Call for contributions

Borderscapes - The linguistic de/construction of borders as an everyday practice

This Special Issue is part of a wider project that aims to generate new understandings of borders as everyday practices that we engage with, as internalised conceptualisations of spaces of belonging (and of exclusion), and as mechanisms that crystallise othering processes. The different parts of the project draw on the border as both a theoretical approach and a methodology.
We invite multidisciplinary contributions drawing from scholarship engaging with bordering practices that naturalise borders as an inherent quality of all that surrounds us. This phenomenon also affects our perception of time, and timelines assume a spatio-visual dimension in that they are drawn on the basis of bounded events and happenings. Spatial (territorial) and temporal (historical) legacies framed within a border perspective consolidate discourses of separation and dissimilarity. At a time when public debate is dominated by institutional discourses of exclusion affecting understandings of citizenship, national belonging and mobility, and when present conflicts are often a legacy of border-making practices rooted in ideologically weak persuasions, it is fundamental to adopt a critical perspective towards, and denaturalise, borders. The project aims to expose the profoundly social and cultural nature of bordering practices, and uncover processes consolidating views about the fixity of borders, disregarding the lived experience of the border and the inherent hybridity of cultural and social border contexts. Bordering ideologies are closely interconnected with views of identity as a given and permanent component of the self. Views of identity as fluid and multiple, however, pose that it is contingent on the specific actions through which it is performed, therefore facilitating change. Borders can thus be deployed as resources facilitating interactions; they can prompt social change and counter perceptions, and self-perceptions, of peripherality and marginalisation.

Perspectives will include, but are not limited to:

- linguistic constructions of the border
- constructions of the border via non-verbal artefacts
- bordering practices and the body
- minoritized groups and bordering practices
- virtual borders
- the border as ideology
- the border as methodology
- border thinking (Mignolo, 2011)

Articles should be 6,000-7,000 words (including references). Prospective contributors are invited to send the following information to [email protected] and [email protected] by 16 February 2024: (a) Authors’ full names, (b) a professional bio of up to 100 words, (c) professional affiliation, (d) the title of your manuscript, and (e) an abstract of your manuscript (300 words max.).

Please use ‘Borderscapes – proposal for Special Issue’ as the title of your email.

The timeline is as follows:
1) Deadline for submission of abstracts: 16 February 2024
2) Notification of acceptance/rejection of abstracts: 28 February 2024
3) Deadline for full articles: 30 September 2024
4) Ongoing blinded, peer-reviews: from 1 October 2024 to 16 December 2024
5) Final version of articles: due 1 February 2025
6) Tentative publication of SI: September 2025
All papers will be double-blind peer reviewed. Submitted papers should be original and not under consideration or published elsewhere.

Linguistic Field(s): Sociolinguistics