Chapter 2 Working the Border Interdisciplinary Encounters Across Intellectual, Material, and Political Boundaries

Placing (Our) Border Work

In this work, and underlying it, we recognize our positionality with respect to borders of control, benefitting from the relative mobility that our citizenship, economic, and institutional resources afford us. At the same time, we recognize a corresponding responsibility, the “ability to respond,” that underlies our situatedness.3 Holding to the words of feminist scholar and physicist Karen Barad, “Responsibility is not an obligation that the subject chooses” or a “calculation to be performed” but rather an incarnate “relation always already integral to the world’s ongoing intra-active becoming and not-becoming . . . through the iterative reworking of im/possibility, an ongoing rupturing, a cross-cutting of topological reconfiguring of the space of response-ability.”4

We embark on this work with the particular tools of a research scholar and a visual artist and a desire to centre relationalities of respect and to practice (even as we learn to practice) ethics of care in our responses to social and political problems that loom large in contemporary society.

As we write this chapter, there is much public debate about the work of political borders in the world today. In the United States, where both authors reside as citizens, asylum-seeking children are separated from their families in contravention of international law; detained border crossers sleep in for-profit detention facilities on concrete floors in overcrowded hieleras (iceboxes); across the Mediterranean Sea, African and Middle Eastern asylum seekers risk death to traverse turbulent waters in pursuit of livelihood and safety in Europe. The violence of border policing, defended as a fundamental responsibility of the modern nation-state, occludes the still-contested status of settler-state territory by Indigenous nations. The chapters in this volume document the various ways that the drawing of lines has displaced or sought to erase Indigenous people (Hall, chap. 6; Barkley, James, and Stone, chap. 5), have shaped people’s sense of place and belonging even generations after the fact (Wells, chap. 3), and continue to impact the ability to move, access health care, or preserve their homes (Donoso, chap. 7; Light, Naumes, and Amarshi, chap. 8).5 These chapters also document struggles not included in the official archive that come in the form of legal battles (Resendiz and Resendiz, chap. 1), refusal of recognition, and thinking relationally rather than linearly (Murphy, chap. 4).6 In chorus with these contributions, this chapter explores how working the boundaries between political geography and visual art can cultivate a multidimensional conceptualization of borders that conveys their capacity to ascribe both belonging and division.

In political geography, borders are not just physical structures delineating space and access but also invisible structures of inclusion and exclusion, sedimented by history, policy, memory, and interrelations.7 Visual art can bring invisible border structures into view, offering opportunities for critical reconsideration and, where necessary, resistance. Through material and imaginative constructions, art can complicate popular perceptions of borders as fixed, question their function as exclusive, and expose their permeability.8 When power is conceptualized as the “control of the flows of information,” Renée Marlin-Benet identifies “art power”—the unique quality of power enacted by artwork—at and across borders. Art manifests its power in communicating “sensory data” and “emotional sensation,” both forms of information. Facing the restrictions structured into political borders, artwork’s ability to engage ambiguity (having multiple meanings) and indeterminacy (having unspecified, unknown meanings) can be especially potent to open space for the creative flow of ideas and imagination, to disrupt and renegotiate hardened barriers, to imagine otherwise, and to possibly enable new/other realities.9 For us, the work of political geography offers grounding to our artistic inquiry, a physical place contextualized by social-scientific research and situated in lived experience, while artwork provides the materiality for imaginative reconceptions. The border forests in Morocco, understood through binocular lenses of political geography and visual art, became the generative place for our work to come into focus.

Collaborative Practice

The forested borderland prompted us to examine the ways our thinking and expressions are shaped (and contained) by our respective disciplines and practices. Leslie’s work uses ethnographic methodologies to explain political borders as technologies of racial violence and exclusion even as they condition possibilities for new forms of belonging. Heather’s art practice explores the dynamic potentialities of boundaries as porous and productive sites of exchange. Considering light and water as subject and medium, she works to unsettle simple binaries and “unfix” exclusionary conceptions of (metaphorical, biological, societal, historical) boundaries. As scholars concerned with complicating and denaturalizing borders, it was important for us to challenge the givenness of our own disciplinary boundaries—to step “out of bounds”—to practice a border crossing of our own through interdisciplinary collaboration. “Working the border” means venturing beyond our individual work into “interstitial space,” inhabiting the “between” as a prevailing rather than transitory state.10 T/here we bring together our multiple border ontologies and methods, moving beyond a transactional relationship and into a “rhythmically interwoven, expansive relationship”—the necessary condition for “geographies of freedom.”11

