ROUTE BIOGRAPHIES: WALKING AND WRITING AS METHODS FOR RESEARCHING BORDER REGIONS

Routes and borders as well as walking and writing are at the heart of this research. How is this world at once enmeshed and separate? Distant and close? Universal and particular? Fluid and fixed? We want to address these questions through the missing dialogue between routes and borders, applying walking and writing as two mutually connected experimental methods for researching border regions. In comparison to walking, writing as a method is an under-researched topic as there is a persistent belief that writing comes at the end of a scholarly enquiry, following the consecutive read-research-write logic. We want to loosen the rigidity of these prescribed steps and use writing as a full-bloodied method in its own right – an “art of knowing”, vital to broader methodological and epistemological concerns that bring walking and writing more closely together. A biographic approach to routes will allow us to reflect on the complex interplay of the temporal and spatial, the material, economic, cultural, political as well as the every-day aspects of selected routes, organised around five case studies. The proposed project takes a walk with Istrian peninsula, an under-researched area in north-eastern Adriatic, characterized by heterogeneous and “moving” images of places, people and things, forming an important part of the cultural, economic and political make-up of Europe. Istria, replete with borders and routes, serves this methodological experiment well, as it has long been defined by its position as a frontier space contested by competing empires and states (the Muslim East and Christian West, the Habsburg Empire, the Venetian Republic, the Ottoman Empire), ethnic, linguistic and national divisions between people living along the coast and in the hinterlands (that became increasingly evident in the 19th century along the Eastern Adriatic coast), as a borderland between the communist East and the capitalist West (after 1945) and other contemporary regional divisions (Mediterranean–Balkans–Alps–Central Europe). These competing traditions continue to resonate in the contemporary representations of cultural spheres in Istria, today shared by three nation states – Slovenia, Croatia and Italy. While the borders of various kinds have been critical for defining the Istria region, we propose to shift the perspective to routes as an alternative place-making device. We argue that routes – always in dialogue with borders, – critically reflect on existing notions of locality. Walking and writing seem to be tailored to research on routes, while routes, either new or well-beaten, are intertwined in various ways with walking and travelogues.