Borders and Hospitality

Special thanks to our guest speakers, whose border stories we gratefully share with their consent: Jenneba Sie-Jallok,  Loraine Masiya Mponela, Ambreen Hai, and Gaura Narayan.

Gillian manages to get the name of her hometown wrong in this episode: it's Victoria, not Vancouver (which is not on Vancouver Island!).

We recorded this episode at the brilliant “Hostile Environments and Hospitable Praxes” conference, organised by Dr Rachel Gregory Fox at the University of Kent, UK, 23-24 June 2025. Thank you, Rachel! 

As we started to think about actually doing a podcast, we relied heavily on Stacey Copeland and Hannah McGregor’s A Guide to Academic Podcasting (2021).

Our amazing podcast editor is Steve Woodward, also known as The Podcasting Editor, without whom Gillian would sound like Moira Rose.

Gillian and Zalfa quote from previous episodes.

Zalfa and Gillian quote from Jacques Derrida’s Of Hospitality (translated by Rachel Bowlsby, to whom Gillian refers later in the episode). 

Zalfa quotes Tiziano Bonini’s essay “Podcasting as a Hybrid Cultural Form Between Old and New Media” and Michelle Hilmes’ essay “But Is It Radio? New Forms and Voices in the Audio Private Sphere”, from The Routledge Companion to Radio and Podcast Studies (2022).

Sara Ahmed writes about “the feminist ear.” 

Canadian poet David W. McFadden’s collection Great Lakes Suite (1997) inspired the dots and dashes of our podcast’s name [and Zalfa’s brief foray into Morse Code]. Gillian references his work in this episode, including the line “the dots and dashes [...] glistening in the waves” (p.192).

Elizabeth Povinelli’s essay, “The Governance of the Prior” (2011) 

Gillian mentions Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace (1795)

Mireille Rosello’s book Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (2002)

The material in this podcast is for informational purposes only. The personal views expressed by the hosts and their guests on the Borders Talk podcast do not constitute an endorsement from associated organisations.

Thanks to the School of Arts, Media and Communication at the University of Leicester for the use of recording equipment, and to the School of Cultures, Languages and Area Studies at the University of Nottingham for financial support.

Music: “Corrupted” by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com

Edited by Steve Woodward at podcastingeditor.com

Transcript

Zalfa Feghali: Welcome to Borders Talk: Dots, Dashes, and the Stories They Tell. We are Zalfa Feghali,

Gillian Roberts: and Gillian Roberts, two border studies academics in England's East Midlands from different countries with multiple passports.

Zalfa Feghali: So we're here. We're here at the University of Kent, recording live in front of a conference audience. Thank you all for being here. And thank you to Rachel Gregory Fox for organising this really fantastic conference on “Hostile Environments and Hospitable Praxes” and to the fantastic delegates and people who have shared their work and ideas over the last two days. So we're here together again, you and I, talking about borders again and continuing this season's focus on keywords. We're today discussing the theme of hospitality. And in this episode, Gillian is in the hot seat. That will make sense in a minute. But first, some reflections from us on our podcast. So we will start off with that critical paper. And then we'll move on to think about hospitality.

Gillian Roberts: Thanks, Zalfa. Critical is maybe doing a lot of heavy lifting for this bit, but I don't actually remember when or exactly why Zalfa and I decided to start a podcast. She's younger than me. She might have a better memory of this. But I do know that we talked about it in passing for ages before we finally sat down in 2023 to make a plan to make a podcast about borders happen. So armed with the experience of having listened to some scholarly and not-so-scholarly podcasts and with Stacey Copeland and Hannah McGregor's A Guide to Academic Podcasting, which I had picked up for free at a conference, but it's also available online if anyone's interested. We worked through Copeland and McGregor's to-do list and eventually came up with our title, Borders Talk: Dots, Dashes, and the Stories They Tell. Sometime after that, we recorded our first episode in my living room with a laughable attempt at a pillow fort to enhance the terrible sound quality. We also recorded our intro and outro, which we later re-recorded on proper equipment and in better conditions. This initial episode recording and all our later episode recordings would be masterfully engineered by our amazing podcast editor, Steve Woodward …

Zalfa Feghali: Hi, Steve. 

Gillian Roberts: Hi, Steve…. who made sure that I in particular was actually audible and that I didn't sound too much like Moira Rose. If you know, you know. It took us some time to find the funds to hire Steve, so we launched the podcast with our first three episodes in the summer of 2024, with eight in total for our first season.