In its most liberatory forms, interdisciplinarity is not simply a method of arriving at a more creative, ethical, effective solution to a social problem but itself a critical practice that aims to disrupt the boundaries that separate us along ideological or identitarian lines often folded into disciplined ways of knowing.12 As a range of subjects and approaches are brought into the same space, new horizons of possibilities come into view.13 Indeed, one of the goals of interdisciplinarity is to challenge the “common sense” of a problem that is often driven by one particular subject position or epistemological orientation. It holds the potential to make knowledge more relevant, balance incommensurable claims and perspectives, and raise questions concerning the nature and viability of expertise.14 Natalie Loveless writes specifically about the strengths of bringing art into the research process (what she calls “research creation”), arguing that it “mobilizes the artistic as a sensibility and approach attentive to how form makes worlds.”15 It is especially relevant that a project aiming to disrupt hegemonic binaries and span disciplinary boundaries would take as its object of attention the political, social, material, and symbolic “lines that cross us” and do so through artistic expression.

The Artwork

Border Disruptions, the art installation exhibited at the conference, visualizes our complex inquiries around borders, including ideas of fugitivity and confinement, seduction and entrapment. Over six feet high and stretching twenty-eight feet long, it evokes a border wall in its extended rectangularity. It is composed of narrow vertical translucent strips of disrupted (cut) images, with each strip suspended from the top, contiguous with or overlapping but unattached to its neighbour. As part of an unstable ensemble, individual pieces never coexist in identical relative relationships from one installation to the next. While extensive in length, the embodied experience of the work is that of verticality; at close proximity, it nearly engulfs the viewer’s field of vision. The imagery, blurred as if in motion and punctured by light and darkness, plays just on the cusp of discernibility. A shape emerging on one slice is picked up a few strips later: Is that a fence? A cage? A forest? The colours range from fleshy soft hues of sand, pink, and gold to strikes of charcoal gray and splashes of hot red, orange, and yellow. A searchlight or a dawning sun? There is no internal point of spatial reference, no horizon line. Itself perhaps is a horizon, a border wall, or both.

Dispersed throughout this chapter are horizontal strips cut from images of the exhibited work. These strips enact an entangled expression of our practice, disrupting a binaristic performance of collaboration: artwork = contribution of artist plus (and separate from) written work = contribution of social scientist. Instead, each iteration of our work together asks us (and our respective modalities) to transgress and transform our/their prescriptive forms. They perform the entangled work of our respective disciplines, creating an interstitial manifestation, a third thing. As an exhibited work of art reconstituted and interjected into the body of a text, reoriented from the previous iteration, it extends an opportunity for an expanded set of questions. For example, what can a shift from verticality to horizontality do for our perspective? Make a move away from hierarchy? Infuse a barrier with motion? Turn sedimentation on its side? Appearing throughout the text, the strips are intended to open/cut space for pause, for a different (nonverbal) language, a gentle stutter to the flow of words. Can these image-borders do the both/and work of disrupting and connecting? Can such imagery, interrupting a text, also interweave (or diffract) multiple ways of knowing? Herein lies an invitation. Or perhaps a provocation.

We weave this work (text and image) across, under, and through the theoretical threads that serve as a connective fiber for our evolving collaboration: Gloria Anzaldúa’s borderlands theory; Karen Barad’s “agential cuts” (cutting together-apart) in the context of diffraction, the “queer” phenomena of light’s simultaneous behavior as particle and wave; Donna Haraway’s “staying with the trouble”; and Jacques Rancière’s political dissensus.16 All the while we attend to interdisciplinarity’s “transgressive charge—to always be pushing at, and defamiliarizing, the limits of disciplinary boundaries.”17

