A new program in the School of Transborder Studies is attempting to build bridges of understanding across the world’s borders, especially the Arizona-Sonora border, with new classes and lectures.
Comparative Border Studies, launched Thursday, is an interdisciplinary research program that aims to find similarities and differences between borders by holding academic discussions in the public realm, said Linda Lederman, dean of social sciences at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
The goal of the program is to welcome a variety of political views and expand understanding of the challenges facing border regions, said program director Matt Garcia.
“Our events will encourage a healthy process of give-and-take, where guests are given a 360-degree treatment to reach deeper understanding of the ideas (surrounding border studies),” Garcia said.
Those issues include topics as wide-ranging as national security, trade relations and environmental management.
Each semester, four to five scholars — including writers, filmmakers and professors — will hold discussions related to border studies as part of the program.
“We plan to mix contributors in a way that brings some of the global to our local and some of the local to our global,” Garcia said.
The program will also fund scholarships, grants for ASU faculty and fellowships for non-ASU faculty, he said.
Themes have been planned for the first three years of the program. The first will focus on the Arizona-Sonora border, Garcia said. The second year will bring in the Canadian border, and the third year will include borders across the globe.
The official launch of the program took place in the Memorial Union.
Associate professor of history at Georgetown University and Arizona native Katherine Benton-Cohen shared her study of border relations in Cochise County.
“What I found was that the ethnic-racial lines I had assumed were fixed and obvious, were in fact fluid,” she said to the audience.
Benton-Cohen focused her study on a miner’s strike that occurred in Bisbee two months after the U.S. entered World War I. One of the main demands of the strike was for those of Mexican descent to receive the same pay as the white workers.
The population of Bisbee included Serbians, Italians, Irish and Mexicans, Benton-Cohen said, all vying for equal inclusion into the mining town that advertised itself as a “white man’s” camp. The definition of “white” was constantly under debate. Eventually white and Mexican-American became the only two racial categories that mattered in the region, even though there were several ethnic groups in the community.
“Many of the boundaries that we take for granted — be they physical, geographical, national, or racial — are at the bottom things we created,” she said.
Though that does not make them any less real, Benton-Cohen said.
“Today we are both closer to that border and more distant than ever before,” she said.
The border is closer because of the increase in the Hispanic population in Arizona and across the U.S., she said. At the same time, the border is farther culturally because of fears of crime and the hardening of racial divisions in the U.S., Benton-Cohen said.
Reach the reporter at ryan.mccullough@asu.edu Click here to subscribe to the daily State Press newsletter.
