Our goal is to build excellence in the knowledge of borders and advance border management in Canada and worldwide. The Centre for Global Studies welcomed the new Borders in Globalization (BIG) project over the summer. Borders in Globalization (BIG) is a 7-year international research collaboration led by Dr. Emmanuel Brunet-Jailly. The project will explore the understanding of borders—real, remote
and virtual—in the 21st century. BIG creates a partnership involving 23 universities and 34 non-academic partners from Canada, the US, Europe, Asia and the Middle East. It is funded through a $2.3-million Partnership Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), as well as $1.4 million from project partners. The partnership will promote excellence in border studies, create new policy and foster knowledge transfer in order to address globalizing forces of security, trade and migration flows, and to understand the challenges of technologies, self-determination and regionalization around the world that are affecting borders and borderlands. Roundtables between policy makers and academics will serve as a platform to launch research that will in turn support policy forums, summer schools, and conferences. The resulting outputs will include policy reports, briefs, and books informing both theory and practice related to borders. The project will provide opportunities for graduate students in the research and outreach activities at UVic, and it will also bring leading border experts to UVic as visiting scholars.