So you might be able to see here what we covered in that first season, an introduction to borders and to border studies, gender and borderlands, the film Arrival, Gloria Anzaldua's foundational text, Borderlands/La Frontera, borders and language, border art, settler colonialism, and speculative fiction, in particular, the novel Prophet Song by the Irish writer Paul Lynch. But we also have recurring segments, namely “Borders in the News” or “Borders in the World”: we do seem to keep changing the name of this segment and at one point, we refer to it as “Borders Around the World.” And in the car on the way down from the Midlands on Sunday, we referred to it as “Borders in the Wild.” So just watch this space. It'll have many, many names, I'm sure. But in this multiply named segment, we discuss recent developments that pertain to borders or recent cultural texts that resonate with border concerns. And finally, we have the segment “Borders I Have Known” in which one of us or our guest or guests recounts an experience of border crossing. So start thinking of yours now if you would like to share. Reflecting on the content of our first season, invariably, hospitality and its inverse hostility has repeatedly surfaced in the content, whether in the main section of the episode where we and or our guests discuss particular issues or cultural objects, or in the regular segments, “Borders in the News”, “Borders in the World”, and “Borders I Have Known”. In our first episode, “Welcome: Connecting Some Dots”, Zalfa talks about sea borders and how these “can make a place more hostile to outsiders because they can give an impression of being constantly under threat, as we see in recent populist political posturing in the UK, for example”. Zalfa picks this up later with respect to the Rwanda plan and the longer trajectory of the “hostile environment” policy to try to deter people from “illegally” coming and staying in the UK. And because the news kept updating, as it does, like it says on the tin, we revisited the Rwanda plan in episode 3 when Zalfa says “but we're talking about a situation in which this bill is bound up in intersecting national discourses around the rights of asylum seekers and refugees, controversy about how they get treated when they arrive, controversy around how they arrive, about their being put up in hotels and how much they, ‘cost’ to UK society, being detained on barges. We hear stories about authorities essentially abandoning refugees and asylum-seeking people who arrive here." And of course, these stories of national security and inhospitality are not limited to the UK. We picked this up in episode three in our discussion of the 2016 film Arrival in which I say, “I spent a lot of time after seeing the film thinking about it and thinking about the political context in which the film was released, which Bran Nicol has written about [...] He reflects on the election of Donald Trump in the autumn of 2016, with, of course, a lot of discourse around walls, around who is welcome and who is not, a lot of fear mongering.” If the Rwanda Plan and the politics of Trump are examples of absence of hospitality, my own experiences told on the podcast reflect the position of a very privileged border crosser. In episode one, I recounted the story of my arrival at Heathrow as a PhD student without a visa (I was a Commonwealth citizen, and this was before 9-11) and I had no difficulties whatsoever in contrast to another student from a different country who spoke little English, who was being shouted at by the immigration official about having to get x-rayed in case he was sick. As I said in the episode, “this has always been a really powerful reminder of who is the welcome guest and who is not.” In episode 3, I tell the story of another border crossing of mine flying into the U.S. within a fortnight of 9/11 to visit some Canadian friends, and expecting a difficult time at immigration given the geopolitical circumstances. Instead, I appear to be greeted by Joey from Friends, the immigration officer literally asking me, “How you doin’?” As I say in the episode, the encounter was “so weird, and just obviously, apart from the totally punctured expectation that this was going to be a difficult thing, sometimes people with privilege are just ever so welcome, even in a time of national crisis. Ludicrously so.” 

Of course, I am a white settler Canadian, and that position facilitates my crossing of borders. Our episode 7 guests, Adam Barker and Emma Battell Lowman (also white settler Canadians), remind us both of the ease with which we can cross borders, but also the fact that these are inherently hostile spaces: “when we're crossing the border, you know, we have to tolerate somebody pointing an assault rifle at us,” Adam points out, or as Emma puts it, “it's not pleasant. They don't make it pleasant.” In order to have a “pleasant” experience, Emma observes, “in those spaces, you have to play good Canadian if you want to cross, right? And good Canadian means being, you know, not talking about those things, not sort of pushing on those kinds of areas and stories,” stories of settler colonialism, the fact that we cross borders with ease on Indigenous territories. As we quote the Métis author Cherie Dimaline’s novel, Hunting by Stars, in episode 8, the character Miigwans says, “‘that isn't our border,’ Miig gestured north. ‘That's an imaginary line drawn by politicians and land prospectors. The only thing we have to worry about is who the original people are so we can honor the lands we are on’” [378]. 

We often turn on the podcast to questions of indigeneity and settler colonialism. In episode 2, our guest, Caleb Bailey talks about borders and settler colonial contexts like Canada and the United States, in which governments “come into contact with more and more ‘impediments’ in inverted commas, in terms of encounters with Indigenous people. And the first impulse is to kind of eradicate them because they're standing in the way of the creation of a holistic, kind of, homogenous state. And then eventually when that doesn't happen, you very generously ‘invite’ them into the body politic.” But borders in North America are European and settler impositions that cut across Indigenous territories. In episode 6, our guest David Stirrup, formerly of this parish, discusses Mohawk artist Alan Michelson’s installation Third Bank of the River at the US Land Port of Entry in Massena, NY, which was commissioned by the US General Services Administration. Massena is sited on Akwesasne territory, and the photographic installation’s colours and shapes recall the two-row wampum, delivered by the Haudenosaunee to the Dutch in the early seventeenth century to illustrate their relationship. As David says, Third Bank of the River is “a rumination on the long history of cooperation and collaboration between the various communities that live there, Indigenous and non-Indigenous. So there's a celebration as well as much as anything else. And it speaks of welcoming people through that space. All of which, yeah, fine, that's definitely happening. But it's also, it cannot help but remind you that that space is Indigenous space. And being reminded that say, because you have this crossing at the Massena crossing, you cross first onto Cornwall Island, which is Akwesasne land, and then cross again because the river goes around Cornwall Island on both sides. So briefly, Cornwall Island, you are an uninvited guest on Akwesasne territory.”

