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Border Towns and Cities

 Funded by European Union Framework 4 Professor Hastings Donnan

This project sought to map competing and contested spatialities at state borders and to document the ways in which these generate and shape forms of social and cultural exclusion often overlooked by policy makers.  The approach was comparative and multi-disciplinary and focused on border research sites in Ireland, Greece, France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and North Africa. 

A central focus was on how borderland residents experience exclusion of ‘others’ and their own exclusion from the ‘centre’.  Key terms were problematised and the project explored how notions such as ‘centre’, ‘marginality’ and ‘social exclusion’ were variously conceptualised and understood by differently positioned actors in ‘peripheral’ Europe.