This session seeks to explore the diversity of current geographical research related to the environmental politics of borderland regions. Contemporary work emphasizes borders and boundaries as continually (re)negotiated processes and institutions materialized through everyday practices in multiple spatialities and modes (e.g. Johnson et al. 2011). At the same time, scholars have argued for an understanding of borders as frontiers or zones of transition that foster transboundary cooperation and the emergence of new territories, regions, and identities (e.g. Zimmerbauer 2011; Paasi 2009). These notions are particularly important in the context of the shift toward environmental governance, where the need to work across borders – national, municipal, or jurisdictional – is increasingly pronounced. This shift, however, has had the tendency to focus environmental governance regimes either ‘beneath’ borders, emphasizing local control and action, or ‘above’ borders, emphasizing transboundary and collaborative arrangements at new socio-ecological scales (Norman and Bakker, 2009; Bulkeley, 2005). As a result, environmental governance regimes appear to draw implicitly on notions of borders and boundaries as relatively stable political lines that can be known and governed, potentially neglecting the competing histories, meanings and values constantly under negotiation in borderland environments.
We invite papers that explore the theoretical and practical dimensions of borders, nature, and environmental governance with topics including, but not limited to:
a) New locations of environmental borders: external, internal, and across the state
b) Environmental borders and (im)mobility
c) Participation and cooperation across boundaries: formalization, stakeholders and shared governance
d) Methodological approaches to borderland nature(s): abstract, particular, and transdisciplinary
e) Borders and the persistence of the State: risk calculability, power, territory and identity
f) Borders and performance: everyday practices, bodies, and constructions of difference
g) Theorizing borderland nature(s): processes of bounding, ‘types’ of environmental borders, nonhuman agency in the creation/maintenance of borders
h) Border narratives: competing histories, collective memory and individual experience
i) Borders through time: changing meanings, discourses, practices and manifestations
j) Border-making: frontiers, new territories, and new regions
k) New scales of borderland nature(s): micro, body, watersheds, flyways
l) Borders and (in) The Commons
Please send proposed titles and abstracts of up to 250 words to Katie Williams ( kcw2@uwm.edu ) and Ryan Covington ( covingt4@uwm.edu ) by October 1, 2012
