Page 365 - Cultural Studies of Science Education
P. 365
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