<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This article critiques narrow conceptions of sovereignty, while holding up Indigenous practices of sovereign place making and creative relational sovereign enactment. I come into this contestation by thinking through creative acts of sovereignty as a generative praxis. Informed by these practices offers a new way of thinking about sovereignty as practiced, generative and relational. Grounded practices of Indigenous peoples in Denendeh (Northwest Territories, Canada) and the authors own experience as a settler living and working in Denendeh, this article also offers a space to think through ‘refusability’ as relational response.
</abstract>

Generative Refusal: Creative Practice and Relational Indigenous Sovereignty

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
While critical scholarship on listening as a political practice has flourished in recent years, there remains much work to do on theorising listening as a situated practice in specific contexts, including as a practice that might unsettle settler-colonial relations. In this paper, we extend <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_borderlands-2021-012_ref_018">Bickford’s (1996)</xref> work on political listening and our own theorisation of situated listening to offer provisional thoughts on the generative potential of refusal, discomfort, attunement and yielding – prompted by the 2017 <italic>Uluru Statement from the Heart</italic> and the broader conditions of listening and being heard in settler colonial Australia. We locate listening within a decolonial framework to extend and unsettle conventional liberal democratic and deliberative modes of listening. First, we argue it is vital to listen to First Nations histories and practices of refusal. Next, we offer attunement to register our differently situated listening positions within colonial networks of privilege and power. Third, we explore the transformative potential of yielding to First Nations’ authority to set the terms, frames and limits of being heard – within, against, and beyond liberal democratic frameworks. Finally, we offer dwelling in discomfort as a location from which to build more just futures, with the sovereignty of First Nations people placed at its heart.
</abstract>

Dwelling in Discomfort: On the conditions of listening in settler colonial Australia

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Migration professionals characterized the 2008 exodus of Zimbabweans into South Africa as a ‘massive refugee situation’ (MRS). In response, and at the request of senior cabinet officials in the central government, South African state architects developed plans for a ‘model’ camp along the Mozambique-South Africa border in the event of another MRS. We use the article to understand implications of the ‘model’ on the proposed site. This requires playing with notions of the border. Play, here, occurs in a context where Mozambique is parsed from South Africa and where much of the South African side encompasses Kruger National Park. Using transdisciplinary speculative design, the article’s proposed intervention is a design intervention. Specifically, without naïvete, we gesture towards a return to a decolonized site more proximate to a spacetime without mobile matter monitored with devices, before electrified fences shocked the mobile into an organic order, and when matter across difference could go undetected because it was too wicked, too microscopic, or too subaltern while airborne, surface, subterranean, or interstitial.
</abstract>

Transposing Afropolitan Mobilities

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Alongside Toonooba (the Fitzroy River) in central Queensland, a series of Aboriginal flood markers are embedded within the earth, commanding attention to the river that flows on one side and the colonial infrastructure of Rockhampton that lies on the other. The flood markers are part of an arts project commissioned by the Queensland Government in 2013 to mark Rockhampton’s history and its relationship to the river. The flood markers, named <italic>Honouring Land Connections</italic>, assert Indigenous voices into discourses of place, particularly discourses about the significance of rivers on Country. This article explores how art represents wider socio-cultural and politicised contexts of Indigenous and non-Indigenous discourse. The authors discuss the artworks as a form of social action that signifies Rockhampton as an Indigenous space with a history that cannot be neatly divided into three time periods. Any suggestion that <italic>Honouring Land Connections</italic> represents Rockhampton’s precolonial period disregards Indigenous people’s ongoing connections with and responsibilities for Country. The artworks signify contested spaces, places and knowledge of Country, culture, and waterways. Honouring Land Connections maintains cultural connections and speaks back to White preconceptions of Indigeneity. The artists wage war on the selective readings and colonial amnesia in Australia to directly challenge notions of <italic>terra nullius</italic> and <italic>intellectual nullius</italic>. This article shows how art can facilitate interaction through which Aboriginal artists can affirm, negotiate, share, and explore their identities while challenging dominant Eurocentric preconceptions of place and identity.
</abstract>

Signifying Aboriginal Identity, Culture and Country in Central Queensland Through a Public Art Project

