A citizen-science initiative on borders, memory, and the emotional topographies of belonging.
Initiated by Machteld Venken and Johanna Jaschik, Talking Borders emerged from the 2nd World Conference of the Association for Borderlands Studies (Vienna, 2018) as a multilingual, citizen-science project that engages with the affective and narrative dimensions of European borderlands. At its core, the project brings together scholars, activists, and citizens to reflect on how borders—both visible and invisible, historical and contemporary—structure lived experience, mediate belonging, and shape social imaginaries.
Through a series of filmed interviews conducted in multiple languages, Talking Borders captures the lifeworlds of border scholars and residents whose memories, research, or migration biographies are entangled with Europe’s shifting border regimes. These voices not only recount personal experiences but also reveal how borders operate as emotional and symbolic terrains—spaces where mobility, exclusion, and identity are constantly negotiated. The open-access collection, hosted on Zenodo, contributes to an emerging form of transnational historiography that values listening as much as analysis, and curation as much as critique. Talking Borders invites us to rethink Europe from its margins rather than its centers, and to trace the enduring role of borders in shaping collective memory, institutional framings, and the cultural politics of inclusion and exclusion.
Talking Borders. From Local Expertise to Global Exchange. Association of Borderland Studies 2nd World Conference
