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Materially and symbolically manifest, borders are shaped by history, politics and power. This first special issue of a two-part series brings together an international collective of authors who presented their papers at a conference on Technologies of Bordering convened by the editors at the University of Melbourne, Australia in July 2019. We invited presentations that critically engage with multiple and varied forms of bordering as expressions of power and oppression, as well as those that considered the possibilities and aspirations for more hopeful and progressive futures. Articles explored a range of issues from borders within and beyond detention centres and carceral systems to colonial and postcolonial forms of bordering. Drawing on a variety of empirical research across different spaces and scales, a range of theoretical perspectives and a diversity of methodological approaches, the articles collectively address the material, digital, virtual and human technologies that divide, exclude, contain, control and govern humans and non-humans.
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Bordering: Creating, contesting and resisting practice

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In this article we ask: how might the significant turn towards creative modes of knowledge production bring together researchers, participants and audiences to disrupt bordering technologies that dehumanise asylum seekers? We focus on videos taken by asylum seekers in Darwin who express their everyday experiences of encountering and transgressing borders. As researchers, we use experimental editing techniques to make these transgressions visible in a society with a white majority culture. We argue, however, that these video techniques often work to privilege our creative agency as researchers, even though the aim is to illuminate different temporalities and visualities of the global refugee crisis. This article problematises this agency and attends to ethical dilemmas by revisiting the juxtapositions, montages, fades, distortions and vortexes we use to centre asylum seeker lives. These visual techniques are an attempt to respond to xenophobic nationalism and racially discriminatory immigration policies through forms of digital activism that transgress standard ‘borders’ of representation and the self/other borders of public debates. In our demand for social and cultural justice, we are inspired by work that uses the affordances of digital technologies to dismantle the rigidity of sovereign borders.
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Transgressing borders with participatory video technologies: Reflections on creative knowledge production with asylum seekers in Australia

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In this article I use an interpretation of Saskia Sassen’s ‘cross-border geographies’ as a framing mechanism for the operations of human rights activists in the Thai-Burma borderlands. I argue that these activists use aspects of the national territories they traverse, such as who belongs and associated rights and obligations, as well as state capital and services. But they also act outside of state sovereignty, in particular through digital infrastructures and transnational networking that connect to other national territories, and their irregular movement across the national border. In this way, human rights activists both operate within national territories and in ways that violate their sovereignty. Activist operations are enabled by an informality attached to the Thai-Burma border, its marginal status to central control, its pragmatic approach to state operations, and its porous nature to flows of information and people. Tighter regulation of these territories, particularly as the adjoining states attempt to exert their authority, is likely to impact the ongoing operations of human rights activists in the Thai-Burma borderlands. Cross-border geographies therefore provide a means for the critical examination of activist operations that occur within and across state and non-state spaces.
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Transversal borderings: Territory and mobility for human rights activists in the Thai-Burma borderlands

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The border bifurcating the island of Timor was arbitrarily created in the late nineteenth century by the Portuguese and the Dutch. It is a border that has divided and separated the people of the ancient kingdoms of Koba Lima ever since, constraining relationships with their ancestral sacred sites, lands and waters. Timor’s wild animals, plants and natural phenomena challenge this division. Their free co-existence and movement through the region remain essential to the material and spiritual unity of life for people along the border. The ancestral and metaphysical connections they embody and enable are continually honoured in people’s ritual practice and speech, connecting and binding together what cross-island politics has otherwise held apart. In this article, we trace the effects of this constant mingling of places, words, and more-than-human beings, and elucidate the ways they subtly re-work the material divisions of colonial and now postcolonial borders. The effects of such re-workings are, we argue, to continuously extend boundaries, to celebrate multiplicity and diversity and, despite the many challenges, to determinedly maintain a commitment to practices that ensure cross-species unity and the flow of life.
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Unity and Division: Caring for Humans and Non-humans in a Divided Land