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
How do the contradictory demands of sovereignty and globalization, border walls and supply chains, co-exist? Drawing on research along the U.S.-Mexico border, I trace global production networks in the Rio Grande Valley. Things are not made in one country and sold in another; they are produced across, or on top of, the border. Crossing borders is what makes globalization global. Moving bits and pieces across territorial lines not only allows companies to arbitrage national inequalities for profit; it also presents an analytic opportunity to view capitalism itself from a different angle. Extensive infrastructures are needed to allow global production networks to cross, but not breach, the territorial claims of sovereignty. I refer to the cross-border infrastructures as the sluice gates of globalization. Rather than seeing capitalist logics as the problem and anti-capitalism the cornerstone of a critical counter-politics, I draw on Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit discussion to consider sluice gates as evidence of <italic>both</italic> capitalism’s rapacious reach <italic>and</italic> its internal heterogeneity and limits. From this perspective, sluice gates allow us to see capitalism as an assemblage rather than a system: fantasies of coherence recede. Following Timothy Mitchell, I suggest that once capital’s system effects have been dislodged, new economic imaginaries appear.
</abstract>

Border Economies/Capitalist Imaginaries: Dispelling Capitalism’s System Effects

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Colonialism left numerous borders in its wake that subsequently became contested. These colonial borders have often been discussed as artificial, dividing communities, people or ethnicities that otherwise would belong together. Such an interpretation of colonial borders, I argue in this article, overlooks another important aspect of colonial boundaries: their role in creating nations as ‘imagined communities’ who in making reference to such borders can lay claim to a distinct national identity. While such an identity can be exclusionary and trigger conflict, it can also have a much more positive and ultimately hybrid function. I use the case of Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa to demonstrate these multiple roles colonial boundaries can occupy and focus specifically on the creation and contestations of the borders of Eritrea. I argue that the acceptance of borders as markers of identity can be a prerequisite for finding innovative ways to overcome exclusions in the everyday lives of borderland groups. Thus, the example of Eritrea could hold wider lessons for addressing postcolonial disputes about borders and boundaries, if institutional arrangements are put in place that allow fluidity in everyday encounters.
</abstract>

Colonial borders and hybrid identities: Lessons from the case of Eritrea

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This article explores discomfort as it relates to art. It proceeds from the author’s own framework of the ‘cracked art world’, bringing that model into conversation with the anthropology of affect. It identifies and explores three different ways in which affects of discomfort arise in art world encounters: discomfort from art, discomfort about art, and discomfort with (other) people. In exploring discomfort with (other) people, it focuses in particular on intercultural arts events, suggesting that these spaces produce affective ambivalence.
</abstract>

Situating Discomfort in the Cracked Art World

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
In this article, I will discuss the relationships between discomfort, biography, emotions, location, and relocation in ethnographic research—specifically in military research in Colombia. In this article I argue that there is an intertwining between biography, discomfort, emotions, construction of research questions, and writing.
</abstract>

Biographical (Re)Locations

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Learning to explore the embodied affect of discomfort allows us to identify the violence that is usually concealed in structures of power, and to identify our complicity and responsibility in sustaining that violence. From the starting point of my refusal to stay with discomfort in the process of writing an academic article, I put into question how easily we can drag ourselves into the same power structures that we criticise. Exploring my own discomfort leads me to delve into the violence of dichotomies that permeate my research context, the Basque Country, and myself as a researcher. The experiences of those who lived through the Basque armed conflict illuminate the possibilities of the disruption of binaries that embracing the vulnerability inherent to discomfort can entail. The teetering movement of tambaleo emerges, adding a new dimension to the interpretation of discomfort. Tambaleo represents the internal move of the body shaken by discomfort. Tambaleo is a proposal for knowledge generation in academic settings and in periods of crisis such as post-ceasefire processes, where certainties get blurred, and the unstable ground of shattered identities makes of wobbling steps potential spins for social transformation.
</abstract>

‘I feel I cannot write anymore’

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
In this paper I look at activist affects, discomforts, and complaints through the prism of engaged collaborative ethnography and autoethnography as a feminist scholar activist and disabled rape survivor. Drawing upon experiences of feminist solidarity and resistance in the ethnographic field in the UK, Spain, the Basque Country, Greece, Latin American diasporic communities, and transnational activist clusters, I follow affective articulations of activist complaints against intersecting violences, vulnerabilities, and their institutional denial. Attuning to lived experiences of multiple marginalisations in volatile contexts, personal and collective testimonies expose the ways in which such complaints are undermined; from court rooms and doctors’ surgeries to physical and digital spaces, structural violence and its ideological amplification of existing harmful discourses operate against them. These activist affects are articulated in contexts of disbelief, challenged for their validity and devalued in importance. Further complicated by hostile environments and attacks on so-called ‘gender ideology’ by both extreme-right and ‘progressive’ intellectual circles, the expression of marginalised lived experiences of discomfort, anger, pain, disappointment, and mistrust are depoliticised and discredited in their urgent quest for accountability. This paper calls for meaningful listenings and engagement with these unsettling affects as valid embodied knowledge of the operation of violences rendering lives unliveable.
</abstract>

