Manon-Julie Borel is a PhD student at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bern. Holding a BA in International Relations (University of Geneva) and a MA in Social Anthropology (University of Bern) for her PhD, she received a Doc.CH research grant by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Her research project is supervised by Prof. Dr. Sabine Strasser (University of Bern) as main supervisor and Prof. Dr. Mathijs Pelkmans (LSE) as second supervisor.
In her doctoral research, bearing the working title “Temporality of border infrastructures: Distant Neighborhood at the sealed Armenian-Turkish border”, Manon-Julie explores the unresolved conflict between Armenia and Turkey. She looks at the everyday experiences of people living and working at the closed and militarized Armenian border with Turkey. In her research she is interested into people’s temporal representations of the border and the conflict and asks: How does the border influence the lived experiences in two border infrastructure sites and how is proximity and distance made and unmade by people’s everyday practices? By this interplay she aims to shed light on the coexisting dis/connectivities between Turkey and Armenia, which she conceptualizes as “distant neighborhood”.