So much of the discourse around hospitality on the podcast surrounds its absence, the withholding of sanctuary from people fleeing atrocities, or the refusal to acknowledge whose land we are really on at sites of crossing and policing borders. But to finish my segment with one of the loveliest of borders and hospitality from the podcast, guest Olivia Hellewell in episode 5 tells us about a trip across the border from Slovenia to Italy, visiting a winery. So I’m just going to play the audio clip.

Olivia Hellewell: when I started speaking Slovene, she immediately set off in Slovene and she was so happy that I'd started speaking that language and I think the expectation on their part would be that if there were any tourists or people visiting if they were to know any language at all it would be Italian and I just sort of tentatively hopefully asked if I might be able to speak Slovene and then from there she took us on this most amazing walk around the vineyards and the winery explaining how everything was made, their ethics and their process and the history of the place. And we just had this most amazing conversation. And I think of all the moments that really encapsulate why I feel it's so important to be able to communicate with other people in their language, like as an act of generosity and showing willing that you want to enter into their world and their kind of day-to-day experiences. That really summed it up for me. I was so grateful in that moment that I did know Slovene and that that knowledge led to that opportunity to meet those people and to speak with them. When we left they gave us a bottle of wine and we kept it for a very long time and at first we didn't know much about it other than what they just shared and we knew that it was natural wine and that was something we were very interested in. When we got home we looked it up and we couldn't believe how much this wine cost. And it's not that I attach a value to the price of the wine, but I was so moved that what had seemed like a simple act was actually a huge act of generosity on their part in return. And I've never forgotten that. It was a very tangible border crossing moment and a reminder of how speaking one language can really bring you closer to people.

Zalfa Feghali: More academics with a podcast. This is a common response that I hear from mildly or extremely irritated grant assessors. Like Gillian, I genuinely don't remember when exactly the idea of a podcast became a recurring theme of our text and voice conversations. I think it was during one lockdown or another. But I do know that I've been doing research and writing about podcasts for longer than that. And I've been thinking in particular about the forms of listening elicited by podcasts – shout out to Rachael [Gilmour - who presented on podcasts earlier in the conference] – about the ethical potentialities of that listening and the communities formed by these listening practices. So thanks to Gillian, you've seen, I could go back but there's no need, you've seen the brainstorming and negotiation process of coming up with a name for the podcast. What is clear to me from the list of discarded names is that the name on which we landed emphasizes our focus on the telling of and therefore the listening to border stories. As you've already heard, our discussions on the podcast regularly return to stories about how borders are weaponized, how they are used to divide spaces or nations or communities or languages, as well as how they are lines of connection, as in the case of Olivia's story that you just heard when she visited the cross-border winery. And in fact, in episode two, one of our guests, Deborah Toner, who grew up in Northern Ireland, describes “the absolute visceral shock [she says…] when I discovered how close together the Falls Road and the Shankill Road get at particular points, […] I spent a lot of time in Belfast growing up because my grandparents lived there but I didn't spend a lot of time in the city, and it was only like as a student really kind of going out and about in the town, and I was like ‘but they almost meet’ and like the way they've been talked about […], like they could almost be part of two different worlds. And at one point you can walk between the Shankill Road and the Falls Road in like three minutes. I thought they can't be this close, this is crazy.”

Listening to Deborah and other border stories shared with us on the podcast reveals just how bound up borders are with the stories that we tell about them: as Deborah put it, “the way they've been talked about […], like they could almost be part of two different worlds.” Border stories, then, can be just as important as the borders themselves, and participate in their own construction and fortification (or indeed, the erosion and dismantling of the borders). And as we know, and as the last two days have demonstrated, borders and borderlands can take the form of narrative constructions just as often as they can be physical sites that are spatially recognised or experienced (or indeed, not recognised or experienced, as many other border stories can testify).

On the podcast we ask: What borders can be known and how are they depicted, used, and mobilized in our everyday lives? In inviting guests and listeners to share their border stories, we enquire after the sonic, narrative, and literary qualities of these narratives. In these reflections I want to think gently through some ideas about how borders “talk,” how listening to them is an act of hospitality, and to consider some implications of sharing border stories on a podcast. What we’ve considered over the course of the existing episodes of Borders Talk, including the one we’re recording at this very moment, is what border stories actually are, and the implications of foregrounding them. So as narrative constructions, border stories can be complex, multiscalar, intergenerational; they can be individual narratives or experiences, like Gillian’s interactions with weird immigration officers; they can be stories about borders; they can be stories from borders; stories told and heard by persons whose experiences, negotiations, and navigations of diverse borders may be vastly different.

