra Ana (Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange Fellow) & Elise Hjalmarson (University of California, Berkeley)