Keynote Speakers

Victor Konrad, Adjunct Research Professor (Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University, Canada), Director (NorthWing Consulting)

Border Heritage: Ideological Legacies of Division Encounter an Emerging World of Mobility and Diversity

Ideologies of nationalism and fundamentalism accrue in part as border heritage from territorial inheritance, national identity, hardened gender roles, naturalized hierarchies, and belief in racial superiority, among other forces that form tradition and sustain power structures. Throughout human history, people have created and shaped borders, and, fashioned approaches and strategies to cross the boundaries established. Human imperatives to first draw lines and limits for territory, and then to move across and beyond the limits imposed, characterize human social, political, and cultural life. The process of delimiting space and then shifting it is not ephemeral; it leaves a legacy, a heritage of borders. This heritage of borders is not necessarily permanent or durable because border heritage is reinterpreted, revised, and re-established as regimes that border heritage. On the one hand, people create border heritage, that is, a heritage of borders, and on the other hand, humans contribute to the bordering and selectivity of heritage. Border heritage is shared and divided past that is acutely created, contested, and experienced. This presentation unfolds the geopolitics of the dilemma of exclusion and inclusion as border heritage encounters globalization and manifests in border walls. It traces how border memory in time changes into border memorialization as place, how border heritage tourism ideologizes colonial pasts, and how border heritage cultures perpetuate a continuing politics of legacy. Over all, the presentation highlights the centrality of understanding border heritage to mediate polarized ideologies.

Kathryn Cassidy, Professor, School of Geography and Natural Sciences, Northumbria University, New Castle, England

Alter-Geopolitical Encounters: Creative Practice, Everyday Abolition, and the Possibilities of Unbordering

Since February 2022, communities across Europe have built spaces where displaced people from Ukraine and their host communities encounter one another across difference. Drawing on my forthcoming book Alter-geopolitical Lives (Manchester University Press, with Maria Dubrova), which arises from a 36-month, ESRC-funded project (2022–2025) based on interviews, policy and media analysis in the UK, Poland and Romania, I analyse the role of creative practices in these spaces. Through Sara Koopman’s concept of alter-geopolitics, I frame connection across difference as a path to secure lives with dignity and justice, positioning these practices as incipient acts of unbordering where new imaginaries of security and belonging counter divisive ideologies. However, critiques of the hierarchies of deservingness, which treat responses to Ukraine as exceptional rather than instructive, risk foreclosing these possibilities. Following Lamble’s work on everyday abolition, this keynote asks what becomes possible if we hold structural critique and creative practice together, refusing to let unevenness foreclose the potential for unbordering to extend to all displaced people.