In the sections that follow, we reflect on the development of our collaborative practice, sharing our insights as potential signposts for future/fellow border workers. Framed by feminist and decolonial scholarship, we chronicle our learning to work across disciplinary borders, through which three iterative (nonlinear) practices emerged. Negotiating inevitable areas of tension and divergence, border work exposed our need for a common language. For us, finding a common language was not a precondition for collaborative work but a central part of collaboration itself. Next is exploration, which we understand not as rendering things discrete and knowable at a distance but rather as an intersubjective experience immersed in the realities of limited time and resources and in sometimes contradictory experiences and modes of expression. We discover that this exploration is necessarily slow and that slowness also enacts a substantive quality to working the border through resisting capitalistic imperatives of productivity and centring relationality and care. The third emergent element of our practice is invitation. The desired fruition of our work is not a “product” in the neoliberal sense. Rather, this collaboration opens into invitation. It cultivates an ongoing openness to one another and invites others into the continuing creative process, disrupting the boundary between maker and consumer, between science and aesthetics, and importantly, between academic inquiry and political practice.

Finding Common Language

As we dug into our shared practice, our divergent orientations to the topic of borders came into clearer focus—a site of productive exchange versus a tool of exclusion and violence. It became important to find a common language that would enable us to move back and forth between art and geography and between sign and form. We identified two feminist scholars whose work gave us what we needed to make sense of the resonances and tensions emerging between us and to develop our common language with which to speak of them. Anzaldúa was a feminist theorist and poet who wrote extensively about language, identity, and belonging as a mestiza growing up in the Texas-Mexico borderlands. Anzaldúa queers border thinking by emphasizing the dual rather than binarist nature of borders—how they can be violent and life-giving, dividing and conjoining. Barad is a physicist and feminist theorist who uses insights from quantum mechanics to trouble received wisdom about the nature of the world and of scientific knowledge production. Barad puts her work in conversation with Anzaldúa’s in order to demonstrate how feminist and queer epistemologies better reflect the infinitely more complex and multiple worlds that quantum physicists have just begun to understand.18

Anzaldúa’s borderland theory captures the dual nature of borders. For her, a border is a sharp thing cutting scars on the earth, dividing “safe” from “unsafe,” “us” from “them.” A borderland, however, is “vague and undetermined”; it is a geography of liminality—a state of neither-nor/both-and “created by the unnatural emotional residue of an unnatural boundary.” Both painful and full of possibility, “in a constant state of transition,” borderlands are rich with the potential of connection.19 Political borders inscribe divisions within the social landscape and, often, within the subject herself. For Anzaldúa, we are all bordered subjects. Divisions and lines can be read as attempts to contain the multiple worlds that inhabit the same space. This insight helped us move forward beyond our tension around borders as violent and divisive as well as sites of contact and possibility. They are both—not multiple components added up to a single whole but overlapping, inseparable wholes.

In envisioning the artwork, we began to pull out images from Heather’s 35 mm film archive, taken in Morocco and South Carolina, that captured various dualities we recognized as being at play in our dialogue: mobility and immobility, light and dark, freedom and captivity, division and unity, opaqueness and porosity. We began to experiment with translucent materials that could be layered and overlapped. Emphasizing the dual (or multiple) rather than the binary displaced the notion of discrete space, loosening the fixity of borders. Describing the relation of light to darkness in the optical phenomenon of diffraction, Barad demonstrates how light refuses absolute separation from darkness.20 Passing through two slits in a piece of paper, light overlaps, which we might expect to create more light but in fact produces darkness: (more ≠ more). In other experiments, light appears mingled within the boundaries of a shadow, troubling a politics (and ontology) of separation, of location: Where is here? Where is there? Which side is dark? Which side is light? Diffraction displays the liveliness of light that “troubles the very notion of dicho-tomy (cutting into two)” disrupting “some of the most sedimented and stabilized/stabilizing binaries.”21 Reflecting on the creative ways that people engage local border walls, Luis Alberto Urrea tells a story of kids in Nogales who play volleyball together across the US-Mexico border wall—one team on one side, the other team on the other, the game reworking the border as an arena of play. Urrea recalled that the US side of Nogales reminded him of the East German side of the Berlin Wall (stark, heavily patrolled, clear-cut of brush and trees for more visibility), while the Mexican side resembled the West German side (full of people, life, murals, street vendors, and musicians). To Urrea, this begs the question, On which side does freedom reside? Where is the “better life”?22 In this enacted relationality across a border wall, we see a diffractive troubling of some of America’s most sedimented national and political narratives. In the self-acclaimed “Land of Freedom,” we ask again, Where is here? Where is there?

