The Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University is the sponsor of Techniques Journal, which announces the release of a special issue on bordering.
In this issue, we’re interested in methods that take into account the dynamism of borders. Because the gerund form is referred to as the “imperfectivizing operator,” which expresses duration, we utilize it as the title for each issue’s theme. The -ing form has a simultaneous and continual temporal valence by nature. As a result, the grammatical form of the gerund refers to each theme—in this case, bordering—as a continual, (durationally) incomplete event that emphasizes its ongoingness. Each issue in this volume refuses to confine their research to things that lie on either side of a particular border, whether it be physical, geopolitical, ideological, or fictitious. They also avoid focusing on the hybrid spaces created by border crossings or queerings and instead pay close attention to how these spaces signal the spatiotemporal ongoingness that underlies their very creation, contestation, and upkeep.
This Techniques Journal issue was intended to cast a wide net and envisage a wide array of critical and speculative answers on how borders are created, maintained, changed, and destroyed within a broadly experimental arts and humanities framework. These are just a few of the various methods to “bordering” that are presented in this issue and are thought to be essential to the planning of our shared, if unevenly felt, planetary life. Others include migration and animal studies, design fiction, Gonzo journalism, and internet curating. We could not expect the methods covered in this issue—docufiction, curation, nonfiction writing, photography, philosophical abstraction, gardening, sonification, and more—to respect the neat and tidy boundaries set up between disciplines and fields of research, and they don’t necessarily carry out what academe considers “acceptable research” as a result of the ongoingness of all borders. Instead, this issue is a test in how to undermine all types of borders, but particularly those between disciplines, knowledge production locations, and academic and nonacademic publishing.
Contributions from: Jimmy Loizeau, Tony Fry, Margret Grebowicz and Maria Whiteman, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Diseño Detonante, Matylda Krzykowski, Claudia Sadowski-Smith, Ploy Yamtree, Michael Hornblow, Nausica Castanas, Mario Orospe, Stephen Loo, Stacey Moran, Adam Nocek.