TY - JOUR
T1 - The Will to Border
T2 - Borderwork and Identifications among Cross-border Commuters
AU - Andersen, Dorte Jagetic
AU - Winkler, Ingo
PY - 2024
Y1 - 2024
N2 - This article provides a deeper understanding of how territorial borders matter for identifications. In an ethnographical investigation, which identifies four othering practices, we illustrate how cross-border commuters construct and negotiate identity by establishing, reinforcing, changing, and/or abolishing self-other distinctions. In these practices, territorial borders become subject to mundane borderwork in everyday negotiation, erasing and building of multiple subject-positions. Borders thus interpret into possibilities for multiple ways of separating, connecting, distinguishing, integrating, being with and being apart, informed by elements of national as well as other forms of identification, even absent ones. Hence, borderwork plays a central role in the commuters’ identifications, and territorial borders come to matter, being active in separating and connecting spaces of interaction, at the same time as they constitute objects the commuters work with, using them to communicate and negotiate identity, relating actors and practices anew.
AB - This article provides a deeper understanding of how territorial borders matter for identifications. In an ethnographical investigation, which identifies four othering practices, we illustrate how cross-border commuters construct and negotiate identity by establishing, reinforcing, changing, and/or abolishing self-other distinctions. In these practices, territorial borders become subject to mundane borderwork in everyday negotiation, erasing and building of multiple subject-positions. Borders thus interpret into possibilities for multiple ways of separating, connecting, distinguishing, integrating, being with and being apart, informed by elements of national as well as other forms of identification, even absent ones. Hence, borderwork plays a central role in the commuters’ identifications, and territorial borders come to matter, being active in separating and connecting spaces of interaction, at the same time as they constitute objects the commuters work with, using them to communicate and negotiate identity, relating actors and practices anew.
KW - Cross-border commuting
KW - borderwork
KW - ethnography
KW - identification
KW - othering practices
U2 - 10.1080/08865655.2023.2200804
DO - 10.1080/08865655.2023.2200804
M3 - Journal article
SN - 0886-5655
VL - 39
SP - 697
EP - 713
JO - Journal of Borderlands Studies
JF - Journal of Borderlands Studies
IS - 4
ER -