Caltech-Huntington Humanities Collaborations (CHHC) Seminar: Hillary Mushkin & Cavan Concannon

What is a border? How do we define borders? Governments define political borders and defend territories with militaries and paramilitaries, as well as through softer means including diplomacy and economic cooperation. Focusing on the borders of the Mediterranean sea, we will compare contemporary and pre-Modern visual practices that contribute to delineating and controlling movement across these borders. Mushkin looks at the technologies in use at the headquarters of Frontex, the EU Border Protection Agency, as an incomplete, interpretive process parallel to contemporary artists' drawing practices. Concannon considers these same geographic spaces prior to the invention of these governmental structures that police modern, nation-state boundaries, allowing us to imagine alternate possibilities for thinking about the Mediterranean.

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About the series: The CHHC program is organized around an ongoing series of two-year interdisciplinary research modules, developed and coordinated by a small group of Caltech faculty members and Huntington residential research fellows. The 2016–2018 CHHC module, titled "Violence and Order Past and Present," studies the various roles that violence has played in political and social order, as well as the possible norms and cultural attitudes that have governed its use. Learn more at chhc.caltech.edu.