COST and EastBordNet Explained
The COST IS0803 project (which in COST's language is called an Action) developed out of two workshops held in 2006 and 2007 (this was when EastBordNet was founded). The full text of the COST project can be downloaded from the COST website (Click on 'Download MoU' in the lower right corner of that website), or from here.
The original overall aims of EastBordNet:
The main aim of EastBordNet is to explore transformations of ‘Eastern’ European borders, comparing knowledge across disciplines, time periods and regions.
Part of this involves focusing on shifts in how places and peoples are valued within and across borders, including shifts in the meaning and location of “Europe” itself. In this, borders are not taken for granted; rather, the aim is to compare findings about the constant process through which borders appear, disappear, reappear and are reconfigured.
The themes of money, gender and sexuality - which always mark differences between people and places, but also involve exchanges and relations across differences – are themes some participants use to examine the expression of diverse values across and within borders.
EastBordNet works to understand how borders are made meaningful or rendered irrelevant, how they generate a sense of location, belonging, worth, distance or alienation. EastBordNet brings together a wide range of people: it particularly includes specialists working on the borderlands running from the north-east (Baltics and environs) to the south-east (Balkans and environs), but it also involves many others, including those working across the post-socialist regions of Europe (e.g. Poland and former East Germany), and those mainly interested in the conceptual and analytical means used to understand the themes of the network (borders, money, gender and sexuality).
Keyword relating to the interests of the network:
Eastern European borders; post-socialist transformation; value; money; gender; sexuality; identity and difference; cross-border exchange; border visibility; north-eastern, south-eastern Europe; mobility; border histories; border documents; concepts of East and Eastern; East-West distinctions; Balkans; Baltic states; place, location and belonging.
