Borderlands and their Mediations: Examinations/ Anticipations

Borders are most readily conceived as lines of demarcation. They separate, often divide. They visibly mark territory, sovereignty, and jurisdiction. Their practices relate to and empower our present global historical predicament of war and devastation, capitalism, neoliberalism, climate change and inequality, gender binaries, and policing. The idea of the borderland, on the other hand, allows us to think about those hardened lines as places where lives, identities, politics, and their possibilities are becoming. The borderlands then are also places of mixings, transfers, changing of forms but these are difficult mixings and not the easy multiculturalism of privilege.

In this spirit of interest and anticipation, the Department of Media Studies at Ashoka University, Sonepat will host an interdisciplinary seminar on borderlands and their mediations on 26 & 27 March, 2026. We conceive of the borderland as both existent political form and domain of transgression through which alternate modes and possibilities of belonging may be imagined, articulated, practiced. We are interested in hosting conversations with scholarly and empirical examinations in the arena as well as with those whose praxis has attempted to remediate these (public) imaginations and their structural possibilities. We welcome papers that trace the entanglements of borderlands with processes of mediation of geographies of territory as much as those of caste, class, religion, gender, sexuality, or disability. These may include projects that attend to imaginations of borderlands within our shared contemporaneous condition of mediatization in late capitalism. They may be empirical engagements with the capacities in which media have influenced present trajectories of social and political becoming. Or, they may attend to processes of remediation and reclaiming of borderlands. In attending to both, we hope to move beyond the cartographic certainties through which the modern state continues to imagine and delimit its people. 

Interested? Email us a brief abstract of your project in about 500 words along with your resume at borderlandsandmediations@ashoka.edu.in by February 10th, 2026. The seminar will take care of accommodation and meals for selected participants. We may also be able to sponsor travel in part or full for a few participants.