The conference crossed the academic divide between “border studies” in the social sciences and “border theory”/“border poetics” in the humanities in examining the ways cultural practices use discursive and semiotic strategies in order to imagine and negotiate the border in its social and historical context.
A special focus of the conference was the region in which it is set: the Norwegian-Russian-Finnish borderland and the wider contexts of the North Calotte, Barents and Arctic regions. A collection of the abstracts of the 65 papers presented will be made available on the Barents Institute web site.