Frontier Spaces: The Production of Place and Meaning in China's Borderlands

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel Proposal Application

Abstract

This panel starts from the idea that places are socially constructed and historically contingent. Nationalism, ethnicity, religion, occupation, age, and social class all affect the ways in which collectives and individuals imagine and live places, thus producing a variety of specific spatialities. Collective modes of spatial identification also crucially shape the meanings ascribed to places and social relations reproduced in places. This panel’s focus on current transformations in China’s frontier spaces highlights the historical contingency of space production and political regimes who mark their presence in the borderlands in particular ways.
In recent years, scholars have examined spaces variously conceptualized as frontiers, borderlands, and peripheries. These spaces have been fertile ground to reconsider geopolitical bordering practices and globalization’s impacts beyond the core economies of Global North. In much of the literature, frontiers, borders, and peripheries are framed as sites of crisis, struggle, and rapid transformation. This panel takes China’s Inner Asian borderland as a key site to extend these debates. Across this region, we observe a wide variety of spatial transformations informed by China’s multi-ethnic social composition and migration patterns, rapid economic growth, large-scale urbanization plans, resource extraction, and ecological strains. Such changes have spurred new spatialities in borderland regions, as physical spaces are transformed and meanings ascribed to places are challenged and reshaped. Contributing papers take a broad, relational perspective on frontiers and border spaces to examine social, ecological, economic, and political aspects of spatial changes in China’s Inner Asian borderland.

Area of Study

• China and Inner Asia

Session Organizer

• Max D. Woodworth, The Ohio State University

Chair

• Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

Individual Presentations

• Monumentalism and Gigantism in Urban Form in China’s Inner-Asian Frontier - Max D. Woodworth, The Ohio State University

• Roads and Non-places at China's Northwestern Border: Marc Augé Revisited - Agnieszka Joniak-Lüthi, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich

• Surviving the Ecology: Herders and Farmers of China's Northwestern border Region - You-tien Hsing, University of California, Berkeley

• Transforming Materialities, Imported Spatiality and Architectural Meanings in Places in Southern Xinjiang - Madlen Kobi, Ethnographic Museum, University of Zürich