Warsaw is a city shaped by reconstruction. Layers of destruction, rebuilding, memory, and mobility remain visibly inscribed into its urban landscape, making the materiality of borders and infrastructures difficult to ignore. It therefore provided a particularly fitting setting for the conference “Border Matters: On Embodiment, Environment and Infrastructure of Border Spaces”, organized by the Max Weber Foundation and hosted by the German Historical Institute Warsaw from 4–6 May 2026. The conference brought together scholars from sociology, anthropology, Science and Technology Studies (STS), history, and border studies to rethink borders beyond fixed territorial lines. Discussions focused instead on bordering processes, infrastructures, mobility, materiality, and the circulation of people, documents, technologies, and environments. The full conference program can be accessed here: https://www.dhi.waw.pl/veranstaltungen/tagungen/detail/stiftungskonferenz-border-matters-embodiment-environment-and-infrastructure-of-border-spaces/

As part of the MediCluster Project, Melike Şahinol, Gülşah Başkavak, and Ayşe Berna Uçarol presented the paper “Beyond Borderlines: Paper Walls as Mobile Boundary Infrastructures in Transnational Surgical-Craftscapes” in the panel “Border-Making Materials,” chaired by Magdalena Saryusz-Wolska.

Building on these broader conference discussions, our presentation focused specifically on the role of infrastructures within global medical manufacturing. Rather than treating borders as fixed territorial divisions, we examined how they are continuously enacted through documentary and regulatory systems that organize transnational production.
Rethinking Borders Beyond Geography: From Boundary Objects to Boundary Infrastructures
One of the most stimulating aspects of the conference was the collective move away from understanding borders as merely territorial lines separating nation-states. Across panels and discussions, borders appeared instead as processes: continuously produced through circulation, infrastructures, materiality, documentation, mobility, and regulation.
This broader perspective resonated strongly with our own research trajectory. We examine the global production networks of surgical instruments through extensive fieldwork conducted in Tuttlingen (Germany), Samsun (Türkiye), and Sialkot (Pakistan). Rather than approaching these manufacturing regions as isolated national cases, we conceptualize them as interconnected production geographies linked through technical standards, certification systems, documentation regimes, and unequal recognition structures. We sought to extend this discussion by asking a central question:
What if borders are not only drawn on maps, but also embedded in documents, certificates, technical drawings, export regulations, and quality control procedures?
This question led us to the concept that became central to our presentation: Paper walls.
Within this framework, we questioned the suitability of classical “center–periphery” models (Wallerstein, 1974) and linear production-chain approaches, which are commonly used to explain global production. Instead, we moved from the STS concept of “boundary objects” (Star & Griesemer 1989; Star 2010) towards an understanding of “boundary infrastructures” (Star & Ruhleder 1996). By shifting the analytical focus from individual objects to the infrastructural arrangements that facilitate coordination, such as documents, standards, and certification processes (Akkerman & Bakker 2011), we approached global production not as a linear structure organized around fixed centers, but as a fragmented yet interconnected “archipelago” operating through networks of circulation and relational ties. In doing so, we demonstrated how documentary and certification practices function as mobile boundary infrastructures that regulate the global circulation of goods (Timmermans & Epstein 2010), while simultaneously producing invisible hierarchies and unequal forms of recognition.
In surgical instrument manufacturing, circulation is not organized solely through products themselves. It is sustained through extensive documentary systems: technical specifications, calibration procedures, audit documents, European Medical Device Regulation (MDR) compliance files, certification protocols, traceability requirements, sterilization standards, and export regulations. These infrastructures coordinate production across countries while simultaneously regulating legitimacy and market access.
To conceptualize this process, we used the notion of “paper walls”, a term repeatedly used by instrument producers/craftsmen during our fieldwork. Producers often referred to the growing burden of regulatory documentation as an invisible wall shaping who can participate in global markets and under what conditions. Unlike conventional borders, paper walls are mobile. They travel through certificates, standards, audits, and regulatory regimes. They do not stop circulation altogether; rather, they filter, slow down, discipline, classify, and hierarchize it. In other words, rather than viewing global production as a linear chain or fixed “center–periphery” model, approaching it as an “archipelago” of interconnected yet unequal relations allows us to view production processes differently. Adopting the “oceanic perspective” (Şahinol 2025), materials, knowledge, legitimacy, and innovation are viewed as constantly circulating across various production nodes. This approach reveals that boundaries are not fixed structures existing outside these relations but are instead continuously produced and reproduced within these circulation processes.
These infrastructural dynamics become particularly visible when examining the organization of surgical instrument manufacturing itself. Our fieldwork suggests that production cannot adequately be understood through linear supply-chain models alone. Instead, the sector operates through fragmented yet interconnected production environments shaped by mobility, craftsmanship, standards, and unequal forms of recognition.
Surgical Manufacturing as a Transnational Craftscape
While global surgical instrument manufacturing is often described through industrial supply-chain models, our fieldwork highlights the continuing importance of craftsmanship within these production environments. Surgical manufacturing depends not only on technical standards and regulatory infrastructures, but also on embodied knowledge, manual precision, tacit learning processes, and intergenerational expertise.
