Talking Borders. Digital Exhibition.

Talking Borders is a digital exhibition grounded in oral history interviews conducted in multiple languages with border scholars and borderland inhabitants whose memories, research trajectories, and migration biographies are entangled with shifting border regimes across the globe. The exhibition foregrounds borders as emotional and symbolic terrains—spaces where mobility, exclusion, identity, and power are continuously negotiated.

The project emerged from an advanced Master’s seminar in Public History, taught by Machteld Venken and Klaus Behnam Shad at the University of Luxembourg (Winter Term 2025), and was conceived for the 50th anniversary of the Association for Borderlands Studies. Students engaged with the interviews not as sources for retrospective interpretation alone, but as analytical material for digital curation. The exhibition employs a multi-level coding framework—descriptive (L1) and interpretive (L2)—whose accompanying visualisations render the analytical process transparent and traceable.

Talking Borders contributes to an emerging mode of transnational historiography that values listening as much as analysis, and curation as much as critique.