As our project continued to take physical shape, Barad’s work provided further language and metaphor to encapsulate our emerging collective imagination of borders as dynamic entities. Barad writes about how performances of differentiation, what she calls “agential cuts,” are not absolute separations but merely reorganizations of always-entangled materials and socialities. Returning to diffraction, in one experiment, when light passes through two slits of paper at the same time, it behaves simultaneously as particle and wave. Barad calls this phenomenon “together-apart.” In other experiments, a single particle of light can pass through each of the slits in its entirety at the same time, a result that challenges the Newtonian theory that light must, in such conditions, take the form of a wave. This shows, Barad argues, that differentiation does not require division. Barad’s insight was helpful at two levels of our collaboration: We composed materials and images through cutting, sticking, moving, and removing with the understanding that each arrangement revealed something new and yet was bound up in all the other arrangements before and after. It also removed the sense of separateness between process and product. Each installation is a “cut” or snapshot of something always in motion—iterative and iterating recompositions.

“Together-apart” also helped us reconcile how our individual, uniquely held relationship to the theme remained discernible even as a collectively held relationship took shape. As Barad affirms, “Entanglements are not unities. They do not erase differences; on the contrary, entanglings entail differentiatings, differentiatings entail entanglings. One move—cutting together-apart.”23 Rather than seeking integration or consensus, this “together-apart” practice aimed for dissensus.

For political theorist Rancière, dissensus is a site from which the political—as an undisciplined range of possible relations, subjects, and practices—can emerge.24 While dissensus produces an unruly space of politics by blurring lines of commonly held interrelationalities and hierarchies, consensus represents the evacuation of the political from a social world predicated upon order (police) and membership (citizenship), a reinforcement of hierarchical divisions. In rejecting the depoliticization of social space, dissensus rejects partisanship (each group rigorously delimiting and policing their side). Feminist and queer theorists, such as Haraway and Barad, articulate dissensual practice as one of “staying with the trouble” in order to disrupt or dislodge boundaries perceived as fixed.25 As we bring art and political geography together-apart, we “displace the borders of art, just as doing politics means displacing the border of what is recognized as the sphere of the political.” It is no coincidence, claims Rancière, “that some of the most interesting artworks today engage with matters of territory and borders.”26

Dissensual practice is a practice of thinking and creating otherwise, of unadhering to common conceptions of becoming “disciplined” in multiple senses of the term. In other words, it is a practice to become undisciplined. In academic life, this means disrupting or even undoing the labor of honing our research skills or creative practices. In the context of border work, this paradigm challenges us to examine possible unintended consensual performances that reinforce problematic hierarchies. Is advocating for the protection of “innocent” migrant children reinforcing the militarization of border enforcement against “bad hombres”?27 In creating artwork, is resistance to representational imagery in order to prevent objectification making the artwork less legible and therefore less accessible? Through our process, revisiting debates we thought we had resolved could feel like moving backward, wasting time, or failing. But it is also the case that “failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world.”28

Exploration and Slowness

Recognizing that exploration is often bound up in a colonial relation between (knowing) subject and (perceived) object, our explorations strove for a deeper encounter between subjects and an ethical commitment to each other and our subject matter that exceeded the demands of “getting work done.”29 We felt our way forward carefully in the subject-space of borders and migration. How do we portray our inquiry without reproducing images of the “suffering migrant” that circulates so frequently in media and humanitarian discourse? How do we avoid propagating one-dimensional perceptions and preserve the multiplicity held both in border regions and in the varied experiences of people who navigate them?

As we explored, we had to trust that something was happening even though very little “creation” had taken place. Marilyn Strathern argues that we need to shift our thinking about creative knowledge production, especially within interdisciplinary teams, as only taking place once the time-consuming preliminaries—drumming up interest or resources, getting people on the same page, working out logistics—are complete.30 These activities are not the run-up to interdisciplinary work but the work itself. This was especially true of our project: each time we sought to reach across the boundaries of time, space, finite resources, understanding, or enthusiasm, we were “working the border.”

