My academic career has been turning around two thematic focus points, minorities and borders, and one geographic region, the Danish-German borderland of Schleswig. B-SHAPES reflects the challenges of competing narratives of borderlands: Who came first? Is it a history of conflict or cooperation? How do borderland populations experience and live with a border – especially when the border has created national minorities as borderlanders who culturally and linguistically identify with the neighboring country? B-SHAPES will try to answer these questions and invite to more cross-border, inclusive thinking not only in borderlands.