Encountering Discomfort and Negotiating Vulnerability as a Feminist Activist Researcher

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This special issue aims to deepen emerging theoretical engagements with discomfort, in relation to recent debates on affect and emotion, and grounded in ethnographic research. It is based on a joint project of bringing together scholars from different backgrounds to examine the methodological and conceptual affordances of discomfort. This project started in the 2019 AIBR (Iberoamerican Anthropology Association) annual conference, where the editors of this special issue made a call for contributions that examined discomfort from original and committed approaches. The quality and the breadth of perspectives moved the editors to collaborate on this publication proposal. The focus on discomfort is a way for the authors of the special issue to bring together approaches from across disciplines, to challenge fixed frames, and inhabit disciplinary borderlands. This common thread also allows the authors to bring together research from contexts and disciplines that might not otherwise be brought into conversation.
</abstract>

Discomforting ethnographic knowledges

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
How we might cultivate ethical and emancipatory modes of existence in hard places, places dominated by unequal and uneven social relations and far from any pristine environments to (re)connect with? This paper shows how learning with urban commoning projects in Paris and London has led to developing a more-than-human theorisation of discomfort. Although feelings of discomfort or unease are often acknowledged as central to collective projects, or in relation to the existential troubles of climate change, such perspectives are seldom examined together. Learning with commoning projects and bringing my ethnographic experiences in conversation with work on queer discomfort, critical social justice pedagogies and more-than-human geographies offers ways of thinking and doing with discomfort as collective practices. I suggest that (some) practices that welcome a careful attention to discomfort can cultivate relational worlds in the cracks of concrete environments. These are collective affective practices that involve ‘staying with discomfort’, a postponing of the tendency to swiftly reach towards a hopeful future in order to recover human and ecological ethical relations that have been obscured, dismissed or ridiculed, or indeed may not be possible.
</abstract>

Affective agencies of discomfort

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This article examines the intersecting forms of social and environmental injustice shaping the lifeworld of Indigenous Marind communities and their more-than-human ecologies in the Indonesian-controlled province of West Papua. Over the last decade, large-scale deforestation and monocrop oil palm expansion have radically undermined Marinds’ intimate and ancestral kinships with sentient forest plants and animals, as well as the moral principles that undergird interspecies relations. These transformations are exacerbated by conservation practices that are undertaken in the name of corporate sustainability but that are problematically premised upon an assumed divide between humans and the environment. The exclusion of Marind from natures both exploited and preserved sits in turn within a long-standing and ongoing history of violence and discrimination perpetrated against West Papuans under Indonesian rule. Drawing from Marind philosophies, practices, and protocols of more-than-human relationality, I examine how Marind conceive and contest the possibility of justice now and in the future—for themselves, forest organisms, and oil palm—amidst multiple, overlapping, and intersecting injustices provoked by capitalism, conservation, and colonialism. I invite an expansion of the scope and subjects of justice beyond the human that remains nonetheless acutely attentive to the persistence of capital-colonial regimes systematically positioning Indigenous peoples as killable before the law.
</abstract>

Can There Be Justice Here?

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Aotearoa New Zealand acknowledges mātauranga Māori in the two Acts and one Memorandum of Understanding recognising the ‘personhood’ status of three geographical regions—Te Awa Tupua, Te Urewera and Taranaki Maunga. They blend the legal fiction of corporate personhood with the already always understanding of human-nonhuman kinship and entanglement of M!ori philosophy, Māori knowledge and wisdom, and Māori epistemology. Through kaitiaki (trustees) these three entities have volition in their ongoing maintenance, development negotiations, and ‘land-use’, and ‘the rights, powers, duties and liabilities of a legal person’. These attributes suggest something more than mere volition in self-management and protection: they suggest <italic>agency</italic>. This article explores the implications of nonhuman agency as <italic>potential for political voice</italic>. As representatives of entanglement for all being—animal (including human), vegetable and elemental—and as a matter of justice they are, perhaps, obliged to participate in democracy and the nation is, perhaps, obliged to give them a ‘seat at the table’. As political agents with equal status to human and corporate persons Te Awa Tupua, Te Urewera and Taranaki Maunga might unsettle settler politics and challenge the imbalances of the Anthropocene.
</abstract>

