Borders and boundaries

Landscapes are divided as much as they are inhabited. Fences, walls, watercourses, administrative lines, parish boundaries, buffer zones and closed frontiers all decide what belongs with what, and every one of them was drawn by someone for a reason.

Research in this theme covers territoriality and the making of borders, the landscapes of partition and conflict, displacement and the places where displaced people are held or settled, and the edges within countries as well as between them: green belts, county lines, the seam between an estate and the fields beyond it. It is also concerned with liminality, with ground that belongs firmly to neither side of a line and takes on its own character as a result. Infrastructure appears here often, since a new road or railway severs as reliably as it connects. The group’s 2018 research fund call was themed on borders, boundaries and landscape justice, and the two themes are best read alongside each other.