Border and Boundary-Making In Turbulent Times: Narratives, Practices and Materialities

Ecological crises, geopolitical tensions, technological transformations, and economic upheaval are increasingly intertwined in what has been described as a polycrisis, challenging established understandings of social order. While globalization once promised openness and interdependence, recent developments reveal a resurgence of borders across multiple domains of social life: territorial, cultural, social, digital, ecological, and political. Borders and boundary-making have thus become privileged sites where these crises intersect, making them particularly relevant for sociological inquiry.

In this context, questions of belonging, identity, and collective futures increasingly emerge through processes of border- and boundary-making. Borders are not only material and institutional realities but are also socially produced through communication, narratives, imaginaries, representations, and everyday practices. This thematic session revisits borders as a fundamental sociological category, moving beyond state borders to examine them as social, cultural, communicative, and imaginative processes through which societies negotiate uncertainty and transformation.

Drawing on sociological approaches to border and boundary studies (e.g. Simmel [1903] 1997; Barth 1969; Zerubavel 1991; Lamont & Molnár 2002; Alexander 2006; Wimmer 2013), the session invites theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions that explore how borders are materialized, narrated, experienced, practiced, and contested. Particular attention is given to communication, collective memory, social imaginaries, materiality, and infrastructures in shaping belonging, exclusion, mobility, and resistance.

We welcome contributions addressing topics such as borders and social imaginaries; crisis narratives; memory and heritage; digital and algorithmic borders; infrastructure and mobility; minority regions and border identities; anticipation and future imaginaries; and practices of bordering and debordering.