A critical assessment from the perspective of political and legal theory of how shifting borders impact on migration, mobility and the protection of displaced persons

Like articles representing the positions of proponents of the measure, those representing opponents construct the nation as potentially in danger as a result of undocumented immigration. How do we learn to recognize the damning effects of good rhetorical intentions? And where will we find arguments which escape this trap that permeates the liberal social policy world? Shifting Borders uses an evaluation of the debate over California Proposition 187 to demonstrate how this quandary is best understood by close interrogation of mainstream reports and debates and by bringing to the fore voices that are often left out of mediated discussions. It is these voices outside the mainstream, so called outlaw discourses, that hold the best possibilities for real social change. To illustrate their claim, the authors present dominant and outlaw discourses around Proposition 187, from television reports, internet chat sites, and religious discourse to coverage of the Los Angeles Times. Their critique ably demonstrates how difficult it is to maintain a position outside the mainstream, but also how important it is for the press, citizens, and scholars to actively search out such voices. The find

Why are some territorial partitions accepted as the appropriate borders of a nation's homeland, whereas in other places conflict continues despite or even because of division of territory? In Homelands, Nadav G. Shelef develops a theory of what homelands are that acknowledges both their importance in domestic and international politics and their change over time. These changes, he argues, driven by domestic political competition and help explain the variation in whether partitions resolve conflict. Homelands also provides systematic, comparable data about the homeland status of lost territory over time that allow it to bridge the persistent gap between constructivist theories of nationalism and positivist empirical analyses of international relations.

Shifting Borders brings together new research on visual culture by scholars located across North America. This compilation of essays explores the notion of borders in a range of domains including art history, architecture, art theory, video games, performance art, artistic creation, and photography. The authors seek to address contemporary concerns affecting larger society through the lens of visual culture. The world is becoming increasingly globalized, as nations and multilateral organizations advocate freer international trade, the sharing of technological and political ideas, and multiculturalism. Yet, despite a rhetorical attachment to the message of lower national barriers, there has been a concomitant rise in veiled borders. These barriers promise to maintain cultural exclusion and economic hegemony. The essays in this volume share a desire to re-examine inherited knowledge systems, to redefine the terms of debate, and create spaces that more accurately reflect a just reality. While this is not the unique purview of Postmodern ethics, what is novel here is the willingness of the authors of these essays, and the artists they investigate, to identify with, dwell in, and expand upon the margins of their particular subject matter. The essays presented in Shifting Borders have the force to open up new forms and understandings of cultural difference and initiate new perspectives in and beyond their respective domains.

In the last few decades, creolisation has become a recurrent feature in the works of scholars from many disciplines, serving as a useful metaphor for understanding contemporary societies in a “world of globalisation”. More than a metaphor, creolisation can be conceived as a powerful analytical and theoretical tool in order to grasp the current dynamics of intercultural encounter and conflict, allowing a close look at the production of new subjectivities and identities. In accordance with this viewpoint, in this book, creolisation processes have been investigated under the interdisciplinary gaze of a wide European research group, which has tried to detect creole patterns in the fields of literature, arts, politics, and the labour market, as well as in the daily practices of people who enact peculiar strategies in order to posit themselves in highly exclusive contexts. By focusing on the multiplicity of shifting borders that today articulate the sense of daily life along multiple contiguous universes, this collective work addresses problems of citizenship, intercultural politics, and difficult cohabitations, starting from the analysis of their narratives and discursive representations. This volume thus has much to say about moving and mixing in our times, and shows in more ways how thinking about creolist and related notions can be very fruitful.

As performative and political acts, translation, intervention, and participation are movements that take place across, along, and between borders. Such movements traverse geographic boundaries, affect social distinctions, and challenge conceptual categorizations - while shifting and transforming lines of separation themselves. This book brings together choreographers, movement practitioners, and theorists from various fields and disciplines to reflect upon such dynamics of difference. From their individual cultural backgrounds, they ask how these movements affect related fields such as corporeality, perception, (self-)representation, and expression.

Italy's northern border follows the watershed that separates the drainage basins of Northern and Southern Europe. Running mostly at high altitudes, it crosses snowfields and perennial glaciers--all of which are now melting as a result of anthropogenic climate change. As the watershed shifts so does the border, contradicting its representations on official maps. Italy, Austria, and Switzerland have consequently introduced the novel legal concept of a "moving border," one that acknowledges the volatility of geographical features once thought to be stable. A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change builds upon the Italian Limes project by Studio Folder, which was devised in 2014 to survey the fluctuations of the boundary line across the Alps in real time. The book charts the effects of climate change on geopolitical understandings of border and the cartographic methods used to represent them. Locating the Italian condition alongside a longer political history of boundary making, the book brings together critical essays, visualizations, and unpublished documents from state archives. By examining the nexus of nationalism and cartography, A Moving Border details how borders are both material and imagined, and the ways global warming challenges Western conceptions of territory. Even more, it provides a blueprint for spatial intervention in a world where ecological processes are bound to dominate geopolitical affairs. A Moving Border features a foreword by Bruno Latour and texts by Stuart Elden, Mia Fuller, Francesca Hughes, and Wu Ming 1, and is co-published with ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe.