Tracing Cultural Border Studies: Bordertextures as a Conceptual Framework

The paper is part of the panel “Celebrating Cultural Border Studies: From Borderlands to Bordertextures” and positions the bordertextures approach within the intellectual traditions of Cultural Border Studies. Taking the 50th anniversary of Border Studies as its point of departure, it traces the emergence and development of border research from a Cultural Studies perspective and highlights its central theoretical reference points. It argues that Cultural Border Studies have been significantly shaped by impulses from various interdisciplinary fields and related shifts in border theory, contributing to a reconceptualization of borders not as territorial lines but as cultural, relational, and dynamic phenomena. Against this background, bordertextures is introduced as a conceptual framework that consolidates key assumptions of these traditions. In a first step, the approach is situated within major strands, methodological observation positions, and conceptual trends in Border Studies, illustrating the shift from processual and network-oriented models toward complexity-oriented perspectives that foreground emergence, contingency, and the self-dynamic character of bordering processes (border complexities). In a second step, bordertextures is developed as an analytical instrument that understands borders as meshworks of social, symbolic, material, and affective entanglements, enabling the analysis of cultural phenomena as emergent processes of (de)bordering.