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Policy regarding people arriving by boat in order to seek asylum was a key focus of political discourse during the 2013 Australian Federal Election campaign. Evening television news reports on the unfolding election revealed a bipartisan push for increasingly punitive approaches to the treatment of people seeking asylum. As such borders and the processes and practices involved in discursively constructing them, as well as the linguistic and visual strategies deployed around maintaining and protecting them were dominating themes of political discourse throughout the campaign and the ensuing election coverage.
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Spaces of exclusion: The visual construction of Australian borders and the asylum seeker subject in television news reports of the 2013 Australian Federal Election

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This article reveals the central role played by the Australian constitution in producing the Australian debtscape through the establishment and maintenance of a colonial nomopoly. Australia’s colonial law is foundationally premised upon violent acts of invasion of Indigenous land and water, and because this continues without consent, the colonial state uses its monopoly of violence to manufacture consent through law for two main reasons: the first is to generate retrospective exculpation for historical wrongs and economic theft (the debtscape) and the second is to establish consent frameworks to provide cover for future exploitation and theft (the colonial nomopoly).
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Debtscape: Australia’s Constitutional Nomopoly

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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.
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Time in the shelter: Asylum, destitution and legal uncertainty

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 21 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)

Volume 21 (2022): Issue 1 (January 2022)

Volume 20 (2021): Issue 2 (October 2021)

Volume 20 (2021): Issue 1 (January 2021)

Volume 19 (2020): Issue 2 (October 2020)

Volume 19 (2020): Issue 1 (January 2020)

Volume 18 (2019): Issue 2 (January 2019)

Volume 18 (2019): Issue 1 (January 2019)

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 across the borders between disciplines, nations, sexualities, economies, identities, peoples and species, and fostered interplay between rigorous scholarship in philosophy, law, cultural studies, politics, sociology, geography, international relations and the environment. Borderlands' profile in areas such as refugees, indigenous politics, post-and de-colonial theory, biopolitics, post-Marxism, queer theory, race and gender, is especially strong, but the journal remains open to a range of concerns and disciplines.  As the complex discourse and reality of the Anthropocene evolves, Borderlands is opening its pages to work in the environmental humanities, posthumanism, STS, and environmental politics, theory and law. It aims to foster new conjunctions of justice, power, theory and bodies; to connect theory, event and structure in compelling and thoughtful ways.  You can read the Borderlands' manifesto to get a sense of the vision with which we began.  Writing for Borderlands  Borderlands has a global reputation for first-class theorising and innovative conjunctions of theory, event and situated analysis. Borderlands' editorial board includes some of the world's most important social theorists including Sara Ahmed, Jane Bennett, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Claire Colebrook, Michael Hardt, Donna Haraway, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Adi Ophir, RBJ Walker and McKenzie Wark. Our rigorous standards and double-blind peer-review process ensures that only the highest-quality work is published. Your work will be published with an open access license - for free - ensuring global and equitable access to your work from readers around the world. And, by publishing with Borderlands, you help support a radical publishing space untainted by big corporate profitmaking and neoliberal elitism.  Past issues of Borderlands  Borderlands issues from 2002-2019 were published under the ISSN 1447-0810 and can be viewed in the National Library of Australia’s Trove archive.  Open Access Policy  This journal provides immediate open access to its content under the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge. Under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license authors retain the copyright and full publishing rights without restrictions and all users are free to share the work (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format), if the contribution is properly attributed and used for non-commercial purposes. The material published in the journal may not be altered or built upon.  All authors who wish to publish in Borderlands must agree to the licensing terms stated above.  ABOUT SOCIETY  The University of New South Wales (UNSW) Environment and Governance Research Group brings together leading international researchers in environmental politics, law and policy, biodiversity, climate security, food systems, and environmental ethics. Our work has a common focus on improving law, public policy and international cooperation in protecting ecosystems and managing the impact of human-induced environmental change. With planet Earth having entered the Anthropocene - the epoch of dramatic human impacts on the Earth’s ecology and systems - our work crosses disciplines and charts paths for improved governance that can support ecological sustainability, and key human interests in health, justice and security, into the long-term future.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process.