Matthew Worsnick

How do architectural, art, and engineering practices influence the ways that people understand borders and the ways that governments envision political boundaries? Can we uncover and explore the agency of the many unseen actors whose decisions and labor create the built environment, and in turn shape mental maps of borderlands? Deploying tools from art history, urban studies, and architectural theory, and drawing upon archival sources from five countries across thirty years, this study excavates the material culture of the contested Italo-Yugoslav border (1918-1948) to show how the built environment revised people’s perceptions of the border and was deployed to justify or challenge the border’s legitimacy in local, national, and international mindsets.