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The Great War and Trianon opened a new chapter in the history, not only of the Kingdom of Hungary, but also of Western Hungary. Besides dividing up the counties of Sopron, Moson and Vas, the newly re-drawn borders also split up most of the railway lines running within them as well. From the territory sliced from the three counties, the previously non-existent province of Austria, Burgenland, was established in 1922. In many cases, the new demarcation lines followed boundaries of old districts or settlements, but it was rare to find natural boundaries among them. As a result, between the two World Wars, the use of the affected railway tracks began to change similar to several contemporary Central European cases, with the exception of GYSEV (Győr–Sopron–Ebenfurth Railway Company), which could remain in its original form. This research paper aims to examine how the shift of borders in this region affected railway transport. It is based on the local historical literature on the railway, regional history and primary resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What smell does border death leave to the inhabitants of borderlands? Is the encounter with the dead bodies of the migrants who perished in the Mediterranean Sea telling in how we articulate discussions around (necro)politics at the external borders of Europe? Based on one-year of fieldwork on the island of Lampedusa (Southern Italy), Door to Europe, and frontier for irregular border crossing, I argue that border death has consequences for both the migrants and the inhabitants of borderlands. The paper will trace such consequences through the testimony of Vincenzo, the old cemetery gatekeeper of Lampedusa, the witness and bearer of knowledge around the nameless bodies buried in Lampedusa's cemetery since 1996. This approach will help considering the extent to which the encounter with migrants' dead bodies – bare life in death – allows ethnographers to speak of the inherently violent system that scholars referred to as necropolitics or thanatopolitics, and the otherwise irreducible force of life, which manifests itself beyond any possible attempt to reduce it or silence it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional ethnography (IE) is a valuable ontological approach for investigating the coordination of social relations, both locally and trans-locally. However, much of the work utilizing IE remains within the confines of a local or national empirical field. This means there are limited accounts of IE exploring geographically dispersed institutions that cross borders and span regions. This paper makes the case for critically thinking and building on Transnational Institutional Ethnography (TIE). In it, I argue that TIE requires adapting the methodological toolbox of IE to deal with expanded geographic space and diverse bodily locations. By drawing on empirical work exploring scholarly participation in the European Union Framework Programs for research, tensions are illustrated that surfaced while working with TIE. In this discussion, I examine the ways in which interpreting an empirical field as a transnational institution, constituted of geographically dispersed people and organizations, caused a re-examination of the methods in IE to acknowledge institutional experiences shaped by diverse material surroundings and differing geopolitical locations. The paper argues that working with spatially conscious methods in TIE contributes positively to both fieldwork and analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rohingya is one of the ethnic minority groups that has faced profound ethnic violence against them in their home country, Myanmar. Almost a million Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh and are currently living in extremely precarious conditions near the Myanmar–Bangladesh border. Despite the sufferings and oppressions of all Rohingya, women, in particular, have been victims of sexual violence. Using various information sources, this paper analyzes different dimensions of the gender-based violence that has endured in Myanmar for decades. This paper also highlights the health and wellness of Rohingya women, including impacts made during the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, it provides a framework for reducing gender-based violence in the Rohingya camps in Bangladesh. Even though this paper focuses on the Rohingya crisis, insights are relevant to other contexts facing similar social, political, and humanitarian crises, particularly in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the first steps towards a new stope design approach, where stope overbreak (OB; rock mined outside of the design) and underbreak (UB; planned rock left behind) is assessed using statistical multivariate analysis (principal component analysis [PCA] and partial least square [PLS]) and georeferenced data measured at an approximately cubic metre resolution (octrees). Results showed that OB is observed in areas of the stope where there is a large blasting energy proxy, large undercut and towards the middle of the face. UB tends to be observed near the border of the faces and where there is large blasting standoff and toeing of the rings. The resolution of the data and the use of multivariate analysis have enabled the depiction of an accurate interpretation of the variation of stope performance along the design surface, going beyond the simple per face analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Receiver Operating Characteristic curves have been widely used to represent the performance of diagnostic tests. The corresponding area under the curve, widely used to evaluate their performance quantitatively, has been criticized in several respects. Several proposals have been introduced to improve area under the curve by taking into account only specific regions of the Receiver Operating Characteristic space, that is, the plane to which Receiver Operating Characteristic curves belong. For instance, a region of interest can be delimited by setting specific thresholds for the true positive rate or the false positive rate. Different ways of setting the borders of the region of interest may result in completely different, even opposing, evaluations. In this paper, we present a method to define a region of interest in a rigorous and objective way, and compute a partial area under the curve that can be used to evaluate the performance of diagnostic tests. The method was originally conceived in the Software Engineering domain to evaluate the performance of methods that estimate the defectiveness of software modules. We compare this method with previous proposals. Our method allows the definition of regions of interest by setting acceptability thresholds on any kind of performance metric, and not just false positive rate and true positive rate: for instance, the region of interest can be determined by imposing that ϕ (also known as the Matthews Correlation Coefficient) is above a given threshold. We also show how to delimit the region of interest corresponding to acceptable costs, whenever the individual cost of false positives and false negatives is known. