Borders. From North America to the Indian Subcontinent

Le séminaire Histoire & histoires du groupe Thes’Art des doctorant.e.s de l’ILCEA4 présente sa dernière séance de l’année universitaire. 

Séance organisée et animée par : 

Importing Evangelical Nationalism: A Comparative Analysis of the pyschopolitics of border biopower, The Ezra Institute and Action4Canada

An empirical analysis of the importation of U.S. evangelical rhetoric into Canada is crucial for understanding cross-border populist religious activism. The influence of think tanks on policy—given their far-reaching power and the scarcity of peer-reviewed research on these associations—warrants in-depth academic attention. A comparative analysis of texts, curricula, and media of The Ezra Institute and Action4Canada will elucidate the extent to which they employ US evangelical rhetoric towards their Canadian audiences. Thematic codes will be used to identify patterns, rhetorical strategies, and ideological adaptions. The thematic codes would vary from topics like Christian Nationalism, Anti-LGBTQ+, Anti-“Woke”, Parental Rights, or Apocalyptic Language. The analysis of these terminologies will emphasize the intensity of specific rhetorical tactics like fear-mongering or victimization narratives aiming to mobilize followers as well as highlight the importation frequency of US culture war propaganda.

Hanna Aicart is a doctoral candidate under the supervision of Pierre-Alexandre Beylier. Her research aims to dissect the the psychological constructs that create border identities within citizens. She is focusing on the porosity of the Canada-United States border and how the border acts as a conduit for alt right populist and evangelical nationalist rhetoric flow into Canada. She explores the concept of the "solider-citizen" using Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, and Antonio Gramsci to ground her work in post structuralist and critical theory. She is participating in a mirror thesis program financed by the MaCl and she is a doctoral candidate with ILCEA4 and ED-LLSH.

Women Who Flow Through Borders of Control

My research deliberates on the convergence of women and rivers as simultaneously indispensable and unruly, honoured yet controlled. If the masculinist state views sovereignty as the power to fix boundaries, then rivers and women unsettle this aspiration. The central puzzle animating my research is therefore: what happens if we take seriously the logics of flow rather than the logics of control in thinking about borders, belonging, and citizenship? By drawing on feminist thought, feminist border theories, and the resistive politics of be/longing (Rowe, 2005), my findings suggest that women’s crossings, like the river’s, carry the power to form a rhizomatic-assemblage of interconnected networks that reimagine belonging beyond the state’s rigid borders.

In the borderlands between Nepal and India, belonging is lived in ways that exceed formal territorial limits: women traverse kinship ties across boundaries, and rivers carve new channels despite dams. Yet state infrastructures, from embankments to citizenship regimes, seek to discipline these flows, producing new exclusions while claiming to ensure order (Mehta, 2005; Yuval-Davis, 1997; Roy, 2012). Through kinship, bureaucratic erasures, and women’s everyday practices of sustaining ties across borders, I show how citizenship operates as a masculinist infrastructure of containment, while women’s and rivers’ movements generate a rhizomatic assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987; DeLanda, 2006) of networks that refuse to be fixed. This tension between flow and control, reverence and erasure, sits at the heart of both border governance and feminist debates on belonging and citizenship.

Kalpana Jha is a researcher and writer whose work explores how people move, belong, and build communities across borders. She is a PhD candidate in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria and a Fellow with the Borders in Globalization Lab and the Centre for Global Studies at the University of Victoria. Kalpana’s research focuses on borders and borderlands, migration, and community networks, drawing on feminist and postcolonial approaches to understand how people experience and reimagine borders in their everyday lives. Kalpana’s work connects local stories of movement and belonging to broader global debates on citizenship, displacement, and justice. She is passionate about understanding how stories of movement reveal deeper questions of justice, identity, and connection in an increasingly divided world. Her book, The Madhesi Upsurge and the Contested Idea of Nepal, examines questions of identity, inequality, and citizenship in Nepal. 

La séance est également accessible sur Zoom : 

https://univ-grenoble-alpes-fr.zoom.us/j/92070569436?pwd=G6tFSKJZ3DKVBbOxSX0aRTaESzsJrU.1
Meeting ID: 920 7056 9436
Passcode: 394317