What Comes to Matter as Border: On Parisian Borderness Dynamics

Even though it is now established within the field of border studies that bordering experiences vary depending on who you are, a less investigated problem has to do with how differentially border-ed/ing realities and knowledges relate, emerge, and matter. Therefore, this paper unpacks, in dialog with feminist sciences studies, what Sarah Green calls “borderness dynamics” as a cosmos-politics, a complicating ecology of situated knowledges on and of border(ing)s. The argument builds on an ethnographic investigation of the processes through which initially “borderless” White European volunteers from pro-refugee initiatives in Paris come to sense and know borders in the city as they encounter other border-ed/ing versions of Paris through their practices.

The paper demonstrates how these shifts in volunteers’ border sensibilities and knowledges matter ethically and ontologically. The shifts in their (not)knowing/sensing, animated by processes of complication, multiplication, and texturization, contribute to re-shaping what comes to matter as border, as well as to de-re-territorializing the city and its inhabitants as a borderland and as borderlanders. Attending to borderness dynamics enables one to map encounter-induced positionality changes that contribute to “rescaping” at once borders, borderlands, and borderlanders.