If border stories constitute a tradition in themselves, spanning a range of different forms and not heeding the boundaries of genre, they are well suited to the podcast medium, focusing and relying as it does on narrative storytelling. According to Tiziano Bonini, podcasting represents “a new hybrid, cultural form, that draws not only from radio, but also from theatre, performing arts, design, and Internet culture” [20]. Some of the essential qualities of podcasts are logical extensions of this hybridity, such as their geographic non‑boundedness by virtue of the technology used to produce them and circulate them. This cross‑border character of podcasts fits neatly with how we understand border stories. It also means that podcasts very knowingly aim to connect listeners from diverse contexts, and in so doing have the capacity to transform a heterogenous listenership into a community. We want to contend that such a community can only be produced though a listening practice grounded in hospitality.

Gillian has already touched on themes of hospitality in the podcast, and we’ll talk more about it shortly as it has particular and obvious salience in relation to our work (Gillian’s in particular), to borders and bordering practices, and of course to the conference. But until then I want to dwell for a few minutes how the creation of a listener community is facilitated by the medium of podcasting, and how listening to a border story can be an act of hospitality.

Podcasting relies on that relationship of hospitality and indeed intimacy as we’ve already heard at the conference, between hosts and guests (and listeners) in the same way that borders and their practices mark out those who are “xenoi” (foreigners) and those who are not. Derrida asks (and this is his question): “This is where the question of hospitality begins: must we ask the foreigner to understand us, to speak our language, in all the senses of this term, in all its possible extensions, before being able and so as to be able to welcome him into our country?” [Of Hospitality, p.15] (a very Derridean construction of a question!). In practical terms, on Borders Talk,as Gillian has indicated, our guests are invited to share with us, in their own terms and language, their own border stories. Helpfully, one of our guests on our episode on borders and language, Alex Mevel, explains how some of his work seeks to break down the borders thrown up even from within the same language, in this case, English. His work on “Easy Language” is about making English accessible: “It's a version of English with a simplified syntax where you make a particular conscious effort to use lexicon that is going to be more accessible or more simple to understand for a broader public.” Just as Alex’s work seeks to remove boundaries to understanding, creating the conditions for increased inclusion, podcasting also participates in creating what Benedict Anderson writing about newspapers might have described as “an imagined community”, in this case, of people listening to a border story.

Listening to a border story on a podcast mobilises another quality of the medium: according to Michelle Hilmes, “the experience” of podcasting lies in “its ability to speak in privacy -- unseen, to an unseen audience” [12]. But the privacy of the speaker is complicated by the act of listening: listeners may be experiencing a podcast using headphones, making it private, but doing so in a public setting, by listening to it on the tube. So there are lots of things to say in sound studies and media history about how podcasting remediates the listening practices developed by radio and other contemporary communication technologies, but to save time, I’ll just say that we might understand this act of listening to a podcast as taking place in what scholars have described as an intimate third space, one in which border stories have been told on the teller’s terms, and are listened to in a space that is not staked out by the bordering practices we are used to. Listening to border stories as hospitality is about an aural encounter with the Other, and happens through what Sara Ahmed might call a “feminist ear” (the feminist ear, I should say): on one hand in the intimacy and in the relative safety of the private sphere; and on the other, breaching the borders of the public sphere in small, resistant ways.

Along similar lines, in his discussion of altruistic hospitality Derrida argues that hospitality “appeals to the other without condition”, but we know that in practice this does not unfold that way [“Rams” p.153]. Of course at (hostile) borders, hospitality is entirely conditional, and there are many examples of this on the podcast and in our world more generally. Furthermore, the many conditions on which contemporary hospitality is premised create a context in which telling border stories is seen as risky and creating vulnerability: for example, apart from my border studies “origin story” which I share on episode 1, I have never since offered (and I will never offer) another border story of my own, not because I have none or because I don’t believe in the important potential of these stories, but because of a long-standing wariness that I think would be silly to abandon. I use this example only to point out that the absence of border stories does not suggest their absence, or the absence of borders, to take the reverse of Deborah’s comment about the Northern Ireland context.

So just like all those “academics with a podcast”, we like to imagine that Borders Talk has listeners, and judging from the download statistics that Gillian sends me, we have some listeners. Whether they are ‘hardcore listeners’ or accidental listeners (or indeed like in this room, captive, unsuspecting listeners) is a whole different point, and one that I early on decided is completely out of my personal control. But what is in our control is to produce a space for diverse border stories to be told, to pay attention to our own listening practices, and to model that hospitality for our listeners.

So at this stage what we’re going to do is to a less formal part of this presentation and on to more organic discussion, to put all this into action, to discuss hospitality and border studies, and then hopefully, if you are interested, to open up a space for your comments, and stories.

In the last episode, you asked me about my vulnerability “origin story.” Can I ask you how you came to work on themes and practices of hospitality? In other words, what is your hospitality “origin story”, Gillian?

Gillian Roberts: I was a PhD student at the University of Leeds – shout out to the Leeds Mafia – and I was working on two immigrant Canadian writers at the School of English. So I was working on Michael Ondaatje, the Sri Lankan-Canadian writer, and Carol Shields, the American-Canadian writer. And I was looking at their encounters with literary prize culture, both domestically and internationally, and how when they won international prizes there seemed to be a kind of recalibration of their identities like as Canadians and they became like celebrated belongings. Rejected title of my first book. 

