Location
Trinity College Dublin
Call for Papers, deadline – 31 March 2025
Conference dates – 11-12 July 2025
How have people constructed imaginary frontiers, boundaries or borders demarcating different geographical areas in the absence of formal political or administrative borders? Can cultural, social, and ethnic frontiers emerge on a geographical level within in the same political or administrative territory? Have there been, or are there examples of boundaries being constructed from below rather than by states? Have there been examples of cultural, social, political, ethnic and/or religious groups constructing territorial boundaries between themselves and others?
The term ‘frontier’ is probably most associated with Frederick Jackson Turner’s landmark 1898 paper on the role of the western frontier in shaping modern American identity in the United States. Lars Rodseth and Bradley J. Parker (2005) therefore suggest that most American historians therefore think of the frontier as an area dividing a core area from the wilderness in which there is no human inhabitants. However, Rodseth and Parker argue that most frontiers are zones of transition between ‘two core areas’, each one containing a population centre and usually a centre of political power. Numerous scholars have studied such frontier zones relating to borders between sovereign states. Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson (1999) suggest that states and local communities alike use symbols in borderlands to define their identity in relation to the other. Peter Sahlins (1989), in studying the Cerdanya region on the Spanish-French border during the early modern period persuasively argues that French and Spanish national identity emerged in this region in opposition to the other, rather than being imposed by the centre. A 2017 collection edited by Johan Schimanski and Stephen F. Wolfe explored how the concepts of borders could be projected onto cultural texts and how the social meaning of border spaces is negotiated among individuals and groups through literary creations, visual and verbal images and metaphors. Much of the excellent scholarship on frontiers and identity to date focuses on the immediate hinterland of borders between states.
However, there is much work to be done on emerging frontiers and boundaries outside the emphasis on international borders. The geographer and sociologist Rob Shields (1991) has shown how of images of the Canadian ‘True North, strong and free’ has been used by residents of southern cities in Canada to construct a Canadian national identity and uses nineteenth-century literature and the frequency of certain phrases in the British twentieth-century ‘quality daily’ newspapers to track an imaginary north-south divide in England. Sara Ahmed’s Cultural politics of emotion (2004) shows how right-wing and conservative rhetoric, such as of the British Arian nation, during David Camron’s premiership produced affect aliens, namely subjects not belonging to the specific community. Is political rhetoric alone sufficient to track a frontier mentality and a territorial identity in the absence of a political border? Are there examples of political movements in places like India and Pakistan, Czechoslovakia or the Netherlands and Belgium that emphasised an identity based on territory and that attempted to create a frontier before such countries were partitioned?
Questions to be addressed include but are not limited to:
- How has historical narrative and/or historical myth been used to demarcate territories within single political units and create a distinctive territorial identity?
- How useful are the cultural, linguistic, spatial and/or affective turns in establishing, tracing and analysing the development of frontiers?
- Can political rhetoric alone demonstrate evidence of a frontier or is more evidence needed to demonstrate a frontier consciousness?
- What role can affect theory and/or the history of emotions play in tracing evidence of territorial frontiers in the absence of formal political borders?
- Does territorial identity emerge in opposition to the ‘other’, and if so does it emerge on the frontier and spread to the centre or does the centre impose this identity on the frontier?
- Are frontiers and territorial cultural boundaries imaginary and if so, how can we examine the imagination of historical actors?
Proposals for individual twenty-minute papers or for panels of no more than four twenty-minute papers are invited from disciplines including, but not limited to, geography, history, anthropology, sociology, political science, law and literature. To maximise the audience, the conference will be delivered in hybrid format. Participants will have the option to publish their paper as a podcast episode. For networking reasons, participants are encouraged to present their paper in person. However, remote delivery of papers will be facilitated for those unable to travel to Dublin for financial or logistical reasons.
Abstracts of no more than 300 words, a biography of no more than 100 words, and a short bibliography are to be submitted to pduffy1@tcd.ie no later than 31 March 2025. Applicants will be notified by 30 April 2025. Any enquiries should be made to Patrick Duffy at pduffy1@tcd.ie.
Bluesky: @frontiers2025.bsky.social
About the organiser:
Patrick Duffy is a fourth year PhD candidate at the Department of History at Trinity College, Dublin, funded by a Research Ireland Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship. His research investigates Protestant opposition in south Ulster to Daniel O’Connell’s Irish nationalist political movements from the 1820s to the 1840s and the role of this opposition in forming cultural, social and religious frontier between the north and south of Ireland.