Across production sites in Tuttlingen, Samsun, and Sialkot, craftsmanship remains central even within highly standardized manufacturing contexts. Precision is not achieved through documents alone. It also relies on sensory experience, skilled handwork, and locally embedded forms of practical knowledge that are difficult to standardize completely.
This is why we use the concept of surgical craftscapes. The term emphasizes that surgical manufacturing is simultaneously industrial, infrastructural, and craft-based. At the same time, these craftscapes are increasingly shaped by documentary and regulatory regimes that determine visibility, legitimacy, and access to global markets.
Paper Walls Across Scales
To better understand how paper walls operate within global surgical manufacturing, we approached them across micro, meso, and macro levels.
At the micro level of everyday production and standardization (Bowker & Star 1999), paper walls shape production practices inside workshops and factories. Technical drawings, calibration procedures, measurement protocols, quality-control documents, and compliance routines do not simply record production; they actively organize it. These documents determine what counts as precision, which deviations become acceptable, and how “quality” itself is materially enacted. In this sense, standardization becomes embedded in daily labor practices.
The meso level refers to recognition and trust, and paper walls function through recognition infrastructures. Labels such as “Made in Germany” do not merely indicate geographic origin. They circulate as condensed symbols of trust, quality, reliability, and legitimacy within global medical markets. Thus, borders emerge not only through customs regulations or territorial restrictions, but also through uneven structures of credibility.
At the macro level, regulatory systems increasingly shape access to international markets. In particular, the European MDR regime has become a powerful infrastructural actor within the global surgical instruments sector. MDR does not simply regulate products entering Europe. Its effects extend across the entire production geography. Importantly, the regulatory burden does not affect only manufacturers outside Europe. Small and medium-sized firms within Europe also struggle with increasing documentation requirements, certification costs, and administrative complexity.
An Important Discussion: Pediatric Devices
One of the most important moments of the conference emerged during the discussion following our presentation, when participants raised the issue of pediatric devices and the growing difficulty of sustaining the production of highly specialized instruments manufactured in small quantities. We found this discussion particularly important because it revealed the broader implications of our argument in a very concrete way.
Pediatric surgical instruments represent a revealing example of how regulatory infrastructures reshape production priorities within global medical manufacturing. These devices are often highly specialized and produced in comparatively low volumes. Under increasingly complex regulatory frameworks such as the European MDR, however, the costs associated with documentation, testing, certification, clinical evaluation, traceability, and compliance can become disproportionately high relative to the size of production runs.
As a result, manufacturers may discontinue certain products not because of technological incapacity or lack of expertise, but because maintaining regulatory compliance becomes economically unsustainable. Recent industry reports and surveys in Germany already point to the withdrawal of specialized medical products from the market, particularly affecting smaller manufacturers and highly specialized devices. Concerns have also been raised regarding pediatric and so-called “orphan” medical devices, whose limited production volumes make them especially vulnerable under current MDR conditions.
Here, paper walls become directly visible. The “wall” is not a physical prohibition preventing production. Rather, it emerges through layers of documentation, audit requirements, risk assessments, certification costs, and administrative obligations that increasingly determine which products remain viable within global markets — and which gradually disappear from circulation.
Bordering Through Infrastructure
The discussions in Warsaw reinforced an important insight for our ongoing MediCluster research: within global medical manufacturing, borders increasingly emerge through documentary, regulatory, and infrastructural practices that shape circulation, legitimacy, and market access.
In the next stages of the project, particularly through forthcoming fieldwork in Sialkot, we aim to further investigate how these boundary infrastructures are experienced, negotiated, and contested across different production clusters within the global surgical instruments industry.
Warsaw provided an especially fitting setting for these discussions. As a city marked by reconstruction, mobility, and layered histories of bordering, it offered a powerful reminder that borders are not simply lines on maps. More often, they operate quietly through documents, certifications, standards, infrastructures, and everyday administrative practices.
And sometimes, the most powerful walls are made of paper.
References
Akkerman, S. F., & Bakker, A. (2011). Boundary crossing and boundary objects. Review of Educational Research, 81(2), 132–169.
Bowker, G. C., & Star, S. L. (1999). Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences. MIT Press.
Star, S. L., & Griesemer, J. R. (1989). Institutional ecology, “translations” and boundary objects: Amateurs and professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39. Social Studies of Science, 19(3), 387–420.
Star, S. L., & Ruhleder, K. (1996). Steps toward an ecology of infrastructure: Design and access for large information spaces. Information Systems Research, 7(1), 111–134.
Star, S. L. (2010). This is not a boundary object: Reflections on the origin of a concept. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 35(5), 601–617.
Timmermans, S., & Epstein, S. (2010). A world of standards but not a standard world: Toward a sociology of standards and standardization. Annual Review of Sociology, 36, 69–89.
Şahinol, M. (2025, August 29). Paper Walls and Endless Circulations: Epistemic Asymmetry in Surgical Instrument Manufacturing. https://doi.org/10.58079/14jtr
Wallerstein, I. (1974). The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. Academic Press.

















