The impact of rebordering on cross-border cooperation. A social semiotic approach to borders' symbolic meaning

This research seeks to better understand how the symbolisation of national borders is performed in the context of integrating cross-border metropolitan regions and from the perspective of their local and regional political authorities and population. Borders are powerful symbols that play a key role in legitimizing a vision, conveying place identities and stimulating emotions. Their meaning is however not pre-given but results from a complex and contested process of symbolic encoding predicated on articulations between political projects, everyday experience, and collective memories. The production, use and interpretation of borders as symbolic resources in various cross-border cooperation discourses is therefore at the heart of symbolization politics. This project aims at specifically examining the ways in which border-related symbolisations are created and mobilised as sense-making frames in cross-border spatial planning and place branding. Social semiotics attentive to the way people use semiotic 'resources' (i.e., signifiers, actions, objects) both to produce communicative artefacts and events and to interpret them in the context of specific social situations and practices will be considered together with critical discourse analysis. Empirically, the project is structured in two part that are mobilizing the same theoretical framework but involve different and complementary case study analyses. The part undertaken by the PI will first perform a comparative qualitative analysis of three emblematic cross-border metropolitan areas in Europe (Basel, Greater Copenhagen and Greater Geneva). The insights gained will then be mobilized to perform a strategic diagnosis of the Luxembourg cross-border metropolitan region. The part dedicated to the PhD will examine border symbolisation processes in a selection of European cross-border urban agglomerations, hence providing additional insights from different contexts.