Talking borders. From Local Expertise to Global Exchange

The Top Citizen Science experiment Talking borders. From Local Expertise to Global Exchange unravels the potentials and limits of bringing in non-scientific expertise in the generation of knowledge. It aims to understand how differences of expertise are socially and culturally constructed. The experiment turns the Association for Borderland Studies 2nd World Conference, which will take place in Vienna and Budapest in July 2018 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire, into a site of scientific investigation itself. The project asks: (1) what do borders mean to border scholars (trained experts)? (2) What do borders mean to young adults from the (ex-) Habsburg area (non-trained experts)? (3) What do borders mean to citizens from the (ex-) Habsburg area regardless of their age or training? And: (4) what new knowledge does a global trans-border encounter between non-trained and trained border experts reveal? The experiment consists of three aspects: (a) It will gather 100 face-to-face dialogues about the meaning of borders. 100 non-trained experts (first year students in the humanities recruited from universities in border regions throughout the ex-Habsburg area) dialogue with 100 trained experts (border scholars working on non-European topics recruited among the conference participants) as equals. (b) The 100 dialogues are made publicly available on the project website. A press release throughout the ex-Habsburg area will invite citizens to visit the website, to create their own dialogues about the meaning of borders, and to upload these on the project website. (c) The project will also host a global digital café for 100 working days on a Facebook page, where parts of the 100 dialogues are posted and commented on by a gradually widening group of experts. The Facebook page will report how scientific knowledge on the global meaning(s) of borders is generated in a cumulative collective learning experience. The unique TCS experiment uses the platform of a World Conference in order to lift the borders of expertise, age and method in science. The TCS project opens up a scientific conference in order to bring in the expertise of non-trained experts, i.e. first-year students, to the very arena where science is presented and exchanged. Engaging border scholars in a citizen science project on the humanities aims to bring us closer to acknowledging and understanding the limits of the production and consumption of science.

On July 10-14, 2018, the Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS) held its Second World Conference in Vienna and Budapest. The meeting was attended by 448 participants from 49 countries, including renowned experts and practitioners, spanning all fields of the humanities and the social sciences. The ABS is the world's largest academic organization dedicated to the systematic study and exchange of ideas, information and analysis of international border, and the processes and communities engendered by such borders. The Second ABS World Conference had as its central topic Border-Making and its Consequences: Interpreting Evidence from the 'post-Colonial' and 'post-Imperial' 20th Century and was co-organised by the University of Vienna and the Central European University on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the dissolution of the Double Monarchy. The world academic conference of the Association for Borderlands Studies was turned into a site of scientific investigation itself, where citizen scientists met border scholars as equals for a cross-disciplinary (border/citizen science) experiment. In turning the 2018 ABS World Conference into a platform for a Citizen Science experiment, the Talking Borders project brought us to the applied dimension of border research: 'Border research then takes on an applied dimension, as we seek to discover, and promote, those mechanisms which enable borders to be opened, reducing the frictions and tensions of socially constructed difference. This is the desire to "overcome" borders through re-imagining them as places where people can meet, to overcome the social construction of spatial fixation (Van Houtum 2002). This is a major challenge of border research-to understand the functional impact and role of borders in a world which has become more spatially flexible, where territory and group affiliations and identities are undergoing a process of internal restructuring' (Newman (2003 p. 23). This Citizen Science project asked: 1. What do borders mean to border scholars? 2. What do borders mean to young adults from the (ex-) Habsburg area? 3. What new knowledge does a global encounter between citizen scientists and border scholars reveal? The Experiment consisted of two aspects: a. It gathered 43 face-to-face dialogues about the meaning of borders. b. It hosted a global digital café for 100 working days, where extracts from the dialogues were posted so that people could comment on them. The online page demonstrated how scientific knowledge on the global meaning(s) of borders is generated. The project aimed to offer a solid empirical data basis for future research in border studies.