Zalfa Feghali: Rejected by who? 

Gillian Roberts: By the publisher, obviously. So, this is what I was working on and one day, just by chance, my friend Dominic Williams (hello Dominic, if you're listening), he was doing his PhD in Cultural Studies, different department, at Leeds, and he happened to walk by and I said, “hey Dominic, whatcha you doing?” He said, “well, I'm just going to a conference.” I said, “all right, what's the conference?” He said, “it's about hospitality.” And I was like, “okay, what's that? Never mind.” And he said, “Gayatri Spivak is the keynote.” And I went, “oh, hey. Well, OK.” And I completely gatecrashed this conference that I think was organized or co-organized by a PhD student in Cultural Studies, Karima Laachir, who's now at Australian National University. So I went to listen to Spivak, but who else was there was Rachel Bowlby, who translated [Derrida’s] Of Hospitality for Stanford University Press. And I was listening to Spivak speak and I was listening to Rachel talk about the process of translating Of Hospitality and I thought, “oh my God, this is what I'm writing about,” but I hadn't known it, right? 

Zalfa Feghali:. Hmm.

Gillian Roberts: So I think I was two years into my PhD. I sort of had to rewrite everything that I had done or, you know, finesse it.

Zalfa Feghali: Which is totally fine. Just totally fine. For those of you who might be writing PhDs in the audience.

Gillian Roberts: It's totally fine to have that moment and I tell all of my PhD students about this moment. And everything just seemed to make sense. It then had like a frame to sit in. I went on to do other projects and I have kind of never really been able to leave hospitality behind. It's one of those things where probably like you and vulnerability, once you've seen it, you see it everywhere.

Zalfa Feghali: Very much so. But I guess my follow up question to this is, this is a border studies podcast. How do we link up hospitality and border studies, or how do you do so in your work?

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, so I guess when I was working on Carol Shields, there's a lot to do with the Canada-US border in her work and that was a bit like my gateway drug into border studies. And so I was even in that earlier project thinking about the work that the Canada-US border does. And unlike some of the more dramatic borders geopolitically around the world, it seems like a very benign border and one we've talked about a lot on the podcast. But what I think is really interesting is these questions of like, who is the host and who is the guest? And in my second monograph, which is on the Canada-US border, there's a chapter on travel writing, specifically the travel writing of the Canadian poet David W. McFadden traveling around the Great Lakes. And oftentimes he encounters in Canada, American tourists who don't know they're in Canada. And he keeps having to tell them that they're in Canada and they're just really uninterested and somehow forget that they've crossed a border. So there's this whole sense of like, OK, well, who is the host and who is the guest? And can you be the host if your guest thinks that they're the host? So in those kind of vignettes in those books that he wrote. And they're very humorous, but I think they're very telling for the Canada-U.S. relationship. So it's been a really useful way to think about power and the space of the border as kind of potentially, we would think, assigning these roles of hosts and guests. But then if you haven't got the receptive audience, you know, in those examples, the American border crosser who understands they're now a guest on the other side of the border, then sort of what do we do with that? And thinking about how the power of the host position can be compromised. That's one way, anyway, of thinking about it. But, of course, as I alluded to in the initial discussion for today, this is a settler colonial border, right? And who were the real hosts in this land, right? Who are the real hosts on that territory? And so I think there's a lot to be said about usurped host positions. And it's something, not using this language, but I think language that's really helpful, Elizabeth Povinelli's idea of “the governance of the prior”, where settler government sort of presupposes that it's the settlers who are in the position of the prior, like they were there first. But what that does to Indigenous people is that, and I think she says, the prior became the foreign without actually having moved, right? They haven't gone anywhere.

Zalfa Feghali: And so... And that would be Indigenous people were foreignized 

Gillian Robert: Exactly

Zalfa Feghali: within what would become a settler colonial state.

Gillian Roberts: That's right. That's right. So those are the questions around which I tend to circulate in relation to hospitality and borders. But you've done some work on another border, namely the Mexico-US border. Does that chime with your research?

Zalfa Feghali: So I work, as some people will know, primarily on the US-Mexico border, although I've done some comparative work. And I do think about notions of hospitality, but only in as much as I think about hostility, I think. And one of the more famous, very well-known lines, as you know, is the idea at the US-Mexico border, which came into being in 1848 after the Mexico-American War, is that “the border crossed us.” So the border was created, it was drawn, and overnight, people who had been living in Mexico were suddenly living in America, or what later becomes the United States, not welcomed, not treated as citizens, in fact, not citizens, even though they had been guaranteed citizenship. So the very common saying is that we didn't cross the border, we did not come here, the border crossed us. And I suppose that's my through line into hospitality.

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, absolutely. Like completely changing the rules of the game by drawing the line.

Zalfa Feghali: Yeah, that's what a settler colonial system does, as we've heard over the last couple of days. Can I ask you, about, I mentioned Derrida, lots of people have been talking about Derrida over the last couple of days, but I know – 

Gillian Roberts: This Derrida? 

Zalfa Feghali: Gillian has her homework with her. Are there specific thinkers or theorists who are touchstones in your work that you consistently return to?

