Thinking Beyond Borders

Thinking Beyond Borders is a collective learning and making programme that reflects on what becomes possible when we dare to think beyond borders: geographical, legal, institutional, but also emotional and imaginary. We aim to examine not only what a border does, but especially what lies beyond it: practices of care, imagination, autonomy and abolitionist future-making.

With Thinking Beyond Borders, we want to create a space for people who work within and across movements (artists, thinkers, activists, students, researchers, and many others) to read, practise and experiment together as we explore border-transcending ways of living and organising. The programme will unfold through reading groups, workshops and lectures across 2025–2026–2027.

What will we explore together?

• Futures, fiction & abolition
Speculative writing as a tool to imagine what a world without border regimes could look like.

• Mapping & re-designing borders
Working with drawings, diagrams and design-driven research to dismantle borders and sketch alternatives.

• Reading groups
Collective reading and thinking on borders, migration and forms of ‘movement knowledge’.

The event on Saturday 6 December is structured in three parts.

14:30

Free the Map. From Atlas to Hermes
Towards a New Cartography of Borders and Migration
Prof. Dr. Henk van Houtum (Nijmegen Centre for Border Research, Radboud University)
Lecture + conversation in English

For centuries, our world has been shaped by one dominant image: a world divided into rigid state boxes, separated by hard lines between “us” and “them.” This state-centric cartography narrows our imagination, hardens identities, and obscures everything that truly moves: lived experiences, unequally distributed passport privileges, connections, dependencies, and forms of solidarity.

In this lecture, Henk van Houtum reopens the map. He analyses the political consequences of classical atlas logic and introduces alternative ways of seeing—countermapping, experiential maps, connectivity maps—that evoke a more inclusive and dynamic worldview. A call to free the map after centuries of state thinking, and to create space for new, human imaginations of migration and borders.

Based on his book Free the Map: From Atlas to Hermes. A New Cartography of Borders and Migration (nai010, 2024).

15:30

Choose one workshop
Workshops in NL/FR/EN/AR

Writing Borders – Tasneem Nagi (Sudan Solidarity Network)

A writing workshop grounded in a Sudanese lexicon. Through texts, videos, and live readings by Sudanese authors and poets, we explore how language makes migration and displacement visible. Participants write together and discover new ways of speaking about—and imagining—borders.

Imagining a Borderless City

What borders shape Brussels? Not only geographical ones, but also the barriers that exclude people on the move from society. And, more importantly: how can we imagine and build a city that has abolished these borders, in spite of—and as resistance to—the repressive migration politics of the country or continent in which it exists?
In a workshop led by militants with and without papers, inspired by the idea of sanctuary cities and prefigurative structures, we map what a borderless Brussels could look like and the pathways to get there.

Reading Beyond Borders

Work with a small selection of texts on borders and on visions that inspire our abolitionist thinking. In a non-facilitated, collective reading group, you will read, speak, think, and listen together.

17:00

Collective feedback from the workshops
We gather all insights and inspirations from the sessions.

17:30

Closing with snacks by Nicole Woutchoko

Throughout the day

Books, podcasts, and screen-printed t-shirts available.