The social-spatial Memory of European Borders: Dispositifs of Remembering and Forgetting.

• Applicant: Dr. Vivien Sommer
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Sociological Theory
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 523151888

Since the Schengen Agreement, temporary border closures and the return to classic border controls have demonstrated in a very material way that closed national borders are anything but forgotten. This raises the question of how borders are remembered in society and what impact memory of borders has on the present status of a supposedly borderless Europe. Although there is considerable research about places of remembering and forgetting, little is known about how socio-spatial transformations have developed in border regions, where borders have physically shifted, and border controls have also partially disappeared. There have yet to be theoretical concepts that can grasp the significance of social memory of borders for the present in everyday life. The junior research group will close that research gap with an innovative study of social memory in twin towns and twin villages. The leading research questions are: What role do remembering and forgetting play in the everyday lives of residents in European border regions? And how and to what extent does socio-spatial memory constitute the meaning of borders? The project will examine memory in everyday life to grasp the dynamics of borders as multidimensional, relational, and complex social-material entities. The project investigates three dimensions of memory of borders as memory frames, memory practices and memory materiality of border twin towns and twin villages at four different borders of nations that are part of the Schengen area: The Polish-German border, the Swiss-German border, the Danish-German border and as a contrast the Irish-Northern-Irish border, where both countries are not part of the Schengen Agreement. Through comparing these borders in the everyday life of residents, the entanglement of the three dimensions of memory is reconstructed as dispositifs in terms of a powerful network that encompasses discursive and material elements. To reconstruct these dispositifs, the junior research group will take a multi-perspective methodological approach: In the first step, the research team will combine expert interviews with memory activists and documentation of their projects to study memory frames. In the second step, we will conduct narrative interviews with residents and produce mental maps of their lives with borders to examine memory practices. In every step, the data is analyzed with a multimodal coding method. To investigate memory materiality in a third step, we will organize go-alongs with residents and combine them with biographical photo-elicitation. For an overall comparison in a fourth step, the research team will conduct cartographic maps in local archives and produce interactive digital maps. We will develop a theoretical concept of the socio-spatial memory of borders based on a synopsis of the results. This novel concept offers a new way of understanding the complexity of remembering and forgetting in present-day life in border Europe.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups