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President's Welcome The Association for Borderlands Studies (ABS) is the premiere scholarly association focusing exclusively on border issues. The ABS was formed with an emphasis on the United States-Mexico borderlands, but today the association is truly global in its scope and its membership. As an association devoted to the greater understanding of borders, we embrace perspectives from all border researchers worldwide, and we celebrate multidisciplinary approaches engaging geographers, political scientists, sociologists, economists, anthropologists and other social scientists. Historians provide a temporal lens for our research. Language, literature, art, film and other humanities interests engage a growing number of our members. Many of our members pursue research that has direct public policy implications and impacts. This includes specialists in environmental sciences, technology, migration, trade, transportation, security and other fields focused on border policy. Also, we welcome members who are outside academia, the government officials, journalists, writers, and others who create border policy and comment on it. For all of us, borders have become a vocation, a prevailing interest and a major focus of inquiry. We invite new border scholars as well as those whose research interests intersect with borderlands scholarship to join the association. Benefits of association membership include receipt of the Journal of Borderlands Studies as well as our online newsletter, La Fonterra. Members receive information about international borderlands conferences sponsored by colleges and universities as well as other organizations. Additionally, we encourage all members to attend the annual ABS conference, held in April each spring in conjunction with the Western Social Science Association. During this year, the ABS will embark on several initiatives to grow the association and border studies worldwide, as well as to integrate and represent effectively all of our constituents, from our heritage membership along the U.S.-Mexico border to the newest members from Asia and Europe, and from our disciplinary base in the social sciences to a growing membership from other fields. One of these initiatives is the ABS Task Force on Growth, Governance, Structure and Operations. I have appointed an eight member Task Force of younger and mid-career scholars to help define where we need to build, adjust and enhance the ABS, and a Committee of Past Presidents to review the plan and finalize it. The initiative is chaired by ABS Past Presidents Oscar Martinez and Chris Brown. One of our imperatives this year is to infuse Spanish translation into our publications and conference, and, with the help of our colleagues at UACJ in Mexico, to reach out more effectively to Latin America to recruit members and engage with the borders studies community there. UACJ will work with our new secretariat at the University of Eastern Finland to produce an English-Spanish newsletter, La Frontera, to represent and convey our two official ABS languages. A third initiative this year, led by the University of Eastern Finland, will be to plan the first ABS World Conference to be held June 9-13, 2014 in Joensuu, Finland and St. Petersburg, Russia. These are both challenging and exciting times for the ABS. I am pleased to welcome you to the Association for Borderlands Studies, and I look forward to seeing you next April at ABS 2014 in Albuquerque. Best regards, |
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For information, contact the officers. Mailing Address: |
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