My research.

Counter-mapping Malta: A study of the regime of borders through structures & noncitizen subjectivities

Welcome to the digital companion to my doctoral research.

This website showcases the research & creative outputs that emerged from four short periods of ethnographic fieldwork, a “patchwork ethnography” (Günel, Varma and Watanabe, 2020) style research conducted in Malta between 2021 and 2023. The primary goal of this research was to define and “locate” Malta’s borders by prioritizing the phenomenological, subjective experience of borders through the narratives & experiences of those who crossed them. This counter-mapping then accounts for borders not only as physical lines on maps, legal thresholds or facts (Agnew, 1994, 2008, 2010) but rather borders as lived, felt, sensed, (at times continually) navigated phenomena.

At the heart of this study is a diverse group of border-crossers, whose perceptions, interpretation, experiences, imaginaries, understandings and narratives reveal how borders are produced, enacted and reproduced in everyday life. I have immense gratitude for their generosity – they shared their time, their stories and their perspectives. Their border experiences illuminate the tensions between borders-as-structure and borders-as-encounter; their subjectivities offer insight into how bordering practices shape – and are shaped – by noncitizens in motion, on the move, migrating, in stasis…all that can be characterized as their migratory worlds. 

What emerged was a border ethnography attuned to multiplicity, relationality and the ethics of listening. This all became possible through the processes of listening, recording, thinking, writing, creating visuals, maps and a soundscape. This site presents both the analytic and creative dimensions of counter-mapping Malta – inviting viewers to think with & through borders in divergent ways.