A Seat At The Table

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Indigenous leaders and scholars demand greater respect for their governance and knowledge authority, with one priority the de/centring of the environmental management research-praxis arising out of natural science traditions (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_borderlands-2021-007_ref_029">Latulippe and Klenk, 2020</xref>). That is, to de-centre colonial privilege and centre Indigenous authority. Who can do this and how involves conceptual, political and cultural expertise; yet, natural science disciplinary practices prioritise invisibilizing power, culture and perspective (<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_borderlands-2021-007_ref_029">Latulippe and Klenk, 2020</xref>; <xref ref-type="bibr" rid="j_borderlands-2021-007_ref_070">Vásquez-Fernández and Ahenakew, 2020</xref>). This article is an intervention into this context. As a non-Indigenous scholar, I introduce the analytical tools I use to unpack two core assumptions that confounded my ability to hear what Indigenous mentors were saying about environmental management. With two demonstrations—Xaxli’p (Canada) and Gunditjmara (Australia)—I also show how Indigenous leaders do not just present their own approaches, but re-constitute environmental management itself with their meanings, practices, and priorities, whilst environmental management also influences Indigenous knowledge and governance. My focus is with how knowledge is formed and re-formed within and between diverse knowledge holders, including my work as a reflexive modern scholar. Significantly, this article is not purely for edification: this is justice work—in support of both Indigenous people and nature.
</abstract>

Terrain

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Based on ethnographic research undertaken between 2012—2014, this article focuses on the experiences and narratives of four refused, male asylum seekers living in a network of emergency night shelters located in churches across Greater Manchester, UK. Without the right to work and under No Recourse to Public Funds, many refused asylum seekers are pushed into dependency on charitable support and live under threat of arrest, detention and deportation. This enforced destitution interlocks with other mechanisms of deterrence within the UK’s asylum system to produce a weaponised time in which the state uses time to marginalise, destabilise and exert control over asylum seekers and refused asylum seekers. This paper argues that this weaponised time should be considered as a technology of state power alongside dispersal, detention, destitution and deportation. In making this assertion, it also takes stock of the UK’s asylum system and its built-in forms of marginalisation. It also places both the ethnographic content and policy discussion within the controversy surrounding the UK government’s ‘hostile environment’ towards so-called ‘illegal immigrants’ that was unfolding as the ethnographic research took place. This opens towards wider discussions on the mutually reinforcing relationship between asylum policy and political discourse.
</abstract>

Time in the shelter: Asylum, destitution and legal uncertainty

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
State sovereignty is customarily connected to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which it is argued established the ideal of political authority being tied to static geographical containers. While academic scholarship has demonstrated that this ideal fails to account for performative and fluid modes of political power, Westphalian sovereignty remains an influential feature of political discourse. This article argues that Westphalian sovereignty consequently fits Ulrich Beck’s description of a ‘zombie category’, a dead social institution kept alive in political and public discussion. This is demonstrated in the context of the Australian State’s exclusion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, as well as asylum seekers arriving by boat. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s theories of sovereignty, I contend that these populations are excluded from the Australian polity because of how they move, while other subjects including ‘genuine refugees’ and European settlers are included due to their ideal (im)mobilities. I argue that this underlying mobile logic of Australian sovereignty and exclusion is hidden by the zombie notion of a static Australian state, which delegitimatizes humanitarian and indigenous claims to sovereignty based on experiences of forced mobility and mobile expressions of political authority.
</abstract>

Westphalian sovereignty as a zombie category in Australia

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This article is an edited version of a conversation that took place on 4 August 2019 at the State Library of Queensland located on the traditional lands of the Turrbal and Yuggera peoples. This article is part of a series of published conversations between Behrouz Boochani and Omid Tofighian, author and translator (one instalment also includes interlocutors from a 2020 UK tour), about the book <italic>No Friend but the Mountains</italic> and Manus Prison theory. During the event Behrouz was speaking via Skype from Manus Island in PNG, and Omid was in Australia while on break from teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. In this conversation they explore many of the central issues raised by the book and the accompanying translator’s essays.
</abstract>

No Friend but the Mountains and Manus prison theory: In conversation

Borderlands Manifesto

Guidelines for Contributors

Borderlands Journal

Borderlands is a transdisciplinary journal of the humanities and social sciences that was founded in Australia in 2001. Since then, it has fostered radical thinking...

Borderlands is a transdisciplinary journal of the humanities and social sciences that was founded in Australia in 2001. Since...