Border Chronotopes

Border Chronotopes in the Digital Age: Memories in Times of Wars

In recent years, more than ever, issues of borders and re\bordering processes have received massive media, political and academic attention. In 2022, The Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, which is the first attempt in 21st- century Europe to forcefully change state borders, is not only leading to major shifts in the geopolitical space of Europe but also causing massive widespread disruptions in the personal geographies and histories of millions of people within Ukraine and abroad. Concomitantly, previous forms of border(ing)s have acquired new meaning. The existential experience of living the war, of balancing between life and death, brings about new anxieties and challenges which transmit across the borders of Ukraine and become palpable in the globalized world provoking both a re-thinking and a re-construction of the borders. 
The project thus will examine the border chronotope, unraveling space-time compression connected with borders in crises: geopolitical, symbolic, ideological, digital, imaginary, existential. Modern wars as the phenomena of the globalized world cause radical transformations of multiple spaces as migrations/relocations/displacement become powerful anthropogenic factors in changing the natural, social, and cultural landscape of both the countries involved in the war and also those of their neighboring countries. Migrant geographies map out the broken universes and devastated home(lands), migration routes, and border crossings. Border experiences often become formative and therefore individuals try to preserve them in their memories. Thus the project intends to demonstrate how modern cultural productionse reflects and shape on numerous avenues of the border experiences across various cultural, spatial, and temporal dimensions
 

The current phase of apparent new and arising challenges of the digital age is marked by a massive dynamization of socio-cultural processes and practices, ranging from the creation of new formats of blended mobilities and the importance of in-person cooperation. The pandemic has created numerous borders making it often impossible to meet in person, at the same time, many borders were erased making online cooperation a rather successful alternative. Within the realities of the wartimes and constant attacks on the energy infrastructure, the online format is not always a good alternative, and thus, the contemporary circumstances call for the necessity of different formats of cooperation, encompassing predominantly a combination of in-person, hybrid, and online formats.

In order to adjust to the current circumstances, achieve the aims of the project, and disseminate project findings, we aim to continue re-designing our project website creating new joint on-line teaching tools, expanding the database for teaching materials (available online and offline), and organizing joint in-person, online and hybrid lecture-series and Ph.D. colloquia. This joint project webspace will then constitute a sustainable tool that will help continue the teaching and research activities at Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University regardless of the existing circumstances. At the same time, it makes an important contribution to the Digitization Strategy of each of the partner universities at large.

In order to critically engage all these issues in the context of this collaboration, we propose to structure our work according to the following fields of inquiry and activities, which could act as work packages:

1. Memories in Times of Wars and Weaponization of the Past 

2. Visualizing Border Chronotopes in the Digital Age: Memories in Times of Wars

3. Borders in Time and Space and Memories in the Wartime: Discourses and Practices in Art and Digital Media

4. Borders, Identity and Memory: From Historical Heritage to Ideological Practice

5. Border-Time-Space Modalities in the Digital Age: Memories in Times of Wars

6. Digital Learning and Teaching in Times of War: Sustainable Shared Teaching Stimuli / Researching and Teaching in a Shared Virtual World / Blended Mobility/ Activities to Strengthen Cooperations 

 

Partners:

Petro Mohyla Black Sea National University, Mykolaiv, Ukraine

University of Silesia in Katowice, Poland