Borders Talk: Dots, Dashes & the Stories They Tell
Hosted by Border Studies academics Zalfa Feghali and Gillian Roberts, this podcast explores border depictions and encounters in our contemporary world. Zalfa, Gillian, and their guests discuss borders, their cultural manifestations, and their implications. In their aim to make the academic field of border studies accessible to non-specialist audiences, they ask questions like: “What do borders look like?”, “How are borders used and mobilised in our everyday lives?”, and “What different borders can be known?” To answer these questions, they consider current events, personal stories, and specialist academic texts, as well as exploring and reflecting on “classic” texts of Border Studies.
Episodes
This episode is the first time we’ve asked each other “how are you?” Yes, we’ve checked.
Here are two “rankings” for passports: the Henley Passport Index, which describes itself as “the only one of its kind based on exclusive data from the International Air Transport Authority (IATA)” and the Global Passport Power Rank, which at the time of recording, ranked as “equal” passports issued by Canada, the UK, and Cyprus...
Special thanks to our guest speakers, whose border stories we gratefully share with their consent: Jenneba Sie-Jallok, Loraine Masiya Mponela, Ambreen Hai, and Gaura Narayan.
Gillian manages to get the name of her hometown wrong in this episode: it's Victoria, not Vancouver (which is not on Vancouver Island!).
We recorded this episode at the brilliant “Hostile Environments and Hospitable Praxes” conference, org...
The Urban Dictionary’s definition of “tsunamied” is very much not what Zalfa intended. In fact, she had to look it up on reading this entry in the show notes, and wishes she had turned on safe search.
For more on vulnerability, check out Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2004), Martha Fineman’s “The Vulnerable Subject: Anchoring Equality in the Human Condition” (2008), Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011), Susan So...
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch is available for purchase here, at your local independent bookstore, or check out your local library. It won the Booker Prize in 2023. (Read an article by Gillian about the Booker Prize.)
Booker Prize chair Esi Edugyan described it as "claustrophobic"; Lynch called it "an attempt at radical empathy."
We mentioned Métis author Cherie Dimaline's n...
Content Note: This episode makes reference to the use of racist language/slurs.
This is what a walrus sounds like (righteousness unconfirmed).
“Columbus was a Dick” is a song by Princess Goes.
Here’s the McMaster University Indigenous Studies programme.
See the Decolonial Atlas’s map of the Six Nations Reserve.
Read more about Idle No More.
Emma uses Gerald Vize...
David mentioned "pretendians," a term used to refer to individuals who falsely claim Indigenous heritage.
David mentioned work by Eric Gansworth (Onondaga). Read more about Gansworth’s work here.
Find a map of Anishinaabe territory here.
Find a map of Mohawk territory here.
The Jay Treaty (1794), a treaty between the United States and Great Britain (and now Canada) sign...
Liv is the translator of The Fig Tree by Goran Vojnović, which you can order directly from the publisher Istros Books, or via our friendly local Five Leaves Bookshop. She mentions Vojnović’s (untranslated into English) first novel, Čefuli Raus.
Liv wanted to share the following excerpt from The Fig Tree, connected to our conversation:
"You're on the other side of the border, you two, were her...
Listeners who did not share Gillian’s TV viewing habits in the 1980s and ‘90s can find the Pace salsa ad here.
We make reference to not only Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: the New Mestiza but also Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro, edited by AnaLouise Keating.
For more on Anzaldúa’s “doodles,” see Suzanne Bost’s “Messy Archives and Materials that Matter: Making Knowledge with the Glor...
Gillian saw Arrival at Broadway in Nottingham. Support your local independent cinema!
Arrival was adapted from Ted Chiang’s novella, “Story of Your Life," which appeared in his 2002 collection Stories of Your Life and Others (Tor Books). Support your local library or independent bookseller!
For more on runaway film production, see Camille Johnson-Yale’s ”’So-Called Runaway Film Production’: Countering Hollywood&...
We Googled “Why are dates important in History,” but fear the results may not have been peer-reviewed.
For peer-reviewed sources on other matters:
- Information about the publication of The Routledge Companion to Gender and Borderlands can be found here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Gender-and-Borderlands/Feghali-Toner/p/book/9780367439590
- For more on Belfast, see David Coyles, Brandon Hambe...
Gillian would like to state for the record that Zalfa is also the real deal.
In other matters:
What is the plural of “impetus”?
The answer, improbably, is impetuses!
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780199661350.001.0001/acref-9780199661350-e-2776 (We note that this tracks, given one acceptable plural for “ignoramus” is “ignoramuses” – a word we use Very Often Indeed these days)
Hosted by Border Studies academics Zalfa Feghali and Gillian Roberts, this podcast will explore border depictions and encounters in our contemporary world.
Zalfa, Gillian, and their guests will discuss borders, their cultural manifestations, and their implications. In their aim to make the academic field of border studies accessible to non-specialist audiences, they will ask questions like: “What do borde...
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