The purpose of border poetics is to create a set of strategies for analyzing and identifying the processes of border-making and border permeability in contemporary societies through aesthetic forms. Border poetics examines the role of art and culture in constructing and tracing borders. Border poetics focus on narratives and other symbolic forms, and on the important subjective dimension which cultural forms mediate in the public sphere. The theoretical basis for border poetics is to see the border from the processual and embodied perspective of the border crossing narrative. Border poetics examines borders as forms of representation, the role of narratives of bordering, individual border crossings as well as grand narratives of border formation and erasure. It deals with passages as well as hindered passages in various ways (e.g. failed/prevented crossings or cases where crossings of the physical border does not imply crossings of symbolic borders as e.g. cultural or social borders). The role of the subject in the border crossing is central.
Border poetics investigates the ways in which borders are negotiated within medialized forms of production and examine the function of the forms of representation in the intersection between territorial borders and textual frames. The kernel of border poetics is that borders on the level of presentation and on the level of the world presented are intimately connected. As interpretation itself becomes a temporal and narrative act the border is reflected and refracted on many planes.
Integration of questions of gender, cultural and other forms of identity is central to border poetics as a field of cultural analysis. Research in border poetics pursues specificity and methodological discipline and follows different lines of approach, preferably both theoretical and empirical at the same time.