Constellation of truths: Towards a conceptualization of borders, (un)civil society, and contentious politics
April 7th & 8th, 2025, University of Victoria.
Members of the Borders in Globalization (BIG) Lab team hosted a workshop event in April 2025 bringing scholars from across the world together to discuss issues of populism, civil society contention, and border politics. The workshop featured panel presentations by emerging and established scholars working on topics including the discursive making of borders, the politics of resistance in border regions, the imperial and colonial dimensions of borders, and the role of populism and ‘post-truth’ in border contention.
Dr. Jeff Corntassel, the lead of BIG’s Pillar 1 on Indigenous Internationalisms, gave the opening keynote address, along with BIG team members Dr. Emma Swan, Dr. Maria Sigridur Finnsdottir, and Jules Soupault.
The workshop also offered the team members an opportunity to present their novel theoretical framework – ‘Constellation of Truths’ (CoT). The CoT framework is rooted in two assumptions: first, that truths and narratives play a crucial role in the (re)production and contestation of borders, bordered subjects, and border identities. Second, that hegemonic truth is in crisis in current political climate, as evidenced in rise of populist and authoritarian politics. Rather than understanding this era as being one of ‘post-truth’ – which presupposes a prior era where truth was important in politics – we contend that truth was also been contested, resisted, and produced through interaction. We argue that as (un)civil society actors in the borderlands are invested in intervening, attempting to construct alternative political imaginaries or producing knowledge in the borderlands, their struggles are generative of a constellation of truths. Within this constellation, diverse voices, narratives, and truth claims all interact with differing degrees of power to construct and broaden the realm of political imaginaries.
See the full call for papers.