Our society is organised around hundreds of borders and boundaries. Material and immaterial, physical and symbolic, territorial and cognitive. Creating borders means delimiting spaces, making distinctions, separating territories, joining margins. Everyday bordering practices and discourses are productively linked to different aspects of social relations: boundaries are everywhere, and many events take place for (because of) borders, at borders, on borders, around borders. Borders are discontinuities that encourage the interplay between cultural and identitarian processes that take place in a specific temporal and spatial dimension. Those processes are at the same time defined through collective narratives and individual identity processes.

Identitarian issues are at stake: distinctions are an essential element of identity construction and borders play a decisive role in the symbolic construction of communities, as they provide subjects with the ability to provide meaning.

The themes explored in second subtheme might be:

• The everyday social construction of borders and boundaries through practices, which play an important part in legitimising, confirming or reinforcing them.

• The interplay between social and symbolic boundaries.

• Borders as interstitial zones that produce liminality, hybridity and creolization.

• The mechanisms associated with the activation, maintenance, or dissolution of boundaries (and borders).

The below texts further expand on these topics. Please consult the below texts on this subtheme if you are interested in developing a topic related to these issues further.