I was born in June 1989 in Poland – the same month that socialism ended, and soon the Iron Curtain fade out. My youth years were marked by the optimism that the enlargement of the European Union to new member states from East and South would result in borderless Europe. But nothing was further from the truth. Although the mobility of “new Europeans” as myself flourished – with the abolition of border controls and pushing aside of passports – there was a price to pay for it. External borders of the EU were reinforced and then securitized and rewalled. Possibilities of legal immigration from post-colonies were limited, and soon people started to die in their routes to Europe. The consequences of these changes motivated me to study the ways in which integration of the EU resulted in them. As a social theorist, I began to examine the trend towards re-bordering as the establishment of the new limits to European universalism. B-SHAPES gives me the opportunity to go further and see how border transformations happen at the borderlands and how they are seen by its inhabitants. By working with the team of international scholars from different disciplines I learn new ways to see and study borders.