Border Politics

In the current historical moment borders have taken on heightened material and symbolic significance, shaping identities and the social and political landscape. “Borders”—defined broadly to include territorial dividing lines as well as sociocultural boundaries—have become increasingly salient sites of struggle over social belonging and cultural and material resources. How do contemporary activists navigate and challenge these borders? What meanings do they ascribe to different social, cultural and political boundaries, and how do these meanings shape the strategies in which they engage? Moreover, how do these social movements confront internal borders based on the differences that emerge within social change initiatives?Border Politics, edited by Nancy A. Naples and Jennifer Bickham Mendez, explores these important questions through eleven carefully selected case studies situated in geographic contexts around the globe. By conceptualizing struggles over identity, social belonging and exclusion as extensions of border politics, the authors capture the complex ways in which geographic, cultural, and symbolic dividing lines are blurred and transcended, but also fortified and redrawn. This volume notably places right-wing and social justice initiatives in the same analytical frame to identify patterns that span the political spectrum. Border Politics offers a lens through which to understand borders as sites of diverse struggles, as well as the strategies and practices used by diverse social movements in today’s globally interconnected world. Contributors: Phillip Ayoub, Renata Blumberg, Yvonne Braun, Moon Charania, Michael Dreiling, Jennifer Johnson, Jesse Klein, Andrej Kurnik, Sarah Maddison, Duncan McDuie-Ra, Jennifer Bickham Mendez, Nancy A. Naples, David Paternotte, Maple Razsa, Raphi Rechitsky, Kyle Rogers, Deana Rohlinger, Cristina Sanidad, Meera Sehgal, Tara Stamm, Michelle Téllez

Border Politics is a groundbreaking book on how borders and boundariesboth territorial and symbolicshape the mobilization of social movements at the same time that they are instrumental in the very often conflicting identity construction processes of social movements participants. Nancy A. Naples and Jennifer Bickham Mendez have arranged a significant, comprehensive, and timely collection of essays., The edited collection offers an important contribution to the sociology of bordering. Rather than focusing on struggles over the militarization of geographical borderlands as outlined by scholars like Reece Jones, the contribution of the book lies in its original approach to the analysis of social movements for which borders and boundaries are sites of struggle. More precisely, the chapters depict how these social movements maintain, contest, produce, and dissolve borders and boundaries., This edited volume highlights many contemporary geopolitical issues in the social sciences. The contributors take a global perspective, examining problems from Asia, North America, Australia, Europe, and Africa.

Nancy A. Naples is Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Sociology at the University of Connecticut. She is the author of many books, including Feminism and Method: Ethnography, Discourse Analysis, and Activist Research, and Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work, and the War on Poverty. Jennifer Bickham Mendez is Associate Professor of Sociology at The College of William & Mary. She is author of From the Revolution to the Maquiladoras: Gender, Labor and Globalization in Nicaragua (2005). Her scholarship has appeared in such journals as Gender and Society, Mobilization, Social Problems and Ethnic and Racial Studies.