María Lois

Heritage-ized Places and Spatial Stories: B/Ordering Practices at the Spanish-Portuguese Raya/Raia

Abstract European Union (EU) internal borders and borderlands have lately become tourist attractions and destinations. Border signs, narratives and feelings have the potential to assume the form of amenities for visitor enjoyment. This paper addresses the politics of representation of the EU interstate borders by examining the Spanish-Portuguese borderline. Located on both sides of the boundary, interpretation centers and border museums display different activities and border spatialities. As experiential and cultural places, these sites b/order meanings through a material and relational affectivity that casts the border, in terms of cultural governance, as a space of representational syncretism.

Scalar politics of border heritage: an examination of the EU’s northern and southern border areas

ABSTRACT This paper studies the production and representation of border heritage in tourist sites and events. Understanding heritage as a form of collective memory, subject to continual active renegotiation in which past events and artifacts are portrayed selectively, border heritage is a focal element in the shaping of spatial identities. The empirical focus is on the EU border regions that have become arenas for collaborative tourism development. Since the internal border regions are the key sites of the territorial cohesion policy of the EU, the selection of a particular heritage may be indicative of the development of the spatial identities in the area. Yet the type of the border has an impact on the modes of heritage-making. Drawing on various materials, documents and fieldwork at sites of heritage tourism, the study examines how the traditions and past events of the Finnish-Swedish and Spanish-Portuguese borders are memorialized in EU-funded tourism development. The approaches of geographical scale and scalar politics are employed as an analytical lens through which the sites and events of border heritage-making are examined. The study shows that border heritage in the EU border areas is constructed through multiple scales, thus offering parallel versions of the past.

Estructuración y espacio: la perspectiva de Lugar

This article introduces a research line developed from the intersection between Social Theory and Human Geography, that is, the perspective of Place. This perspective is a theoretical and methodological proposal developed from the threads of the Structuration Theory, by exploring the possibilities of the inclusion of space as a key element for social life structuration. The main point of this work is, in one side, to underline how the dialogue between disciplines opens frameworks to analyse social and political life, through the perspective of Place; and, in the other, to deepen in a geographical heuristic tool to update questions about the relationship between theory and methodology in research processes.