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Re-Imagining Borders Technologies

Miriam Ticktin

Last week, Professor Miriam Ticktin (Anthropology, New School), shared new research to a packed room as part of the Roots and Routes Series. In her talk, “Re-Imagining Borders Technologies: Designing New Political Forms”, Ticktin shared work from a current collaboration on how reimagining borders enables a new politics.  Her argument highlights the symbolic role of borders, arguing that border walls not only defend but define territories altering categories of natural and human kinds. Describing borders and border walls as technologies of containment, Ticktin illuminated how borders do more than regulate human—they alter our sense of ourselves and of the commons. In contrast to the perspective of borders as either open or closed, working with designers and architects, Ticktin argues for a specultative politics that moves beyond these dichotomies and conceives of borders as permeable, temporary and multilayered. Revisioning borders as welcome lounges or flyaways is an ethical challenge to current conceptions that determine who is allowed to move and who is not.

Next in the Roots and Routes Series is award winning author Valeria Luiselli who will speak about US migration on January 18 at 7pm at the Durham Arts Council. (link)