Global Borders Research Collaboration (GBRC)

The Global Borders Research Collaboration (GBRC) aims to study how categories evolve in a context of intense flows of people, goods, and cultural references.

In the wake of the Border Crossing Symposium organized at MIT in 2012, the MIT Borders Research Initiative (with the support of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, the Foreign Languages and Literatures Section, and the Center for Bilingual/Bicultural Studies), PRESAGE Sciences Po, and the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia gather their forces to study identities, kinship, citizenship, and the sense of belonging across national borders. This unique collaboration will offer top-notch expertise on one of the most important question of our times: citizenship and identity in a global era.

GBRC will question widely used notions today such as globalization, transnationalization, and internationalization. GBRC calls out for new intellectual approaches to the enduring questions of citizenship, migration, and defining the borders of national belonging.

Scholars from our three institutions will develop joint research projects in a multidisciplinary perspective. We are particularly interested in studying how issues related to gender, race, sexuality, class, religion, are combined with culture and language, and how this very combination constantly changes, and weighs on the production and implementation of law itself: civil status, antidiscrimination law, citizenship, marriage, filiation, healthcare regulations, to name but a few themes.