We inaugurated our monthly journal club on 6 March 2023, with a discussion of the book “Border as method, or, the multiplication of labor” by Sandra Mezzadra and Brett Neilson (2013). With this book, the authors aim to provide a social theory of borders. They offer a new understanding of widely studied concepts such as migration and work, but also neoliberalism, sovereignty and globalisation, precisely through the medium of borders, which they propose to use, as suggested by the title, as a method. In doing so, they demonstrate how borders are at the heart of various social processes, especially in the context of migration.
This first journal club gave us the opportunity to discuss the concept of “border”, which lies at the heart of our respective research projects, as well as to collectively read a book which has been one of the inspirations for the drafting of the E-BoP project itself. From the perspective of E-BoP, we were particularly interested in the authors’ view on the interaction beween borders and the political and legal construction of labour markets