Öresund Comparative Borderlands Research Group

The research group is a platform for collaboration based on active dialogue over the ways that bordering in a relatively affluent part of Europe intersects with realities taking place across an increasingly globalized world. 

Doing so, it seeks to pluralize the diversity of actors typically understood to perform border work across EU regions; to consider novel methods to interpret contemporary border hybridity, porosity, and dependency alongside more established demarcations of geopolitical frontiers; and finally, to challenge the presumed legitimacy and utility of discourses and practices that naturalize bordering efforts and their effects.

This research group provides a space for researchers, artists and practitioners in the Öresund to work together to advance wider knowledge about the conditions and experiences of European bordering and borderlands. We take a particular interest in the ways that bordering occurs across diverse social, cultural, historical and geographical outlooks. Embracing an assertively interdisciplinary and comparative approach to critical border studies, the group seeks to generate conceptual frameworks and methodologies that strengthen awareness, understanding and action over the ways borders are constituted, inhabited and politicized within, beyond and in connection with the Öresund itself.

Cross-border integration is a pillar of the EU that views cohesion as the basis for societal well-being. With the creation of the Nordic Council in 1952, Nordic states have been hailed as pioneers of European region-building over numerous socio-economic, legal and environmental issues. The opening of the Öresund Bridge in 2000 exemplified long-held aspirations for a European community founded on the free movement of people and capital. Yet, this ‘golden age’ of European integration is today increasingly under threat. Since 2015, researchers and media in the Öresund have highlighted the increasing normalization of resentment towards refugees and migrants in mainstream political discourse, the persistence of border closures and mobility restrictions on each side of the Sound, and growing inequities in socio-economic power and opportunity available to residents in terms of education, transportation, housing, and other amenities. These challenges are focal points for the field of critical border studies, and as circumstances evolve, the need to account for the ways that borders are established in, related to, and made meaningful for different groups are as urgent as ever.