Towards New Ways of Knowing Boundaries
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This week in Meaning Lab, we’re gathering around Boundaries — the visible and invisible lines that organize experience: personal, social, political, ecological, and technological.
We often talk about borders as if they were the only game in town: hard edges, walls, checkpoints, lines on a map. But as Edward Casey, author of The World on Edge reminds us, borders are only one kind of edge. Boundaries are more porous and lived. They are the blurry zones where identities meet, the shifting thresholds between private and public, human and machine, inside and outside. They structure our worlds while constantly being re‑negotiated in practice.
Across the interdisciplinary cluster of research into boundaries, a few threads keep reappearing:
In history and politics, walls and border regimes are technologies of power. They stabilize trade and safety, but also concentrate exclusion. From city walls to the Berlin Wall to the latest border infrastructure, we see how “simple lines” become enchanted, carrying myths, fears, and promises far beyond their concrete form.
In social and civilizational life, boundaries mark sacred enclosures, safe spaces, and moral landscapes. They tell us what is allowed to happen here and not there, who belongs and who is out of place. Simmel suggests that our position in the world is defined by living “between two boundaries,” using them as signposts in the infinite space of our lives.
In intimate and psychological experience, boundaries modulate how we show up with one another. The line between private and public now runs through our phones, feeds, and group chats. “Safe space” becomes both a literal room and a felt distance that lets thought and relationship unfold without constant threat or exposure.
In science and knowledge, boundaries decide what counts as credible. Disciplines defend their edges, drawing lines around “proper” methods and objects. Those lines distribute authority and voice: who gets to name reality, and who is treated as noise.
And in the human non‑human machine tangle, boundaries are being redrawn in real time. Cybernetics, AI, and sociobiology each blur the line between organism and instrument. Technology stops being an afterthought to “the human” and becomes part of the very feedback loops through which perception, language, and agency emerge.
In Meaning Lab, we’ll bring these strands together as a socio‑technical inquiry:
How do the boundaries we inherit and enforce shape what we can perceive, care about, and act on — and where might they now need to soften, thicken, or be rewritten?
We’ll explore questions like:
Where do political borders, social norms, and personal limits line up in your own life — and where do they clash?
Which boundaries in our current projects feel protective and necessary, and which feel like artifacts of an older order that no longer fits the conditions we’re in?
How do AI systems and digital infrastructures redraw boundaries between self and feed, tool and collaborator, private reflection and public performance?
In contemplative or relational practice, what happens when the felt boundary between “me” and “world” loosens — and how does that shift our sense of responsibility?
This session is not about arguing for borderlessness. It’s about becoming more precise and honest about where our lines are, what work they are doing, and who they serve. We’ll treat key texts and examples as boundary objects: shared reference points that help a diverse group think and feel together about the edges we live inside.