Collaborations are process oriented and take time. Choosing such collaborations is an act of resistance to the coloniality of time against which productivity is measured and through which it is assigned value. In our case, the “rightness” of our collaboration stemming from our long friendship and ongoing fascination with each other’s work motivated our willingness to commit to such a time-intensive endeavor, especially as we constantly felt pulled in other directions by demanding professional and personal responsibilities. We sought to find a rhythm that supported each other’s work rather than burdening it. Necessarily, the project unfolded slowly, which ultimately provided the space for a more meaningful and deeper practice.31 While perhaps seemingly insignificant, it is in these micropolitical shifts, the “bit-by-bit-ness,”32 that otherwise worlds are made.33 We were cultivating “a willingness to take on the space of the unknown in a transformative way.” Speaking of fugitive navigation on the way to freedom, Manu Vimalassery observes, “To reach the goal, you don’t move in straight lines, on predictable paths, or along foreordained, agreed-upon courses . . . the uncertainty of a journey to an unknown destination. This uncertainty has a name, which is the name of the journey itself, and of the destination: liberation.”34 In our own “bit-by-bit,” nonlinear, uncertain ways, we were/are working toward a liberatory practice.

Invitation

The composition and recomposition of the art piece and the project as a whole are not confined to the bounds of our own work. A collaboration between art and social science offers the capacity for invitation and encounter—into a shared physical presence with the artwork and intellectual space with each other—to think inclusively (and in an embodied way) through the issues that drive our inquiry, to (re)compose together. At “The Line Crossed Us” border studies conference, we were able to share this work with scholars, activists, and artists interested in how borders have shaped landscapes, made or unmade nations, and reinforced colonial geographies and how they continue to be resisted, undermined, and reworked. As we talked together, walking along the piece, we described our exploration and shared some of the vocabulary that enabled our collaboration. We invited those present to share the relational space and conceptual territory of our project rather than regard the results of the project. The scale and the expressionistic tenor of the work required slowness, time to absorb and process. The imagery is difficult to discern, flickering on a tenuous edge of recognition and suggestion. In the arhythmic arrangement of narrow vertical strips, image fragments of almost-discernible places, objects, and textures are hard to pin down. Associations emerge and recede. Engaging in our common language, people began to move forward and add language of their own. Words like “fugitivity” emerged; some expressed feeling “overwhelmed” by a sense of the enormity of boundaries; others saw “fragility” in the construction as an indication of the inherent “instability” of boundary making. Someone questioned its political work: Does the beauty of the piece erase the violence that borders often engender? In our intention to disrupt rather than reenact conventional border conceptions, beauty can do the work of invitation, drawing people into the space of relationality. Beauty can create an affective (emotional and psychological) opening, softening the metaphorical ground toward receptivity. It can afford comfortable ground to grapple with uncomfortable realities, a hospitable space to “stay with the trouble.” The cut that manifested in our initial installation began to change before our eyes as others made their own cuts together-apart.

Invitation into the interdisciplinary process even at the moment of creation returns us to expanding entanglements of relationship and interresponse-ability. The Great Lakes Feminist Geography Collective35 argues that slow, collective scholarship reflects a feminist ethic of care for oneself and for others and is bound up in “the struggle for . . . the decolonization of knowledge, in which experimentation, creativity, different epistemologies, and dissidence are all valued and encouraged.”36 Loveless points out that the values of deliberate, creative collaboration (curiosity, curation, carefulness) share the same root word: to care, which also “brings warning (caution), desire (to know), and considered choice (the care at stake in curation).”37 In other words, an invitation to join in our endeavor is also an invitation into relationships that exceed our most comfortable or cherished boundaries—of the university, of the nation, of the self as a solitary and self-contained agent. Haraway insists that this is what is required if we are to survive these “disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with each other in the thick present.”38

Issuing an expansive, unbounded, excessive invitation into relationship might be the how for addressing the most troubling problems of our troubled times. The who of these relationships is multiple, other, more-than—in Anzaldúa’s words, nepantla (neither here nor there). Haraway calls it (us) oddkin: “Staying with the trouble requires making oddkin; that is, we require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles. We become-with each other, or not at all.”39 We can imagine a better world only if we get serious about our entanglements with all the other (Indigenous, colonial, ecologically dynamic, more-than-human) worlds out there (in here).40

Migratory Futures

This chapter describes our ongoing art–social science collaboration to intervene in struggles over borders and boundaries that loom large in social and political life today. We discover that true interdisciplinary collaboration has the potential to enliven knowledge creation through developing new languages in common, through exploration of other terrains of knowing, and through inviting others into the process. Such work is processual—that is, the line between process and product is necessarily blurry and, as such, is not readily legible to neoliberal metrics of productivity and does not always produce recognizable “results.” Instead, such a practice makes space for multiple worlds, for care-full collectives of singular knowledges, individuals, creative processes, methodologies. Such a practice is imbued with decolonial possibility.

