Join us for a special BIG_Talk featuring author, Laia Soto-Bermant (University of Helsinki) in conversation with Franck Billé (UC Berkeley) about her recent book, Border Enclaves: An Ethnography of a Contested Territory in Europe’s Southern Periphery (Soto-Bermant, 2026). Part of the Rethinking Borders series (Manchester University Press), Border Enclaves examines the Spanish enclave of Melilla as a prism for understanding Europe’s contemporary dislocations. Based on over a decade of ethnographic research, Soto-Bermant explores how borders are enforced, contested and inhabited in a city suspended between Africa and Europe, colonial legacies and modern regimes. Through a polyphonic narrative following smugglers, migrants, teachers and politicians, it reveals how everyday practices and symbolic performances shape life in the enclave. Selective visibility―who is seen or erased―structures authority and exclusion.
Dr. Laia Soto-Bermant (University of Helsinki), is a social anthropologist and Kone Research Fellow, She leads a four-year project on conspiracy theories and Covid-19. She earned her doctorate from the University of Oxford (2012) and held a postdoctoral fellowship at Arizona State University’s School of Transborder Studies, before joining the University of Helsinki as a researcher on major projects funded by the Academy of Finland and the ERC (Crosslocations). She also holds a master’s in Clinical Psychoanalysis and teaches a graduate course on anthropology and psychoanalysis at the University of Barcelona. As Editor-in-Chief of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale, she spearheaded an urgent Covid-19 special issue that gathered over one hundred contributions worldwide. Her research on borders, migration, urban segregation and the politics of knowledge has been widely published. She is a co-author of An Anthropology of Crosslocations (2024), and has published her research in a number of academic journals (Journal of North African Studies, Journal of Borderland Studies, Social Anthropology) as well as edited volumes (Locating the Mediterranean: Connections ad Separations across Space and Time (2022) and The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering (2017). Her first monograph, Border Enclaves: An ethnography of a contested territory in Europe’s southern periphery, is forthcoming with Manchester University Press (May 2026).
Franck Billé (University of California, Berkeley) is an anthropologist and geographer working at the intersection of cartography, sovereignty, and territoriality. His research interest has led to several book projects organized around the theoretical foci of the volumetric, the corporeal, and the topological. His most recent books include Voluminous States: Sovereignty, Materiality, and the Territorial Imagination (2020), On the Edge: Life along the Russia- China Border (with Caroline Humphrey, 2021), [Redacted]: Writing in the Negative Space of the State (2024), and Somatic States: On Cartography, Geobodies, Bodily Integrity (2025). More information is available on his website www.franckbille.com