Ethnographies of border mapping: retracing the field through the geographical archive
Start: 2025. Department of Geography, Durham University.
Supervisors: Philip Steinberg (Durham University) and Noah Leshem (Durham University)
Overview
Many border treaties end with a map, defining and delimiting territory and sovereignty. But what lies behind the map? This proposal addresses this key question, focusing on the textual, visual, and epistemological practices that underpin the calculative fieldwork of border mapping. In so doing, it places ‘the field’ at the core of the research, as a site of encounter between surveyor and surveyed, between coloniser and colonised, between outsider and insider.
The negotiated process of border mapping is embedded in the archive: in the papers, notes, reports, and maps that document connections between field and office as boundaries are surveyed and demarcated on the ground, communicated on the map, and materialised through everyday practice. To explore this multi-sited, multi-faceted archive, the proposed research will excavate ethnographies of border mapping through a studentship that fuses Durham University’s expertise in the technical practices of boundary delimitation and Queen’s Belfast’s expertise in the history of cartography with the rich collections of maps and other materials from boundary negotiations held at the Royal Geographical Society.
Funded by .