But interdisciplinarity, as a collaboration within the university across various academic disciplines, has its limits. All the disciplines within the university were germinated and nurtured in the colonial project; in the extraction of objects and people for study or (forced) labour; in the privileging of scientific practices of describing, measuring, categorizing, and so on; in the division of vocation (of artist, scientist, theorist) from the laity.41 Furthermore, the production of colonial knowledge has often begun with exploration in order for knowledge to be “treated, enunciated, and represented in new contexts.”42 Thus, a project whose aim is to disrupt colonizing forms of knowledge and imagine emancipatory futures must migrate beyond the confines of the academy altogether. We contend that debordering knowledge production through interdisciplinary collaboration preserves space for the varied, conflicting experiences of living with borders in the settler-colonial nation-state and conditions the possibilities for meaningful political and social change.

“Working the border” continues to be an invitation to all of us to traverse boundaries and consider how exploration might be more affirmatively understood or reworked as a position of receptivity, listening, and relinquishing ownership or other proprietary claims. Disrupting borders unmoors colonial markers of “here” and “there,” enacting an unruly spatiality. Our hope in our continuing collaboration is that valuing unruliness, staying with the trouble, and making oddkin might countermap a strange and lively territory of possibility.

Notes

1. 1. A. Barbosa et al., The Intercontinental Biosphere of the Mediterranean: D9.2 Case Study Report.

2. 2. The images appearing throughout the text are recomposed grayscale cuts from a previously installed artwork entitled Border Disruptions. Rather than discrete representations of work that exist outside the text, these images are an integral aspect of this chapter, reiterated from their previous variation into a new form, doing new work within this specific context. They are reprinted with permission of the artists-authors.

3. 3. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza.

4. 4. Karen Barad, “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance,” 265–66.

5. 5. Sheila McManus, Paul McKenzie-Jones, and Julie Young, eds., Challenging Borders: Contingencies and Consequences.

6. 6. McManus, McKenzie-Jones, and Young, Challenging Borders.

7. 7. Corey Johnson et al., “Interventions on Rethinking ‘the Border’ in Border Studies.”

8. 8. Jacques Rancière, “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics.”

9. 9. Renée Marlin-Bennett, “Art-Power and Border Art.”

10. 10. Derek Briton, “From Integrated to Interstitial Studies,” 373–74.

11. 11. Manu Vimalassery, “Fugitive Decolonization.”

12. 12. Gavin Little, “Connecting Environmental Humanities: Developing Interdisciplinary Collaborative Method,” 3–4.

13. 13. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene.

14. 14. Raphael Foshay, “Introduction: Interdisciplinarity for What?” xxix.

15. 15. Natalie Loveless, How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, 102.

16. 16. Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera; Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning; Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction”; Haraway, Staying with the Trouble; Rancière, “Contemporary Art.”

17. 17. Loveless, How to Make Art, 60.

18. 18. Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway; Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction.”

19. 19. Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera, 3.

20. 20. Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction,” 171.

21. 21. Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction,” 168.

22. 22. Luis Alberto Urrea and Krista Tippett, “What Borders Are Really about and What We Do with Them.”

23. 23. Barad, “Diffracting Diffraction,” 176.

24. 24. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics.

25. 25. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble.

26. 26. Rancière, “Contemporary Art,” 47.

27. 27. “To Some, Trump’s ‘Bad Hombres’ Is Much More Than a Botched Spanish Word.”

28. 28. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure, 2.

29. 29. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, “On Tricky Ground: Researching the Native in the Age of Uncertainty.”

30. 30. Marilyn Strathern, “Experiments in Interdisciplinarity,” 87–88.

31. 31. A. Mountz et al., “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University.”

32. 32. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 40.

33. 33. Loveless, How to Make Art, 102.

34. 34. Vimalassery, “Fugitive Decolonization.”

