UNIVERSITY OF THESSALY - DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY ARCHAEOLOGY AND SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY
PERFECTURE OF THESSALY
International Conference:
Folk/Traditional/Popular Culture and the Internet
Volos, 6-7 November 2013
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Abstracts
- Aspasia Theodosiou (ΤΕΙ Ηπείρου)
Virtual Prespa: nation states and "border-ness" online
This paper discusses and analyzes the Prespa Region, a multi-national, cross-border region in southeastern Greece, through its virtual presence on cyberspace. The virtual explosion of on- line posts regarding Prespa today is already productive of a certain type of visibility: the conservation and sustainability discourse constructed around the distinct natural environment of Prespa looms large on the web and tends to constitute an inseparable attribute of a variety of cultural or political articulations regarding Prespa.
Against this predominance of the environmental discourse which tends to “override” national boundaries, we will be also looking at the ways that Prespa Lake borders have been rearticulated in various national, international, regional travel websites and blogs.
In approaching the Prespa border as a vantage point, a “meeting place” where a diversity of accounts, policies, documents, and stories seems to merge, converge and diverge, we are concerned with questions regarding: the different forms national borders come to take; the bordering practices that inform and are informed by Prespa’s web-presence; the different senses of border that are generated between heightened transnational environmental issues and the strictly bordered state-centric tourist spatialities.