Gillian Roberts: Yeah, so, you know, we have heard a lot about Derrida over the last couple of days, and Derrida is really central to my hospitality origin story. And of course, he's also reflecting on many different texts, but on Kant's Perpetual Peace [1795], right? And this notion of the right to hospitality, the universal right to hospitality, but it is conditional. And that's something else that we've been talking about. So what does it mean to have a hospitality that is conditional? And that's something I think that Derrida takes up in really interesting and challenging ways. And I have found that really useful as a Canadianist because of the way in which the Canadian nation state has projected itself as a hospitable space, historically, despite treating lots of different communities like absolute garbage. But what it likes to project to the world is this amazing welcome, right? But we've heard many times over the course of the last couple of days about, about the conditions of hospitality, Leah [Cowan] this morning was talking about the net benefit, right? If you have to rely on the net benefit of migration, then, you know, is that a sign of hospitality? And that's something that Mireille Rosello picks up on in Postcolonial Hospitality, that if a state is accepting immigrants for economic reasons, then that isn't an act of hospitality, or at least it's not an act of infinite hospitality, those conditions are very much there. So she's been important as well. And she's thinking through the French example in particular, and in French literature and cinema, which we've also heard about over the last couple of days. But I think it has been really useful for thinking about Canada. And I was looking at the latest statistics in terms of accepting refugees, for instance, in Canada, Canada accepted more than 100,000 Syrian refugees since 2015, more than 300,000 Ukrainian refugees since the Russian invasion. And yet there are communities that have not been welcomed, right? We don't have amazingly high statistics for Palestinian refugees. And there are lots of terrible stories about how refugees from Somalia were treated in earlier decades. So it's that real disconnect between the way the nation wants to project itself as this welcoming space and then what's it like on the ground? And are people being treated equally hospitably? That has been really useful, again, as a frame to think through. And I think all of those contradictions that Derrida explores are so useful. Again, we have heard about this. If you have the power of the host position, and he talks about the, you know, the master in his own home, who retains his authority of being in his own home, that is not the same as he says, giving space to the other. Or one of the quotations that I just have to go back to, because I go back to it all the time, and it's so different to what any nation state would actually do: “Let us say yes to who or what turns up before any determination, before any anticipation, before any identification, whether or not it has to do with a foreign or an immigrant, an invited guest or an unexpected visitor, whether or not the new arrival is a citizen of another country, a human, animal, or divine creature, a living or dead thing, male or female” [Of Hospitality, 2000:77]. That's from Of Hospitality and I just think that is such a radical challenge to how the nation-state operates in relation to even what it thinks of as its benevolent generosity to people outside its borders.

Zalfa Feghali: That certainly doesn't translate into the sort of place-marketing strategies that we see in Canada and elsewhere. 

Gillian Roberts: Yeah. 

Zalfa Feghali: Well, I wonder if we can, just being mindful of time, if we might want to reflect a little bit on some of the themes that have emerged, I suppose, repeatedly over the last couple of days, before throwing out this microphone very carefully to the very generous audience who have been listening very patiently to us. We've been thinking about active listening. We've been hearing about communities of care, whose voices and stories need to be foregrounded and why that matters, and forms and genres. I think you were saying this yesterday, that how they circulate and the ways in which different forms and genres will be foregrounded or take precedence; we've been reflecting on extractive versus ethical approaches. And really what has been great, for me at least, is hearing about not just theory, but praxis and lots of people actually using that word in its most useful form, I guess. But also storytelling, the act of storytelling as an intimate act, but the act of telling a story as making visible, as making agentic, as foregrounding agency. And so on this point of agency, I think, we can invite any of you who might want to share a story about a border or a story about a border you have known or a reflection on anything related to questions of hospitality or hostility over the last couple of days.

Jenneba Sie-Jallok: Okay, so my name is Jenneba Sie-Jallok. When you said borders, I thought it can't think of any experience that I have with borders at all. But I remembered an experience that I had traveling from Athens to Bari in Italy in 2017. And afterwards, I just jotted it down: From Athens to Bari. I recognise the harsh voice from somewhere as the dipping sun catches his uniform. I think at first it's him, then realise the rhythm, the beat, that it's me. Yes, I'm British. You want to see my passport? Again? Dense gaze from him to me, unsure. Apparently, I turn my head to airport queue, seek signs of tuts, shaking heads in my defence, but no look is caught. All eyes are down. Too news-heavy. Refugees, illegals, and me in my boho portobello skirt. I could be. I quell my anger, count to five, move on, as engine readies. Fellow passengers, I know you well but not at all. Touch forehead, shoulders, chest, to bless, as wheels tuck in and I slip a quiet Hail Mary from my animus lips. Old habits. Tectonic plates are shifting. Western empires trembling. We land. Ciao, Italia. Glad to see you, I think. Now to passport control. Again, baggage, heavy heart. I question my presence as I step upon your bloody soil.

Zalfa Feghali: Thank you very much. Yeah. 

Gillian Roberts: That was amazing. Thank you so much. I know that's a tough act to follow. But would anyone else like to share a border story?

