Research

This trajectory examines changing relationships between sovereignty, security and power across Europe and the Americas.

Recent geopolitical conflicts, economic dependencies and technological transformations have challenged earlier assumptions that global interdependence would reduce conflict. Instead, questions of territorial defence, economic resilience, hybrid warfare and digital security have become increasingly central.

Research explores these developments across multiple scales – from individuals and societies to states, nations and empires.

This trajectory studies how knowledge, norms, institutions and cultural forms circulate between Europe and the Americas.

Rather than treating translation as a one-way transfer, it focuses on multidirectional exchange, reinterpretation and contestation across historical and contemporary contexts.

Special attention is given to colonial legacies, post-socialist and post-colonial entanglements, and the interaction of area studies with cultural, legal and social science perspectives.

This trajectory investigates the spatial organisation of economic life and unequal patterns of development.

Topics include trade relations, supply chains, industrial policy, capital flows, climate transformation and the political economy of transatlantic relations.

By combining economic, environmental, political and social perspectives, the trajectory explores how global economic change reshapes Europe and the Americas.

This trajectory focuses on migration, displacement and the agency of refugees in shaping new social worlds.

Research examines how people navigate mobility, legal frameworks, belonging and everyday life under changing political and economic conditions.

A comparative perspective across Europe and the Americas highlights multidirectional migration flows, racial hierarchies and the cultural resources people mobilise in situations of displacement.

AreasLab is the cross-cutting innovation space of the ScienceCampus. It develops new approaches for future-oriented area studies through digital methods, epistemic diversity and reflexive research practice.

Its work includes new forms of knowledge communication, participatory outreach, multimedia scholarship and critical reflection on power, positionality and excluded forms of knowledge.

AreasLab connects academic excellence with experimental, open and socially responsive research methods.

This ScienceCampus research network builds on the studies of marginalization and memory studies to explore how margins of memory are produced and challenged in societies across the globe. In answering this question, we bring various strands of research on memory cultures of marginalized groups together—informed by gender and sexuality studies, queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory, Holocaust studies, migration studies, peace and transitional justice studies, and beyond—as we seek to theorize a nuanced and intersectionally-informed concept of margins of memory.

Our interdisciplinary endeavor involves researchers from Anthropology, Cultural Studies, History, History Education, Literary Studies, and Political Science. The work of the network members covers memory cultures of marginalized groups across Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Australia, which span over a hundred years—from the 19th century to today. We ground our analysis in exploring oral/written memories and memorials as well as “non-verbal” memories and silences that find expression in arts, images, sounds, other sensory engagements, performances, and social acts. Drawing on this rich dataset, we conceptualize margins of memory as a comparative analytical tool and a connective lens to explore slippages and entanglements between historical and contemporary cultures of memory across the globe.

By focusing on cultures and politics of non-hegemonic remembrance, the network contributes to pluralizing theoretical and methodological approaches to memory studies. Through the concept of margins of memory, we develop modalities of listening to and interpreting the silences of the archive while also attending to the agency of marginalized groups from a comparative perspective. Against the backdrop of today’s securitization of memory  as well as contemporary and historical memory wars across the globe that disproportionately affect marginalized groups, we seek to theorize how non-hegemonic communities make sense of their pasts to spatially and temporally orient their lives, deal with their present, and build their futures. Mindful of multiple forms of marginalization in dynamic contexts across the globe, we seek to develop ways of mobilizing the concept of margins of memory to serve the studies of differently vocal, transnationally mobile, and ever-increasingly virtual communities of memory.

Members

Launching an Early Career Researcher Network

By Dr. Marie Beyrich & Dr. Mélanie Sadozaï

Why We Begin with Law

Drawing on our backgrounds in law and border studies, our project begins with the observation that law does not only draw borders on paper. It shapes and regulates them, creating thresholds that complicate the lives of those who cross or live alongside them.

Borders, in this sense, are not static lines but shifting legal constructs that affect who may move, under what conditions, and with what consequences. They are also felt in everyday realities – in access to welfare or the labour market, in visa rules enforced at airports or embassies, or in the quiet persistence of “bordering” or “rebordering” in contested regions.

From Lines on Paper to Everyday Realities

Traditionally, borders have been understood as political markers. However, critical border scholars have challenged this approach, drawing attention to borders’ lived dimensions. Nevertheless, this scholarship has only partially explored how legal frameworks set the conditions for who may cross, under which circumstances, and with what rights.

In our work, we take law as the starting point of everyday life. Borders matter for people: they take shape in regular encounters, in access to work or welfare, and in local memories of past divisions.

Geography, politics, and culture continue to play a crucial role, but law now often provides the decisive framework through which these other factors are channelled and made tangible.

Our Approach: Border Labs

To study these dynamics, we are establishing an international early career research network, funded through the Leibniz ScienceCampus Europe and America in the Modern World.

Our core method is the Border Lab. This involves immersive, field-based encounters in regions where law, politics, and everyday life collide in distinctive ways.

Focus Areas

Bavarian / Bohemian Border

From Iron Curtain to Schengen

This border illustrates the transition from alienation constructed by militarised closure to an integrated cross-border space – albeit one that remains vulnerable to disruption and processes of rebordering, for instance during pandemics or due to political contingencies.

The Channel Islands

As Crown Dependencies between the UK and France, the Channel Islands highlight legal entanglements in maritime boundaries, fishing rights, and immigration.

Georgia – Abkhazia

This contested de facto border shows how legal claims, international recognition, and lived realities interact under conditions of “borderization”.

The project deliberately addresses diverse sites. Each allows us to explore how borders are constituted in practice, and how law both structures and unsettles them.

Interdisciplinary and Collaborative

The network brings together doctoral and postdoctoral researchers from Germany, France, the UK, and Belgium.

Beyond legal analysis, we combine methods and perspectives from:

• Political science
• Geography
• History

Critical border studies, ethnographic fieldwork, and discourse analysis enrich our starting point in law, ensuring that borders are not only studied as legal abstractions but also as lived spaces, narrated experiences, and visualised realities.

This interdisciplinary mix allows us to capture how legal frameworks interact with historical, political, social, and economic forces in shaping the meaning and practice of borders.

Outputs and Trajectories

The project will unfold between 2026 and 2028 with:

• Opening and closing events in Regensburg to frame and present our work
• Three Border Labs across Europe and the Caucasus
• A public exhibition translating findings into accessible visual formats
• A special journal issue to anchor the research academically

Longer term, we plan to establish a Border Lab at the University of Regensburg as a permanent hub for interdisciplinary border research and teaching.

Looking Ahead

The Law and Borders Network is both a research agenda and a collaborative experiment.

By grounding legal analysis in interdisciplinary dialogue and fieldwork, we hope to capture the evolving, uneven, and deeply human realities of borders.

Our presentation in Exeter was only the starting point. Over the coming years, through our network and Border Labs, we aim to continue these conversations:

• Across disciplines
• Across borders
• With communities for whom borders are not abstract lines, but lived realities

Contact

If you are interested in our work, would like to get involved in the network, or have contacts, suggestions, or knowledge that could enrich our project, we would be delighted to hear from you:

Members