THINKING FROM THE BORDER – Methodological and Epistemological Experimentations between the Arts and the Human Sciences

From where do we speak?
This publication gathers the outcomes of a research project bringing together sociologists, art historians and artists to investigate the frontier as both a subject and an epistemic framework. This collection of essays questions the processes of globalization in terms of how they have transformed the theoretical tools through which ideas circulate and migrate, and how we invent the Other, while creating several contemporaneous worlds.

The concept of the border occupies a central place in social and political arenas today. As the seven authors of this collection of original essays show, it can also be a methodological tool used to inform research in a wide range of artistic and academic fields and create new epistemological tools. From the opening theoretical piece in Thinking from the Border, which explores various definitions of the border to each subsequent chapter that complexifies and illustrates these definitions, often based on a combination of philosophical concepts and artistic practices, this timely collection offers illuminating perspectives on various ways the border functions to create new concepts and artistic tools.

From Dis Voir’s Visual Art Essays series, this multidisciplinary work brings together a geographer, sociologists, art and architectural historians, and an artist to examine new methodologies that blur the boundaries between the human sciences and artistic practices to open up new paths and invent new protocols for connecting historicized artistic and social experiences from different parts of the world.

Translate from French by  Charles La Via.