Memory and Everyday Borderwork: Understanding Border Temporalities

Abstract

The field of border studies has traditionally paid little attention to questions of temporality, leading to criticisms over its presentism and lack of historical reflexivity. A number of recent publications have brought temporal questions more centrally into border research, examining the changing and historically contingent nature of borders. This article intervenes in this body of scholarship, using memory as a means of studying the past and present of borders. Bringing border studies scholarship into a more systematic conversation with memory studies, the article shows how memories of the past play an important part in the symbolic construction of borders, and that processes of remembering are central to how citizens produce borders in everyday life. The focus on memory and everyday borderwork allows to go beyond linear and uniform conceptions of time that have shaped the writing on border temporality. It draws attention to how time is ordered and interpreted in non-linear and multiple ways and how these temporal orderings confirm, extend or question the meanings of borders. The usefulness of studying memory in everyday borderwork is exemplified through an analysis of memory narratives in the Russian-Estonian borderland, based on extensive fieldwork and the analysis of 58 narrative life-story interviews.

Seeing Like a Complex Border: On the Methodology of Complexity-Oriented Border Research

“…Furthermore, the approaches outlined above indicate that these connections cannot be conceived of without a temporal dimension. While the temporality of the border beyond its linear historicity has long been neglected (also Donnan et al 2017;Pfoser 2022), a complexity perspective sharpens the view not only for the temporality of border processing itself, but also for the multiplicity of temporalities; Little (2015, 431) speaks of "complex temporality" that must be synchronized at borders or leads to heterogeneous time structures. In this context, borders sometimes produce their own temporal horizons (of waiting, e.g.…”

Imagined borderlands: Terrain, technology and trade in the making and managing of the China‐Myanmar border

“…Reconstructing their history, then, is inextricably bound to an ethnographic attention to their present functions, and to how they are performed and represented in everyday practices (Loong et al ., 2019). Megoran's work is thus one of few to account for the temporal dimensions of national borders—a topic that has been largely neglected in the field of border studies (Pfoser, 2020). Importantly, Megoran's approach does not imply linearity in the study of a particular national border, rather, it allows for returns and repetitions.…”

“…In recent decades, to be sure, the growing field of border studies has sought to account for the changing and historically contingent nature of national borders, most notably by addressing them as social processes of ‘bordering’ (cf. Paasi, 1999; van Houtum & Naerssen, 2002; Newman, 2001; Pfoser, 2020). In close conversation with such approaches, geographer Nick Megoran (2012; 2017) developed a ‘biographical’ approach to international boundaries, shedding light on how boundaries materialize , rematerialize and dematerialize —that is, how they appear, change, reappear and become more or less significant over time.…”

Russian imperialism, racist differentiation and refugees at the Polish borders: Media as ‘borderscapers’

“…This is so because the PiS government's framing of the crisis as an artificially generated part of a ‘hybrid operation’ against the EU, executed by the Belarusian regime but masterminded by the Kremlin, has fallen on fertile ground (Fajfer, 2021). 2 Indeed, the ‘truth claims’ propagated by the PiS government about a ‘hybrid operation’ dovetail with the Polish collective memory of Russian imperialism and the perception of Russia as an existential threat (see Pfoser, 2022).…”