UNESCO Chair on Refugee Integration through Education, Language and Arts

In this episode,recorded at the online UNESCO RIELA Spring School 2025, we will hear from Prof Dr Bilgin Ayata, project leader of the research project Elastic Borders: Rethinking the Borders of the 21st Century. This project, generously funded by the NOMIS foundation, proposes a new conceptualization of the border building on the concept of elasticity in physics. Thinking of borders as elastic offers new avenues to understanding not only how state borders stretch and retract, but also how they create fields of stress and violations in the processes of extension and retraction. Borders become elastic when they are extended either beyond or behind the territorial confines of a state.  

Abstract:

The research project “Elastic Borders: Rethinking the Borders of the 21st Century” is an interdisciplinary research project directed by Prof. Dr. Bilgin Ayata and is generously funded by the NOMIS Foundation. With an international team of six researchers, the project aims to develop an empirically grounded conceptual framework of elastic borders to account for the transformation of borders in the 21st century. The focus of the study are the southern external frontiers of the European Union where a high elasticity of borders can be observed. Two central research questions guide this project which are pursued in two research units. 

First, the project asks what kind of policies, technologies and practices enable the enactment and implementation of elastic borders; and what kind of patterns and movements of border elasticity can be observed over time and space. The second research question relates to socio-political changes resulting from elastic borders and asks if and how they transform processes of social boundary-making and social relations in the very localities across which they are extended to or retracted. How are border regions transformed by the stress of elastic bordering practices which are often introduced as exceptional or temporary measures to a particular border crisis, and how do local residents, migrants, administrative and border personnel, and humanitarian actors experience and respond to them? How does the stress of the elastic border strain relations and life on the ground?

In this keynote presentation, Prof Ayata will tell us more about the programme, the background to the research and the challenges and opportunities. There will also be time for questions at the end of her presentation.

Please scroll down for the biography of the speaker. 

 
Download the E85 transcript here.
 
Biography of the speaker:
 
Prof Dr Bilgin Ayata is the project leader of the Elastic Borders research project. She joined the Centre for Southeast European Studies at Graz University in October 2020. Previously she was professor for political sociology at the University of Basel. She obtained her PhD at Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, USA) and her MA degree from York University (Toronto, Canada). Her teaching and research centers on socio-political transformations with a focus on migration, borders, citizenship, affect and emotions, and postcolonial studies. Her regional expertise includes Europe and the MENA region. She has published widely on displacement, citizenship, transnationalism, affective politics, memory and violence.

Names and organisations mentioned:

This episode was edited by Catherine McGrath.

First published: 13 March 2026

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