Thesiss

This dissertation analyzes everyday practices of externalization of African migration control beyond and within Europe's geopolitical limits, in sites such as detention centers in Libya, but also in Rome; in dinghies adrift at sea among herds of sophisticated military vessels, b…

The Sino-Indian relationship marked by mutual mistrust for the last six decades has seen definitive changes since the late 1980s. Though considerable issues remain unresolved, the two have begun establishing mechanisms to establish a certain level of trust that began with the vi…

Cyprus has been divided by a border since 1974. The failure to recognize, acknowledge and understand the psychosocial aspect of the conflict during the reunification talks has been nothing but an obstruction on the way to end the division, as the conflict weighs heavily on the T…

This study is about the reassertion of the state and the tightening of border controls in an era otherwise defined by the retreat of the state and the opening of borders. Focusing on a particularly striking example of this trend, I explain the causes and consequences of the rapi…

This study concerns the extensive subcontracting network of apparel assembly and home work that has expanded in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip over the past thirty years. Of concern is how the power disparities in terms of nation and gender have shaped the spatial organization…

The border between Russia and Estonia has undergone significant changes in the past two and a half decades from a border between two Soviet republics to an international border and external EU border. In the public discourse and the scholarly literature, this border has been cha…

Pluralities of people s crossings of the Mekong Thai-Lao border occur as locals subvert, reject, ignore, and embrace the logic of the national border. From a state-centric point of view, the everyday movements of these people, who rely mainly on a subsistence economy and have th…

This research examines the language and rhetoric of fear used to justify the walls and fences built by the American government along the U.S.-Mexico border, and by the Israeli government around the Occupied Palestinian Territories. It focuses specifically on the rhetoric used by…

During the United States Civil War, a Mexican national, Pedro Garcia, and hundreds ofothers like him came to Brownsville, Texas, looking for ways to strengthen their positions byjoining the Union army. Eventually, the Mexican/Tejano recruits deserted in droves while theUnion for…

In the early 2000’s, The Mars Volta’s popularity among prog(ressive) rock fandom was, in many ways, a conundrum. Unlike 1970s prog rock that drew heavily on Western classical music, TMV members Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and Cedric Bixler-Zavala routinely insisted on the integral impo…

Border walls are built by any and every kind of country to keep people out. Sometimes, as is the case of the Berlin Wall, they wanted to keep people in. The United States border wall has been built to keep Mexican citizens from crossing illegally into the U.S. in an attempt to f…

Cuerpos de Fuerza y Resistencia: Dismantling the U.S.–Mexico Border in the Work of Ana Teresa Fernández and Margarita Cabrera addresses how their artwork maps a geography of resistance that counters the carceral landscape of the U.S.–Mexico border. I apply Michel Foucault’s (192…

The landscape of the United States and Mexico borderlands is a particularly hostile one for the children who inhabit it. This thesis explores children’s experiences in the borderlands of El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, and proposes three design interventions that imagine a post-borde…

Contrary to the view of national borders as a product of modernization, the Great Wall was considered to came into being almost two thousand years earlier as a permanent boundary dividing the imperial territories from its northern adversaries. Refuting both views, I illustrate t…