35. 35. The Feminist Geographies Specialty Group (FGSG) of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) promotes explorations of how gender, women, and other axes of social power are actualized through space. https://www.aag.org/groups/feminist-geographies/.

36. 36. Mountz et al., “For Slow Scholarship,” 1254.

37. 37. Loveless, How to Make Art, 47.

38. 38. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 1.

39. 39. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 4.

40. 40. Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera.

41. 41. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 70.

42. 42. Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 70.

Bibliography

1. Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
2. Barad, Karen. “Diffracting Diffraction: Cutting Together-Apart.” Parallax 20, no. 3 (2014): 168–87. http://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2014.927623.
3. Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
4. Barad, Karen. “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance: Dis/Continuities, SpaceTime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-Come.” Derrida Today 3, no. 2 (2010): 240–68. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48616359.
5. Barbosa, Ana, Beatriz Martín, Alejandro Iglesias-Campos, Juan Arévalo Torres, Julian Barbière, Virgilio Hermoso, Sami Domisch, et al. The Intercontinental Biosphere of the Mediterranean: D9.2 Case Study Report. Berlin: Ecologic Institute, 2018.
6. Briton, Derek. “From Integrated to Interstitial Studies.” In Valences of Interdisciplinarity: Theory, Practice, Pedagogy, edited by Raphael Foshay, 367–90. Edmonton, AB: AU Press, 2012.
7. Foshay, Raphael. “Introduction: Interdisciplinarity for What?” In Valences of Interdisciplinarity: Theory, Practice, Pedagogy, edited by Raphael Foshay, 1–30. Edmonton, AB: AU Press, 2012.
8. Halberstam, Jack. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011.
9. Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.
10. Johnson, Corey, Reece Jones, Anssi Paasi, Louise Admoore, Alison Mountz, Mark Salter, Chris Rumford. “Interventions on Rethinking ‘the Border’ in Border Studies.” Political Geography 30, no. 2 (February 1, 2011): 61–69. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2011.01.002.
11. Little, Gavin. “Connecting Environmental Humanities: Developing Interdisciplinary Collaborative Method.” Humanities 6, no. 91 (2017): 1–22.
12. Loveless, Natalie. How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
13. Marlin-Bennett, Renée. “Art-Power and Border Art.” Arts & International Affairs, October 27, 2019. https://theartsjournal.net/2019/10/27/marlin-bennett-2/.
14. McKenzie-Jones, Paul, Sheila McManus, and Julie Young, eds. Challenging Borders: Contingencies and Consequences. Athabasca, AB: AU Press, 2024.
15. Mountz, Alison, Anne Bonds, Becky Mansfield, Jenna Loyd, Jennifer Hyndman, Margaret Walton-Robers, Ranu Basu, et al. “For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University.” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 14, no. 4 (2015): 1235–59. https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1058.
16. Paasi, Anssi. Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness: The Changing Geographies of the Finnish-Russian Border. Chichester: John Wiley, 1996.
17. Rancière, Jacques. “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Aesthetics.” In Communities of Sense: Rethinking Politics and Aesthetics, edited by Beth Hinderliter, Vered Maimon, Jaleh Mansoor, and Seth McCormick, 31–50. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
18. Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. New York: Continuum, 2010.
19. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies. London: Zed Books, 2012.
20. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. “On Tricky Ground: Researching the Native in the Age of Uncertainty.” In The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research, edited by N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln, 85–107. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2005.
21. Strathern, Marilyn. “Experiments in Interdisciplinarity.” Social Anthropology 13, no. 1 (2005): 75–90.
22. Strathern, Marilyn. “Social Property: An Interdisciplinary Experiment.” PoLAR 27, no. 1 (May 2004): 23–50.
23. “To Some, Trump’s ‘Bad Hombres’ Is Much More Than a Botched Spanish Word.” PBS NewsHour, October 20, 2016. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trumps-bad-hombres-draws-jeers-spanish-lessons.
24. Urrea, Luis Alberto, and Krista Tippett. “What Borders Are Really about and What We Do with Them.” OnBeing.org, July 12, 2018. https://onbeing.org/programs/luis-alberto-urrea-borders-are-liminal-spaces/.
25. Vimalassery, Manu. “Fugitive Decolonization.” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016). https://muse.jhu.edu/article/633284.