Borders are a historically produced and continuously reproduced social conventions operating on multiple levels and registers. By focusing on the social history of borders, this workshop asks how families, kin groups and intimate relations shape borders and patterns of movement within specific constellations, which kinds of movement they facilitate and which they block, how actors adapt to them and invest in them, and consequently, how they affect and are affected by specific patterns of movement.
This two-days workshop organized by members of the EUI and IHEID history departments will bring together 13 early career researchers working on migration and border-making in relations to intimacy, family and race from different perspectives and historical contexts. Focusing on the period from mid-late nineteenth century to contemporary time, the event will address topics such as reproductive rights, sex work, kinship formation in colonial and postcolonial settings, national and diasporic family politics. As part of the workshop, Professor Julia Laite (Birbeck Unviersity) will give a keynote lecture Finding (and Losing) Lydia: What can one woman's short life tell us about intimacy and mobility in the early twentieth century world?