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340                                               L. Carter and N. Walker

            about borders to two examples involving Indigenous Australians. Firstly, we look
            at  the  boundary  drawing  and  spatial  difficulties  in  developing  appellations  for
            Australian Aborigines. Secondly, we look at layered border zones/spaces within
            TEK  taken  from  Dennis  Foley’s  2001  ethnographic  text,  Repossession  of  Our
            Spirit: The Traditional Owners of Northern Sydney. Escobar (2007) believes that
            the development of such ethnographies from the interstitial spaces of modernity/
            coloniality by those living bordered lives are essential for us to progress justice. We
            conclude with some comments on the implications for science education.



            Borders and Border Spaces

              Space is conceptually nothing and everything until borders are formed, [thereby] creating
              a bordered space or place. (Rodger 2008 p. 23)
            Borders, boundaries and their study have always been of interest to social scholars.
            Newman (2006) tells us that the discipline of border studies originated with the
            fields  of  physical  and  human  geography,  and  political  science,  and  that  border
            scholars of the first half of the twentieth century saw borders/boundaries as the
            physical consequences of political power. They were hence, largely concerned with
            their description and categorisation for purposes of sovereignty and security. From
            the early 1960s, the field began to focus on the functional characteristics of borders
            and transborder contact. In the 1990s, border studies opened up to interdisciplinary
            approaches, and became interested in boundary-drawing practices and discourses
            (e.g., Berg and Van Houtum 2003). The field now lies at the “border” of cultural
            studies, ethnic studies, multicultural studies, and postmodern anthropology, and in
            addition  to  its  traditional  cartographic  preoccupations,  it  is  concerned  with  the
            contemporary conceptual questions of disciplinarity, identity, and cultural politics.
            Indeed,  two  very  recent  special  editions  of  prominent  cultural  studies  journals
            have  focused  on  borders  and  border  zones.  They  are  the  European  Journal  of
            Social Theory Volume 9 Number 2 from 2006, and the October, 2007 edition of
            Globalizations.
              For many theorists (e.g., Ashcroft 2001), a major significance of boundaries and
            borders is that they were foundational to Eurocentric modernity’s project of ratio-
            nality and regulation. Once established, b/orderings of all types worked to fix stable
            systems of guaranteed boundaries that differentiated not only territories but also
            social spheres, categories like nature and culture, the rational and the irrational, the
            human and technological, and between the scientific and unscientific. Van Houtum
            et al. (2005) cleverly use the term “b/orderings” to encode both the demarcation
            and delimitation purpose of borders, and their functional role of creating order.
            As a verb, it also alludes to the continuous processes of boundary construction.
            Borders allowed what was inside to become known, understood, ordered, controlled
            whereas what was constructed as outside, to be left unb/ordered, unknown, threat-
            ening, wild or chaotic. Borders have also allowed modernity’s subject to subsume
            and  know  the  b/ordered  object  within  the  definitional  bounds  of  foundational
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