A post by Nabil Ferdaoussi
Border studies have become an ever-expanding field of inquiry, integrating conceptual and theoretical frameworks from the humanities, social sciences and further afield. To pin down what Border Studies is, or gauge its epistemological scope, is thus no easy feat. In fact, a coterie of border scholars is apprehensive about the hyper-interdisciplinarity of the field—irrespective of the gains it has reaped, probing the added-value, relevance and methodological rigor of these disciplinary overlaps. Whilst a series of epistemological ‘turns’ have punctuated the field, the so-called ‘processual turn’ has been trumpeted as a tour de force, redirecting our focus from the border as an ontological object to bordering as a process of reproducing, rationalizing and sustaining exclusionary practices.
