Guest edited by: Anoma Pieris, University of Melbourne

Celebratory representations of border-less geographies and the confronting realities of border conditions have provoked varied architectural responses. The border is significant in architectural discourses on war, exile, immigration, post-war reconstruction and settlement, inviting new theories of 'warchitecture', 'forensic architecture' and 'borderlands'. The spatial, physical and material conditions of borders and border-habitations have had lasting psycho-social effects described through displacement, migration or violence. This challenge of global post-national imaginings was evident at the 2014 Venice Biennale where the thematic 'Absorbing Modernity' exposed the constructed-ness of national boundaries. Borders were featured innovatively in several pavilions, such as Korea, Hong Kong, Canada, Italy, and, indirectly, Israel. The desire for sovereignty, security and national subjectivity was unsettled.

Despite the many forces for economic and political unification in the post-national era, the demarcation, relocation, deconstruction and passage across geographic borders shape contemporary national subjectivities and their constitutive architectures. Recent research has recognised the intensification of political subjectivities at the nation's (purported) periphery, its impact on marginalised subjects and the traumatic inscription of border crossings on the bodies of the politically disenfranchised.  The border has prompted many intellectual positions such as 'Border as Method' (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013) and 'Border Thinking' (Mignolo 2012) which identify the critical and epistemological significance of the periphery. This issue of Fabrications seeks to apply historical tools in understanding the phenomenon of the border, its changing meaning and its political salience. It asks how architectural history might illuminate this largely theoretical and sometimes ahistorical discourse. It hopes to question the conditions that give architecture authority, permanence and aesthetic standing through its service to the nation, and prompt new research on the architecture of border conditions.

We seek papers that question the nation and its borders and explore post-national and trans-national imaginings. Our specific focus is on sovereignty and its exceptions; on the border as an object of surveillance and security, and the crossing as a fantasy and threshold to freedom. We are interested in new historical scholarship on terrestrial and liquid borders and varied spatial conditions including walls, causeways, security zones, islands and camps; border conditions such as towns, routes and interstitial spaces that anticipate border crossings; and militarisation, border security, detention and displacement. Papers might additionally cover the history and politics of conflict zones and post-conflict scenarios, as well as everyday practices of border control. They may explore conditions of unhomeliness, migration and displacement whereby multiple borders are internalised, reproduced or memorialised in the intimate reconstitution of lived space. We are also interested in the materiality of loss, memory and dispossession that is animated in subsequent strategies of emplacement. We hope to feature a broad international spectrum of research including papers on the Asia-Pacific region.

Papers should be submitted online at www.edmgr.com/rfab by the due dates identified above.