Crosslocations developed a new way to both theorize and research the dynamics of location in the Mediterranean region. It explored the multiple, often overlapping, sometimes contradictory and coexisting ways by which the significance and value of locations are generated, and the implications of that in terms of how people experience where they are in the world. Many projects have studied the mobility of populations (migration, refugees, shifting border politics and so on); Crosslocations shifted its focus to how the regularly changing connections and disconnections between places affects people's lives.
We began with the idea that several locations can coexist and overlap in any given place, each one ascribing different relative significance and value to the place, and that these values change over time. It drew on the concepts of 'locating regimes' and 'relative location' introduced as conceptual tools to test, critically assess and develop this new approach towards studying and analysing the dynamics of connections and disconnections between places. And differently from many other studies, the disconnections were as important to the research as the connections: the effects of raising walls, drawing lines and forbidding passage are as important as the multiple ways in which places are interconnected. While the world is multiply and globally interconnected (e.g. by internet cables running along the seabed; by transnational banking systems; by international border regulations; by transportation and trade infrastructures, etc), it is also a highly unequal world which disconnects and limits relations between regions. Understanding how a place can be simultaneously connected in some ways while disconnected in others, and what effects that has for people, was at the heart of the work of this project.
The core research material was ethnographic fieldwork carried out in different parts of the Mediterranean region. This was combined with advice from a team of experts in economy, infrastructure, law, religion, language and other disciplines, that could advise the anthropologists on how their areas of specialism connected and disconnected the Mediterranean region in different ways. We also collaborated with a cartographer and photographer so as to experiment with different ways to visualise this novel way of understanding location: ways to make the idea of overlapping, coexisting locating regimes visible. Conventional maps show only some kinds of borders (formal political, topographic and geological ones, mostly); the aim was to make visible many of the other ways of connecting and subdividing places.
The overall objective was to draw on this approach to create a different way to research, analyse and understand the crisscrossing, overlapping and sometimes contradictory dynamics of locations in the Mediterranean region.
