Team

Dr. Christophe Sohn is an urban geographer and border scholar working as a senior researcher at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER). His research agenda revolves around cross-border regional governance and the mobilization of borders as a resource in various border cities across Europe and in the US-Mexico borderlands. As the principal investigator of the BOMIOTICS project, Christophe focuses on examining how border artifacts are employed as semiotic resources in cross-border cooperation initiatives, with particular emphasis on the Franco-Luxembourg border and the trinational agglomeration of Basel.

“My interest in border semiotics emerged during my research visit to San Diego-Tijuana. Despite the challenging presence of a militarized border wall, I observed that local stakeholders promoting cross-border regional integration actively mobilized the border as a symbolic resource through specific meaning-making strategies aligned with their everyday transborder practices, imaginaries, or projects. This observation led me to explore the critical potential of social semiotics for the study of borders and their changing meaning through a multi-year research project dedicated to the symbolic recoding of borders in the context of cross-border regionalization."

Kamil Bembnista graduated in sociology and communication studies with a special focus in border research. He is particularly interested in the concept of the uncertainty of borders and what it means to be exposed to them, which has been also the main inquiry of his PhD thesis. Since November 2024, he works as a postdoctoral researcher in the BOMIOTICS project at LISER, focusing on the Basel case-study. Before joining the team, he worked on the topic of borders in an interdisciplinary field between documentary filmmaking, urban and regional planning, design and architecture e.g. at the Department of Regional Planning at the Brandenburg University of Technology in Cottbus, Germany.

"A visual approach to the study of borders and borderlands has accompanied me since the beginning of my research. I see the visualization of grievances, asymmetries, power relations, but also opportunities for innovation that borders bring with them, and the analysis of visual communication related to borders as an essential task for border studies. In my dissertation, for example, I not only addressed the question of how borders create meaning by analyzing them through multimodal discourse analysis and visual social semiotics, but I also produced films that show social dynamics related to borders.”

Jerome Jakob is a social-cultural anthropologist specializing in border studies, with a background in cultural sociology and migration research. His primary interest lies in the social production of knowledges, practices, and realities. As for example, the co-creation of (im)material worlds. Within the framework of the BOMIOTICS project, Jerome works on his doctoral dissertation with a specific focus on two case studies involving cross-border cooperation in Frankfurt (Oder)-Słubice and Alzette-Belval. His ongoing research centers around the symbolic role of national borders in cross-border agglomerations in Europe.

"As an anthropologist, I am passionate about exploring the nuances of regional living environments. My interest in the different meanings of intra-European borders was sparked by my involvement in a scientific project researching the integration of refugees. I am fascinated by the multiple attributions of meaning of a border by different individuals exposed to bordering. Working in an interdisciplinary research team enables a diverse perspective for studying these meaning-making processes. By combining ethnography and social semiotics with geography, I hope to contribute to a more profound understanding of the everyday worlds of borderland(er)s."

Loris Pagnani is a Historian, with a background in law, specialized in European Contemporary History. As a native of the Greater Region and graduate of the University of Luxembourg, Loris has continuously been exposed to borders and intrigued by their implications. It is therefore only natural that his research interests are related to the history of borderlands and cross-border cooperation, especially in the Greater Region. In the VISUAL-CBC project, Loris works on the visuals and multimodal analysis of the history of the Greater Region and the Upper Rhine as a PhD researcher at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)  under the supervision of Dr. Sohn (LISER) and Dr. Wassenberg (Sciences Po Strasbourg). Loris is enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Strasbourg and the University of Luxembourg.

“When I started my Master, the cross-border aspect was at the heart of the classes, and I therefore concentrated my thesis on this. From this valuable experience, I developed in collaboration with Dr. Sohn the outline of my doctoral project that aims to contribute to the historical study of cross-border territories and regionalism in Europe. The visual dimension of the cross-border narratives, their changing iconography, the symbols and the meanings they convey constitute a complex subject of research that requires an interdisciplinary approach combining historical sciences, border studies and political geography. Taking all of that into account, a semiotic approach is therefore preferred in order to have the best comprehension of the cross-border narrative”.

Dr. Ekaterina Mikhailova is a Human Geographer specialized in Border Studies and Urban Studies. Over the past ten years she has published on interactions, livelihoods and everyday re-/de-bordering in many European and Eurasian borderlands from the Iberian peninsula to Central Asia. Before starting Associate Professorship in Border Studies at the University of Tromsø, Ekaterina worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the BOMIOTICS project with a focus on Frankfurt (Oder)-Slubice case-study. Ekaterina continues to collaborate with the BOMIOTICS project as LISER Research Fellow.

“A semiotic approach to borders has gradually developed in my research agenda over the years. When I was working on my doctoral dissertation on border twin cities, I was fascinated to examine how differently the border is perceived, experienced and instrumentalised by different actors in different parts of the world. Later, in the postdoctoral research phase, my engagement with critical toponymy, in particular my work on place (re)naming in border cities at the University of Geneva, was an important next step in developing a more nuanced understanding of the meaning-making processes unfolding in borderlands.”