Globalization and transnationalism have reshaped our communities and their borderlines. Communities exceed fixed boundaries, existing instead in the liminal spaces where narratives intersect, clash, or cooperate. These liminal spaces—physical and virtual, local and global—provide opportunities for diversifying discussions on diaspora, cultural hybridity, and ethnic identity. Ethnic women writers make significant contributions to this dialogue regarding the reconfiguration of people and their perimeters. A multigenre and multicultural text, Community Boundaries and Border Crossings explores the novels, short stories, essays, autobiographies, testimonios, plays, poems, and hybrid poetics of established and emerging ethnic women writers. This collection of critical essays highlights the new zones of cultural contact and exchange that are defining the twenty-first century. Each chapter reflects an awareness of cultural changes and challenges, engaging readers in a richly productive conversation concerning the interconnectedness of border crossings and community boundaries.

At conferences and in the literature on community interpreting there is one burning issue that reappears constantly: the interpreter’s role. What are the norms by which the facilitators of communication shape their role? Is there indeed only one role for the community interpreter or are there several? Is community interpreting aimed at facilitating communication, empowering individuals by giving them a voice or, in wider terms, at redressing the power balance in society? In this volume scholars and practitioners from different countries address these questions, offering a representative sample of ongoing research into community interpreting in the Western world, of interest to all who have a stake in this form of interpreting. The opening chapter establishes the wider contextual and theoretical framework for the debate. It is followed by a section dealing with codes and standards and then moves on to explore the interpreter’s role in various different settings: courts and police, healthcare, schools, occupational settings and social services.

How is it that walls, borders, boundaries—and their material and symbolic architectures of division and exclusion—engender their very opposite? This edited volume explores the crossings, permeations, and constructions of cultural and political borders between peoples and territories, examining how walls, borders, and boundaries signify both interdependence and contact within sites of conflict and separation. Topics addressed range from the geopolitics of Europe’s historical and contemporary city walls to conceptual reflections on the intersection of human rights and separating walls, the memory politics generated in historically disputed border areas, theatrical explorations of border crossings, and the mapping of boundaries within migrant communities.

Global social work: crossing borders, blurring boundaries is a collection of ideas, debates and reflections on key issues concerning social work as a global profession, such as its theory, its curricula, its practice, its professional identity; its concern with human rights and social activism, and its future directions. Apart from emphasising the complexities of working and talking about social work across borders and cultures, the volume focuses on the curricula of social work programs from as many regions as possible to showcase what is being taught in various cultural, sociopolitical and regional contexts. Exploring the similarities and differences in social work education across many countries of the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Pacific, the book provides a reference point for moving the current social work discourse towards understanding the local and global context in its broader significance.

Through the overarching interconnected themes of community boundaries and border crossings, this collection explores issues of diaspora, trans-nationality, cultural hybridity, home, and identity that are central to ethnic women writers.

When the Berlin Wall fell, Germany united in a wave of euphoria and solidarity. Also caught in the current were Vietnamese border crossers who had left their homeland after its reunification in 1975. Unwilling to live under socialism, one group resettled in West Berlin as refugees. In the name of socialist solidarity, a second group arrived in East Berlin as contract workers. The Border Within paints a vivid portrait of these disparate Vietnamese migrants' encounters with each other in the post-socialist city of Berlin. Journalists, scholars, and Vietnamese border crossers themselves consider these groups that left their homes under vastly different conditions to be one people, linked by an unquestionable ethnic nationhood. Phi Hong Su's rigorous ethnography unpacks this intuition. In absorbing prose, Su reveals how these Cold War compatriots enact palpable social boundaries in everyday life. This book uncovers how 20th-century state formation and international migration--together, border crossings--generate enduring migrant classifications. In doing so, border crossings fracture shared ethnic, national, and religious identities in enduring ways.

This book provides an interdisciplinary approach to power, inclusion/exclusion and hierarchy in a Turkish border town, with a focus on the impact of nation-state border on social stratification and change. Through the lens of ethnographic research and oral history, the book explores social mobility among various strata within the context of transition from Ottoman rule to the Republican regime, in order to reveal culturally informed strategies of border dwellers in coming to grips with new border contexts. It is suggested that the border perspective will move the social analysis beyond "methodological territorialism" and provide a theoretical framework that explores social change at the intersection of local, national and transnational processes. This book will appeal to readers interested in borders and circulations, social structure and power relations in border regions, as well as transnational shadow networks in the Turkish/Middle Eastern context. The book is a valuable resource for students and scholars of border anthropology, political and economic geography, studies of globalization and transnationalism, anthropology of illegality and Turkish and Middle Eastern studies. It will be a useful grounding for humanitarian professionals who are learning about the social and economic landscape of border towns.