The construction and negotiation of borders. Discourses and social practices related to the border between Norway and Russia.

BORDERS; SOCIAL PRACTICE This project will focus on discourses and practices related to the Norwegian-Russian border in the borderlands. The border represents barriers and opportunities. More than 50 0000 people cross the border every year. The research question is how different discourses and perceptions concerning the Russian-Norwegian border and borderlands are created and inscribed in people?s private and professional lives, and in institutions and policies on different arenas. The arenas chosen are the political-administrative, police, cultural exchange, education and leisure tourism. The study will be undertaken on the basis of the academic discourse known as border studies (Rosaldo, Newman, Paasi etc). The political-administrative arena will be studied through a discourse analysis of documents and interviews with people that have significant contact across the borders. Another frontier aspect has to do with the way the border is under surveillance and control, functions that employ lots of peopl e. In this project focus will be on perceptions, knowledge and attitudes in police staff on both sides concerning border control problems and collaboration. Another set of issues relate to the borderlands as a sphere for cross-cultural communication and interaction. One perspective is to look at borderlands as an arena for exchange of arts and folklore, and how these contacts give rise to public and individual border narratives, often modified and spread through media exposures. Cultural exchange also in cludes tourism; how tourists perceive the Norwegian-Russian border as such and the borderlands, and how the presentations from the tourism industry, hosts and guides, influence the perceptions of this particular border and the adjacent countries. As the b oundary also is a border between languages, this project will focus on the significance of language skills for perceptions of border and border practice, and student exchange as a way into international careers.