Project description
Transdisciplinary study of the border novel after 9/11
The 9/11 terrorist attacks triggered a global escalation of harsh border regimes. The acute mass displacement around the world, resulting in an unprecedented 100 million refugees as of May 2022, exacerbated the situation for migrants and refugees in Western countries. The EU-funded NARFIB project will investigate modern literature exploring the strict border policies following 9/11. These border novels reflect contemporary perceptions and influence of the emotional and physical effects of border control on characters. The border exposes flaws in liberal democracies for both refugees and citizens, as strict policies victimise them equally. NARFIB will develop a transdisciplinary methodology by synthesising the latest research in border studies, literary studies, surveillance studies and political psychology.
Objective
The Novel and the Refugee: Contemporary Global Fiction and the Imaginary of Border Regimes (NARFIB) will investigate an emerging trend in contemporary fiction which engages with the global escalation of harsh border regimes since 9/11 that have sanctioned the state’s capacity for extraordinary measures against ‘outsiders’ to protect ‘insiders’. The rise of what I identify as the ‘global border novel’ coincides with the acute mass displacement around the globe, with an unprecedented one hundred million refugees as of May 2022, exceeding the previous year’s statistics by an alarming 10 million (Siegfried, UNHCR). NARFIB conceives of the border novel as a cultural product that mediates and is mediated by the contemporary border imaginary. The border novel iterates fictional spaces in which characters live out the affective and material impacts of the border’s disciplinary power. For these characters—on both ends of the spectrum of citizenship, whether refugees or ‘core’ citizens of Global North—the border signals the psychic and material exposure to the internal contradictions and limitations of liberal democracies in the face of their precarious futures, while the figure of the refugee points to precisely where a greater number of citizens will end up, that is, a victim of the border. NARFIB dwells in this problem by assuming an interlinked relationship between refugee fiction, the recent escalations of border control, and the ways that the border imaginary renders the political panic about unsettling the residual myth of the mono-cultural state.NARFIB will develop a transdisciplinary methodology by synthesizing the latest research in border studies, literary studies, surveillance studies and political psychology. NARFIB will be conducted in the Department of Literature, Area Studies, and European Languages (ILOS) at the University of Oslo (UiO), and in collaboration with the supervisor of the project, Professor Johan Schimanski.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social sciencespolitical sciencesgovernment systemsdemocracy
- social sciencespsychology
- social sciencessociologydemographyhuman migrations
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
0313 Oslo
Norway