Borders Behind Us and Borders Within Us: Towards a New Sociology of Borderlands

Over the past few years, events of a global, European, but also regional kind have made us realize that the existing knowledge of border and borderland studies and sociological instrumentation is insufficient for analyzing current events. We have lived for years in the belief that borders, at least in “our” part of the world, are disappearing – now they are being reconstructed, strengthened, increasingly armed.  The Covid-19 pandemic entailed, among other things, the phenomenon of restoring borders between EU countries, as well as certain sanitary regime requirements that resonated with border procedures. The border with Belarus, which is close to us, is also drawing the attention of researchers from various fields today due to the ongoing humanitarian crisis, which began in 2021. Another face of this crisis was brought on by the war in Ukraine. The term borderland is thus gaining new meanings, and the study of the phenomena and processes that take place in borderlands raises a number of ongoing challenges and problems not only of a methodological nature, but also of an ethical character – linked to important choices of a moral nature and even experiences of a border nature. The issues of the collapse of the axionormative sphere and multiplied conflict affect all social actors in the borderlands. Proposing a semi-plenary session, we want to take up themes related to contemporary research on borders and borderlands, in which sociologists and sociologists have a dominant voice, taking into account diverse categories of people present and/or entangled in (post)border social phenomena: those living in these areas, people on the move, institutional actors connected with uniformed services, as well as the system of social policy, activists working on the Polish-Belarusian border and providing assistance to Ukraine. The issues of the session include tabuized topics, and at the same time (sometimes) exposed and instrumentalized in the public debate and scientific discourse. Undoubtedly, the new sociology of the borderland is a hot sociology, not only because it takes up current and important topics, but also arouses intense emotions of researcher.