Loraine Masiya Mponela: I'm Loraine Masiya Mponela. I live in Coventry. So my story, I was traveling to Norway. I've forgotten the year, but it was to attend a summer school. So at Amsterdam, as we were changing planes, I showed my paperwork. It was a funded, summer school, and so they said, “oh. Why is it saying that everything is paid for? We don't believe that.” So I was delayed, yeah, I was delayed. I didn't miss the plane, but nearly. And I had so much stress and anxiety. They were like, “no, we need to talk to the organizers first, because we don't believe this. You live in UK. How can you not fund yourself or something like that?” So it's something that I have not even understood to say, does that really happen that people can't go on scholarships because you live in the UK? But to me, it was just strange that I was delayed for having the right paperwork. You know? Yeah. So that is my story. 

Gillian Roberts:That's amazing. Thank you for sharing, Loraine. And just to follow up on that, because again, you'd think the paperwork would facilitate the hospitality and it did exactly the opposite because of their suspicion.

Loraine Masiya Mponela: Yeah, they had to ring the University of Bergen [?] to confirm. That's that's the point when I was really... But otherwise, I was stuck.

Gillian Roberts: And that also relates to another point about the border regime entering universities where universities are now, as we all know, especially this country, expected to be doing the work of the state when it comes to monitoring and surveilling students in particular. But that's a very interesting, to say euphemistically, twist on that on that particular configuration. Thank you so much for sharing.

Zalfa Feghali: Yea, thank you. Does anyone else feel brave? Doesn't have to be the literal crossing of a national border. Borders, as we know, can take many forms, including just a practice.

Gillian Roberts: I've got one. Yes, 

Zalfa Feghali: Yes!

Gillian Roberts: if we have time. 

Zalfa Feghali: We do.

Gillian Roberts: I always have one. 

Zalfa Feghali: Which border will you have crossed today? 

Gillian Roberts: Well, it's the usual suspect. I've actually written about this before, but I was looking recently at what I had written, and I thought, God, Gillian, you missed the point. And it's in print, so that's a bit embarrassing. So this is when I was a teenager, and I was living in my hometown of [Victoria], British Columbia, Canada, which is on Vancouver Island. And I had a friend who lived in Bellingham, Washington State. This is Aubrey, who's featured, I have referred to her in earlier episodes. Hello again, Aubrey. So Vancouver Island is very close to the Canada-US border, but it's a sea border. So I was going to take the ferry, it's called the Anacortes Ferry, to visit her in Washington State. It's a very picturesque route, if anyone's ever traveling there. And what I didn't even know was possible, but has become fairly commonplace, was that I was going to cross the Canada-US border while I was still on Vancouver Island, right? And this is by virtue of going behind a chain link fence where U.S. immigration officials would ask me questions. And I was so thrown by this. I wasn't prepared for this at all. I was prepared to have those questions when I actually got to Washington State. But I was as far as I was aware on Vancouver Island and they were asking me what I did. I said I went to UVic. They wanted to know what I was majoring in at UVic. And I felt really angry. I felt like like, “why are you asking me these questions here like, this is the United States? This is not the United States. Thank you very much.” And of course, when we disembarked at the other end, I got all of those questions again. Um, from the border guards. And meanwhile, Americans were just walking by merrily. I thought, that is so unfair. Like, how come this happened again? And how come this was happening on my land? It's not my land, right? Um, so this... 

Zalfa Feghali: Small details.

Gillian Roberts: Exactly. So this was, uh, Sidney, British Columbia, north of, of where, where I lived as a teenager. But this is W̱SÁNEĆ territory, right? So my rage is very settler colonial rage. And I had, I had no awareness at that point that, of course, I was the usurping host at that point who was feeling my very righteous indignation. I still think it's pretty weird, but there are some much more important layers beneath that experience of, you know, who is the host here.

Zalfa Feghali: Well, thank you, because you have given me the opportunity again to talk about islands or to ask you about islands. And I wonder, well, I suppose I wonder if you think it's because of the island situation.

Gillian Roberts: I mean, that arrangement also exists in, like, Calgary Airport, though. So I think, yeah. And I think you can clear U.S. Customs in Dublin Airport as well.

Zalfa Feghali: Yes you can now.

Gillian Roberts: So this de-territorializing of borders is becoming a bit normalized, but I think it's very weird. But there is something, I think, about the island that like, I mean all borders are fictional as we know. If you look at a map of Canada and there's kind of a squiggly border on the east coast and then it's a straight line the 49th parallel and then you get to the west coast and then there's a squiggly line and this time it's in the water and this this line is perhaps, you know, as David McFadden would say, “the dots and dashes [...] glistening in the waves” [192]. I mean, they don't. It's deeply fictional there. But maybe that facilitates the chain link fence, actually, that sense of, well, where are we going to put this? If the border is actually in the water, then it might as well be here.

Zalfa Feghali: Those jagged edges, as we've been saying.

Gillian Roberts: Yes, come down. I feel like a game show host. Come on down!

Zalfa Feghali:  We have no goodies.

