Rajayhteistyö identiteettityönä

Suomen ja Ruotsin rajan ylittävät yhteistyöprojektit paikallisten asukkaiden kokemana ja kertomana

Abstract

Cross-border cooperation is normally understood
as an expression of how increasing mobility and
transnational partnership can challenge borders
and act as a catalyst for the emergence of crossborder
identities, particularly in the European
Union’s internal border regions. In this article,
cross-border cooperation is examined from the
perspective of local people who carry out and
experience cooperation in their everyday lives. Local
cooperation is approached as identity work, through
which individuals can negotiate their spatial identity.
The case study concerns the Finnish-Swedish border,
particularly the rural border communities where
people’s experiences of the border and crossborder
cooperation are examined using a narrative
interview method. The method is well suited to the
study of borders and identities because it is sensitive
to particular everyday situations in which border
discourses are negotiated and because it encourages
researcher to look at the context-bound characters
of borders and cross-border interaction. Moreover,
the examination of individual border narratives
can help border scholars to be more critical when
conceptualizing and classifying borders and identities.
Cross-border interaction and cooperation can have
rather different manifestations in different contexts
and a border region is an arena for multiple spatial
identities.