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the method by applying it to the Wisconsin Breast Cancer Data. We provide Python and R packages supporting the presented method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proceeds from a moment of impromptu 'border-fixing' in the wake of an inter-communal conflict, to explore the everyday spatialisation of the state in a rural region of Central Asia. Drawing on ethnography from the Kyrgyzstan - Uzbekistan border, it contributes to a growing concern to understand how the state is rendered 'integral' in everyday life. Rather than focusing on the enactments and justificatory statements of state officials, the paper explores instead the diffuse but passionate work of borderland dwellers in policing the state edge in a context of political upheaval. 'Territory' in this reading is not just an a priori attribute of the state, nor only the product of official imaginings and interventions, but the site, too, of everyday practical and symbolic work, a vehicle for claims making and the means of performative enactments of belonging and difference. The paper calls for greater attention to the 'ordinary affects' that are elicited by borders and boundedness and the need to bring discussions of territoriality into conversation with a literature on the affective life of the state. Doing so, it argues, will both enrich our understanding of everyday state formation and give us greater purchase on the role of events in rupturing and reconfiguring state space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Media coverage and emerging scholarship have brought increasing international attention to the urgent humanitarian crisis facing Central American transmigrants as they navigate landscapes of violence in Mexico. While stories of Central American immigrants who remain in Mexico are largely absent from this coverage, there is arguably a 'Central Americanization' occurring on the southern border through this permanent settlement. Central Americans choosing to establish themselves in the border state of Chiapas do so in a socio-spatial and political context defined by the introduction of 'progressive' state- and national-level migration policies on the one hand and the persistence of discrimination and violence on the other. We know little about the implementation of these policies on the ground, namely how they are applied and the impacts they have on the immigrant experience in Mexico. To begin to fill this gap, this paper focuses on the experiences of Central American immigrant women living in the Mexico-Guatemala border city of Tapachula. Employing a feminist geopolitical lens, which encourages conducting research and analysis at diverse scales, it examines their everyday interactions with low- to mid-level representatives of the Mexican state as they seek to avail themselves of their legal and social citizenship rights, and the impacts of these interactions on their livelihoods. This article argues that low- to mid-level officials' actions reveal the importance of a form of extra-official, subtle, yet pervasive regulation through which immigrant women are denied rights they are entitled to, inducing negative impacts to their livelihoods, which I term everyday restriction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The narratives of fear and uncertainty from the discourse of the 'global war on terror' have been used by many governments to expand securitization processes. As more aggressive security tactics have been deployed, scholars have sought to understand the changing relationship between individual rights and the authority of sovereign states by drawing on Giorgio Agamben's insights into the state of exception. In this paper I argue that borderlands are a key site for investigating the connections between the state of exception and securitization processes because political borders are the symbolic markers of the limits of a sovereign's authority. I trace the securitization of the borderlands between India and Bangladesh and I describe the increasingly exceptional measures employed by Indian border security forces in order to prevent terrorist threats from entering India. At the intersection of the state of exception in the borderlands and the securitization narratives and practices of the global war on terror, Muslims in both India and Bangladesh are marginalized in the affairs of the state and targeted in state-sanctioned violence. I conclude that borderlands, as an explicitly spatial example of the state of exception, are a crucial site for locating and understanding the decision on the exception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore and evaluate the concept of integrated rural tourism (IRT) by drawing upon a networks approach and the notion of best practice. By integrating the two an attempt is made to understand the processes that generate the sharing, exchange and transfer of knowledge and skills. The case examples of tourism-focused networks from the England-Wales border region highlight how the innovative practices of individual actors have shaped local resources into tourism products, providing a long-term focus for economic development and local restructuring. It is concluded that the development aspect of best practice, as a pathway to developing IRT, offers a tool to capture the 'intangibles' or noneconomic aspects of networking that promote economic growth and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates practices of border formation through an analysis of Australia's quarantine processes. We use the work of the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service (AQIS), through the Northern Australia Quarantine Strategy (NAQS), to interrogate the ways in which borders are made and remade in daily life. By exploring quotidian practices of quarantine we argue that borders are the sites of complex and fluid relationships that are constantly being renegotiated as multiple active agents cohabit, contest, belong, and exclude. We find that quarantine borders are constantly being (re)made by forces outside NAQS's control, including through the practices of Yolngu Indigenous land-management staff and rangers, individual local residents, and diverse non- humans. Borders are revealed as active spaces produced in multiple locations at multiple scales. They are underpinned by diverse ontologies and are always more-than-human. This challenges the overly simplified view evoked within AQIS's public awareness material and the prevailing national discourse of defence, invasion, and fear. Through attention to quotidian practices of border making, different ways of understanding borderland geographies emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]