Ambreen Hai: So my name is Ambreen Hai. And this is a story about when I was 19. I should start by saying I'm originally from Pakistan. So I had gone to college in America on the East Coast, Massachusetts, had a wonderful year. And because I could not afford to go home for a year, I was going home for the first time after an entire school year around May. This is 1984. So the flight, of course, was not direct because you don't fly directly to Pakistan. So starting from Boston, we went to stop somewhere maybe in London and then London…the flight from London would always stop, or anywhere in Europe, would stop in Dubai, somewhere in the Middle East. People would disembark, more people would come in, and then you get to Karachi, which is where I was going, and so from Dubai to Karachi was only an hour. But the whole thing took about 18, 19, 20 hours, literally from airport to airport. So I was exhausted. So by the time we got to Dubai, so this is not exactly a border, but it was kind of an in-transit border, if that makes any sense, because I was in Dubai, and they made us disembark in Dubai. It wasn't something I was prepared to do, but okay, everybody get off the plane, we have to do something with the plane, whatever. And I was traveling alone for the first time, and this is, it was nerve wracking. So anyway, so we could wander around the Dubai airport, couldn't go out of the airport into Dubai, because we didn't have visas. But that's okay, I was ready to go home, dying to get back to my family. And in Dubai, when everybody else was getting back on the plane, we had to go through some kind of check. There was this man who was... OK, I don't want to sound stereotyping, but he was wearing a robe. He was Arab. And here's the interesting thing. In many of the stories you've been telling, the immigration official stops you, asks you questions. But what struck me as I was listening to you is that, in my experience, he didn't ask me any questions. He just wouldn't say a word. He just held up his hand and stopped me, and I couldn't go any further. And he wouldn't say a word. And I was terrified, actually, because I didn't know what was happening. And as still a teenager, I was asking him questions: “What do I do? Can you tell me what I'm supposed to do? Do you want my passport?” I don't remember what I said. And he just wouldn't answer. And I was stuck in limbo at this border in Dubai, an hour from home. But I couldn't get there until I could get on the plane. Finally, a woman comes. And she said, “oh, he can't talk to you because you're a woman.” I'm not kidding you. Anyway, so then she just, you know, looked at my bags or whatever I had and said, “yeah, you can go.” And I walked back onto the plane shaking, both with sort of the sheer, you know, the stress of having gone through this weird experience where I didn't know why I was being stopped by a man who wouldn't tell me, who wouldn't talk to me. And I would say one thing that that had never happened to me in Pakistan. It was, again, people talk about Islam and whatever as sort of this monolithic thing, which it's not, because there are different practices. And to me, coming back for the first time from being away, coming back to a Muslim country, I had never experienced this weird experience of being gendered in such a way that as a woman alone, I could not be addressed by a strange man. And I remember thinking, so I was so angry because what is he doing there? If he can't talk to women, then why is he in an airport? Anyway, so that was my, I got home, I was fine. Lost my luggage, but that's okay. It got back, melted chocolates for my baby sister.

Gillian Roberts: Thank you. Thank you, Ambreen.

Zalfa Feghali: Thank you so much for that, Ambreen.

Gillian Roberts: It makes me think there's like a choreography to border crossing that we think we know until we come up against there's a whole other choreography that you know no one's shown us or taught us or and and what what do you do? It's just like you have to freeze until the choreography gets explained. But yeah, thank you. That's that's quite the story.

Zalfa Feghali: And I think a great example of how borders make acute those intersectional identities. But, you know, following maybe like Karen Barad, thinking about interference as well and that wave formation that Barad theorizes.

Gillian Roberts: If there are no other stories that people want to share, Rachel, did you want to? Oh, we have another one. Yes.

Gaura Narayan: One last, one last one. Thank you. Hi, my name is Gaura Narayan, and I'm from New York. And my story is a funny one, and it's actually not really mine. It's my husband's. This was many, many years ago. Our children used to play ice hockey. And my husband was driving them from New York to Québec for a hockey competition. I think my son was competing, and my daughter had been sent. I was looking forward to a lovely week by myself. When I got a call from the Canadian border where they'd stopped him, they wouldn't let him go across into Québec because he was taking our children without my written consent. Wow. And so yeah, they wouldn't let him and until they'd spoken with me and I had said, “No, these are my children. This is my husband, and he's allowed to take them across the border.” After that, we just permanently kept a thing in the car, which said, “This is my husband. This is his name. This is his passport number. And he's allowed to carry our children across the border. And he's not stealing them from me.” So yeah, that's my story.

Zalfa Feghali: “Please, take them, I want my week off!” Thank you so much”

Gillian Roberts: I thought you were going to say they stopped them because of a hockey rivalry across the border. 

Gaura Narayan: Yes, it was the Mission Cup. Exactly. 

Gillian Roberts: But thank you so much for sharing. Fantastic.

Zalfa Feghali: Thank you. I think it's always nice to end with a laugh. So thank you very much for that, Gaura. 

Gillian Roberts: And thank you to all our listeners for bearing with us. 

Zalfa Feghali: Thank you to our captive listeners today and hardcore listeners wherever they may be. Thank you very much.

Zalfa Feghali: What borders have you known? Tell us your stories.

Gillian Roberts: Until next time, we've been Zalfa and Gillian on the line. Thanks for listening.