Border matters: situations, technopolitics, and inscriptions

Borders are material arrangements that do not evolve seamlessly. The technologies of border and immigration enforcement are plagued with what ifs, arrangements that do not pan out, and futures that never materialize but temporarily have us imagine and inhabit specific conditions. Enforcement infrastructures are productive. They are constructed in the pursuit of political objectives. Borders are constituted through matter that institute and are made through relations, practices and ideas; they draw/are drawn together by people and organizations. To examine smart borders in this manner is to tend to their material and semiotic dimensions. It is to observe, describe, recompose, and question its moments of emergence as differentiated relational arrangements across time. This essay, which builds on critical race and feminist STS, border studies, and American studies, is a methodological reflection on how to excavate border matters as sedimented assemblages. It calls for the study of borders through historical methods and an ethnographic sensibility attuned to relations in situations, technopolitics, and inscriptions.