Monograph about borderscapes in Italy

Professor Stefania Tufi is working towards a monograph about borderscapes in Italy. Building on years of research into border areas in Italy, the monograph will discuss a range of inflections of the border as experienced at given time-space junctures in the Italian context, while highlighting that the relevance of the border is global, but that it also informs both personal and collective constructions of the self and the other.

By analysing different instantiations of the border in relation to Italy, a privileged vantage point due to its rich multilingual set-up (comprising internally configured ethnolinguistic minorities), the ontological basis of border-making practices will be problematised to move to a characterisation of border epistemologies.

The linguistic perspective will provide an all-encompassing dimension proposing that language is primarily responsible for the construction, permanence and challenging of border discourses, and that linguistic artefacts provide a synthesis between the material and the symbolic in processes of border-making.

The project will also engage with transnational settings offering linguistic constructions of alternative forms of citizenship which are realised in discourse, and which are not state controlled, but are performed in everyday actions to produce mobile geographies of citizenship.

Adopting a critical approach to the study of the border, the monograph seeks to make a timely intervention into current debates about the significance of the border as a contemporary challenge from a novel perspective, foregrounding linguistic and material constructions of borderscapes. The relevance of a borderscapes framework will emerge beyond consolidated principles of territoriality.