Borderlands are more than just transitional areas between territories; they are sites of condensed history, conflictual memory and cultural negotiation. In this course, we consider border areas as socially constructed landscapes in which historical ruptures, political boundaries and collective memory are reflected. The course combines perspectives from geography, sociology, history, architectural history and cultural heritage research to examine the symbolic and material character of spaces. The focus is on the Alpine region, in particular South Tyrol and neighbouring areas, whose history has been shaped by border shifts, autonomy efforts, wars and EU integration. The course also focuses on the question of how border areas are remembered, represented or overlooked today – and what social and political challenges this poses. This interdisciplinary course is open to all interested parties and conveys general scientific content at the interface of history, political geography, sociology and cultural heritage research.
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18. 03. 2026 19.30—21.30, IT, UNIBZ, F0.01
Borders and control regimes: rethinking space, power and differences
Anna Casaglia
The artificial and contingent nature of borders and frontiers is the central theme that will guide this talk. We will discuss mobility, physical, administrative and symbolic barriers, technologies and racial profiling, and how borders have become decisive in the production and reproduction of inequalities and asymmetries. The aim will be to critically analyse the recent radicalisation of mobility governance practices, with a focus on deportations and the criminalisation of migrants.
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Prof. ass. Anna Casaglia
Anna Casaglia is Associate Professor in Political and Economic Geography at the School of International Studies and the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento (Italy). She holds a PhD in Urban and Local European Studies from the University of Milano-Bicocca (2011), with a dissertation on the divided city of Nicosia. Her research focuses on critical border studies, political geography, migration and security, climate mobility, and the geopolitics of borders. She works at the intersection of feminist, decolonial, and critical approaches to bordering practices, with particular attention to the Mediterranean and European border regimes. She has been President of the Association for Borderland Studies (2023–2025) and serves on the Steering Committee of the International Geographical Union’s Commission on Political Geography. She is a member of the editorial collective of ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geography and of the editorial board of Geopolitics. Her recent publications appear in journals such as Political Geography, Geoforum, Environment & Planning C, Geopolitics, and Journal of Borderlands Studies. She is the author of Nicosia Beyond Partition. Complex Geographies of the Divided City (2020). She teaches courses on Political and Economic Geography, Geographies of Security, and Critical Geographies of the Anthropocene.
15. 04. 2026 19.30—21.30, DE, Tessmann Library
Across borders? From San Diego to Trieste! On the emergence, overcoming and exploration of borderlines, border areas and border landscapes
Michael Falser
How do borders arise? What happens on both sides of borderlines? What cultural and artistic practices emerge in border areas, and what technical regimes stabilise large-scale border landscapes or help to connect them? And how can we understand these ambivalent formations from a historical perspective and evaluate them from a contemporary perspective? This lecture examines these questions from an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates aspects of art and architectural history, infrastructure research and cultural heritage studies. The journey first takes us to the curious Chicano Park in San Diego, Southern California, USA, where a Mexican-American working-class community counters exclusionary policies with monumental graffiti artworks. The second case study takes us back to historical Europe and highlights how the railway, as the (internal) colonial medium of the 19th century, helped Vienna as the centre to connect the cultural areas of the late Habsburg Monarchy to their borders – from Lviv to Bolzano and Trento, and from Reichenberg to Trieste and Sarajevo.
Conference in German.
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PD Dr.-Ing. Mag. Michael Falser
The architectural and art historian studied in Vienna and Paris and completed his doctorate at TU Berlin with a dissertation on the political history of monument preservation. After working as a conservation architect in the United States, he held research assistant positions at LMU Munich and ETH Zurich. As project leader for Global Art History and Cultural Heritage Studies within the Excellence Cluster “Asia and Europe in a Global Context” at Heidelberg University, he completed his habilitation in 2014. He has had visiting professorships in Kyoto, Heidelberg, Vienna, Bordeaux, Paris-Sorbonne, and Ottawa, and obtained a DFG Heisenberg Fellowship (2020–2024) at TU Munich, where he conducted a research project on German colonial architecture in Africa, Asia, and Oceania. He is currently Privatdozent at the Institute of European Art History at Heidelberg University and works as an independent expert and curator based in Vienna. His research focuses on global art and architectural history from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, cultural heritage studies, monument preservation, and UNESCO World Heritage. Among his latest publications Monuments and Sites De-colonial! Approaches to the Built Heritage of the German Colonial Era. Berlin 2024; Habsburgs going global. The Austro-Hungarian Concession in Tientsin/Tianjin in China (1902-1917). Wien 2022 and Angkor Wat – A Transcultural History of Heritage. Berlin 2020.
06. 05. 2026 18.00—20.00, IT, UNIBZ, F0.01
Trieste and the north-eastern border: new mobility, identity and memory policies
Claudio Minca
Trieste and the north-eastern border have long been a highly symbolic area for Italy's geopolitics. In recent years, Trieste has also become one of the main arrival points for migrants travelling along the so-called Balkan route. This has had consequences for the way in which the border with Slovenia has been managed and perceived. The arrival in Italy of thousands of informal migrants each year via the forest paths surrounding the city has justified the Italian government's temporary suspension of the Schengen agreements, highlighting the mechanism underlying the mobility differential applied to different individuals entering the country formally or informally. This lecture will analyse the political geographies that have marked these different forms of mobility, significantly redefining the role and image of this border.
Conference in Italian.
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Prof. Claudio Minca
Claudio Minca è professore ordinario di Geografia presso l'Università di Bologna. Prima di ricoprire questo ruolo, ha insegnato in diversi contesti internazionali, tra cui le università di Newcastle e Londra, nel Regno Unito, la Wageningen University nei Paesi Bassi e la Macquarie University in Australia. I suoi principali interessi di ricerca riguardano il rapporto tra teoria spaziale, biopolitica e modernità. Più di recente, si è dedicato all’analisi delle geografie politiche dei campi profughi. Tra le sue opere più recenti figurano Thinking like a Route (2026, con Y. Weima) e A Spatial Theory of the Camp (2025, con R. Carter-White). Ha recentemente vinto un ERC Advanced Grant per un progetto intitolato "The GAME: Counter-mapping informal refugee mobilities along the Balkan Route”.
Exkursion: Reschen
Dr. Waltraud Kofler-Engl
Im Rahmen des Studium Generale der unibz „Grenzlandschaften. Erinnerung, Identität und aktuelle Grenzfragen“ führt diese Exkursion auf den Reschen.
Beschreibung und genauer Ablauf folgen.
Eine vorherige Anmeldung ist erforderlich. Bitte schreiben Sie diesbezüglich an die E-Mail-Adresse: plattform.kulturerbe@unibz.it