Sketching across borders

This article explores borderscapes as multilayered or displaced geopolitical and cultural borders through a/r/tography as living inquiry. Art making (via cartoons), arts-related research, a/r/tography, and border studies constitute a broad interdisciplinary framework for the study. The starting point is that a/r/tography as living inquiry provides an approach where interdisciplinarity can be seen more in terms of a “rupture where in absence, new courses of action unfold”, than as “a patchwork of different disciplines” (Springgay et al., 2005, p. 898). Hence, the main research question asked is: What kinds of new actions and understandings develop with ruptures involving visual arts-related research and the borderscape notion featured in this project? The focus is on the cartoons that address borders from different perspectives. The a/r/tographic viewpoints of metaphor and metonymy, openings, and embodiment are used to analyze these cartoons, their making processes, and ruptures that are linked to them. Moreover, I use general vantage points such as playfulness and temporality (memory) in my analysis. What was learned from a/r/tography in this study is how an a/r/tographic viewpoint could help to specify the symbolic ruptures within the visual and theoretical understandings of borders. In addition, the idea of playful openings was developed here to overcome not only the visual ruptures in the cartoons, but also those ruptures that are caused by the limitations of memory. Consequently, four ruptures – symbolic, visual, internal, and temporal – were approached as new actions and understandings that help to reconsider the border theory. For instance, it became clearer how the idea of borderscape touches on shifts of perspectives (identities) besides border spaces and other border processes. Thus, the observations in this paper can be used in the future for developing the study of the diversity of the border studies conceptualizations. Furthermore, the article provides insights through which to rethink connections between arts, scholarly disciplines, learning, and living inquiry; inward and outwards, as well as back and forth in time. Comic strip: Kari Korolainen