Topic: Border Studies
Well, this is a bit of an aside to be starting my research semester, but I am going through old email to declutter before beginning, and I came across an invitation for visiting professorships at the University of Glamorgan in Wales in the area of border studies. I found the centre for border studies' mission statement and materials provocative (not to mention finding the idea of being a visiting professor lovely). It strikes me that we've gone around and around in this department about defining ourselves. Are we going to do space studies, as Kevin suggested, regional studies, as Tom and others have suggested, Native American studies, or something else? Many of the issues relevant to all of these "studies" fields touch on border issues. Not to mention that North Dakota is on the largest unprotected border in the world. I think the Centre for Border Studies in Glamorgan is looking for people with some depth of experience in border studies (which I simply do not have at this point) yet we might start to think about how our department could do some border studies.
Brainstorming:
How is my work tied up with borders in some way?
Jessie Redmon Fauset:
Well, race has been a border in the US from the beginning, becoming a bit subtler recently, but no less invidious. Slavery created boundaries that could not be crossed by blacks in the US. These boundaries (North-South being the most obvious) came to have great significance as slaves journeyed north to freedom, as the Civil War directly or indirectly broke down the free-enslaved border which eventually led to the great migration to industrial centers.
During the Harlem Renaissance, Harlem was a black community with borders, into which whites felt free to venture to discover otherness (exotic, poor, wild). Fauset did not embrace this "other" division--she wrote instead about something outside the established black-white boundaries: middle class black experience.
Community Engagement:
When one invokes that amorphous term "community," one immediately conjures visions of boundaries. Community emphases connection, but within boundaries usually. I've written articles that suggest (not uniquely) that community engagement classes break down the classroom/"real" world divide and others have discussed bridging town and gown. Perhaps the argument might be made that in our global, international, webbed world having a sense of one's community might be increasingly important or at least increasingly challenging.
