The Higher Research Seminar: Benjamin Rosher, University of Gothenburg - “Affective borders: ontological security and emotional attachments to state borders”

Abstract 

One of the most pressing global challenges is that our current border imaginaries are unsustainable. By the end of 2022, for reasons including conflict, globalisation, and climate change, over 281 million people currently live in a country other than their country of birth, either out of choice or necessity. Furthermore, borders obscure the racialised violence that maintain them and harm those whom they nominally seek to protect; by creating a fear of the monsters who live out there, borders limit our social worlds and opportunities in the name of protection and security. Despite this, people remain emotionally attached to borders. For many, they provide a sense of ontological security – the phenomenological security of the self.

In this session, I will explore three avenues for understanding emotional attachments to borders: Lauren Berlant’s work on Cruel Optimism, Simone Weil’s argument for the Need for Roots, and Brian Massumi’s theorisation of the Future Birth of the Affective Fact. Each of these theorists, in different ways, can help us understand why calls to “take back control” of borders can be so seductive, and why emotional attachments to borders can be so central to our ontological security seeking, despite (or even because of) the manifold harms they inflict.

Benjamin Rosher

I am an international political sociologist and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Gothenburg. My doctoral thesis explored the role that contingency plays in both producing and mediating the experience of the post-Brexit border in Northern Ireland. My research interests span critical border and ontological security studies and I have been published in high-ranking academic journals including European Security and International Political Sociology. I have submitted evidence to Parliamentary Select Committees and written research reports for both public and private sector stakeholders. I have also engaged in extensive public facing work, particularly through my role as a Research Associate with the Centre for Cross Border Cooperation and as a Research Assistant on the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey where my work has been cited in national and international media outlets including The Guardian, Daily Mirror, and Time Magazine. Finally, I am co-founder and co-convener of the Ontological Security Studies Research Network, a multi-disciplinary global network of over 150 members across all career stages working on ontological security studies.

The Higher Research Seminar is the Department's main collective seminar. The research staff and invited national and international leading scholars present ongoing research and analyses of a broad range of exciting topics of relevance for Political Science.

The Higher Research Seminar is held on Wednesdays, 13.15 to 14.30 in Eden 367, unless otherwise indicated. PhD Mid-term seminars 13:15 to 14:45. 

Convenors: Robert Klemmensen and Jonathan Polk

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The Higher Research Seminar | Department of Political Science