Buzz Beyond Borders
Approximately 39,600 transborder students living in Mexico undertake a daily hypercommute across the border to the United States for their K–12 or college education. Their unique voices remain largely unheard.
Initiated by a group of transborder students, Buzz Beyond Borders is a design-led initiative focused on amplifying the voices of students from the northwestern border regions of California and Arizona. This project extends narratives beyond academia to platforms like the World Design Capital, where Buzz Beyond Borders held a design intervention, allowing future designers, artists, advocates, educators, and policymakers to gain firsthand insight into the experiences of transborder students.
Transborder students, their families and educators, and service workers share their stories through a phone that functions as a tool for continuous, iterative, and interactive documentation. The phone records the stories, which can be played back for other transborder students to hear and can then be used by these students to share their own stories, fostering solidarity and understanding. The narratives are later explored in transborder resource networks through interventions such as exhibitions, facilitated workshops, and panel discussions.
The initiative Is aimed at creating a participatory platform and establishing a network and resource for students and policymakers. It integrates collective fabulation and political imagination to transform public understanding of the situation of transborder students while extending resources and support to the students themselves.