Kristen Maher

Professor

San Diego State University

I am interested in local borders -- the kinds of physical and psychological divisions that divide places and peoples -- and in how they can be taken down. I am just completing a book entitled Making Unequal Neighbors: Borders and the Politics of Place Stigma about neighboring cities San Diego (US) and Tijuana (Mexico). This book shows how the inequalities between these cities are in part a product of the ways San Diegans and media represent Tijuana as a space of poverty and violence. I have come to South Africa to examine "debordering" between communities divided by apartheid.