Previous Course Offerings

Instructor: Alexia Bloch

Over the past 20 years, anthropologists have extensively studied the implications of intensified forms of mobility for local communities, families, individuals and the cultural production in which they are enmeshed, often being attentive to how gender and sexuality inflect the experience of migration. Increasingly anthropologists are joining other social scientists in asking critical questions around social policy and the cultural assumptions that inform how states and communities decide who —e.g., temporary workers, permanent residents, exotic dancers, agricultural laborers, or non-citizen children—belongs and what forms of mobility will be embraced. As we examine key texts in the study of migration and transnational mobility (and immobility), we will consider how the possibility to cross borders, a sense of belonging, and questions of citizenship are intertwined. As we consider how forms of connection, intimacy, emotional labour, and family structures have shifted with transnational flows of labour and concomitant newly contested border crossing, we will also closely examine the forms of governance impeding mobility. We will be especially concerned with the following theoretical and methodological issues: ethnographic approaches to understanding changing ideals around mobility, citizenship, gender, sexuality, home and family; transnational cultural productions; the politics of care, and state and state-like efforts to police gendered flows of productive and reproductive labor from Asia and the Pacific, North Africa, and the former Soviet Union to other parts of the world.

Instructor: Marie-Eve Bouchard

This course is based on the fundamental idea that discourse practices are an important indicator of wider social and cultural structures. Language has a key role to play in the racial and ethnic boundary-making processes, as it is a vehicle for the ideologies that get attached to racialized and ethnicized subjects. It is through language that racial and ethnic ideologies are produced and reproduced, perpetuated and resisted. This course takes an interest in the construction and maintenance of racial and ethnic boundaries through the use of language.  

This course is built around two main questions: If race and ethnicity are ways of categorizing identity (rather than being inherited essences of identity), then how and why are race and ethnicity so powerful in shaping social life and experience? If race, ethnicity, and language are social constructs, how can we (as citizens, students, and scholars) represent and discuss these concepts without reifying them? We will read a range of ethnographies and articles that seek to overcome these dilemmas.

Instructor: Desiree Valadares

This course moves beyond normative landmasses and nation-states to consider global oceanic connections, migration routes, diasporic settler populations, and Indigenous seascape epistemologies. We will explore five main thematic areas which include: (1) Blue Geographies (2) Oceans as Archives (3) Bridging the Oceans and Diasporic Connections (4) Oceanic Formations, and (5) Sound and Oceanscapes. Each student will produce a 10–12-pg research paper and translate the main themes into a 10-minute soundwork.

Instructor: Peter Klein and Andrea Crossan

The Global Reporting Program (GRP) offers graduate students the chance to research complex global issues and produce major works of journalism/knowledge mobilization. This course involves master’s journalism students partnering with graduate students with subject-area expertise and interest, as well as students or journalists at partner institutions worldwide. In 2024-25, the focus was on border issues.

Instructor: Catherine Dauvergne

This course provides a foundation for scholarship and practice in the area of refugee law.  The first part of the term will be spent considering international refugee law, with particular focus on the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and jurisprudence from around the world on the definition of a refugee.  The second part of the term will consider how the Convention is implemented in Canadian law, and will examine key aspects of refugee status determination in Canada.  The course draws on topics in international human rights law, administrative law, and some aspects of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Assessment in this course will include an exam worth 60% of the grade, and two smaller assignments worth 20% each.  Assessment may be adjusted, by negotiation with students, if fewer than 20 students enrol in the course.

Instructor: Catherine Dauvergne

This course introduces students to Canadian Immigration Law. The centrepiece of the course is Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, the framework legislation that translates Canada’s immigration policy choices into law. Topics covered in the class will include economic migration and family class migration, temporary migration, inadmissibility to Canada, deportation and other forms of removal, migration status, and citizenship. Refugee Law is not covered in this course.

Instructor: Anna Jurkevics

This course surveys and challenges Western approaches to land, place, and territory. We begin with surveys of the concept of place, the history of territory, and the political economy of land. Part II covers theories of territorial rights and will address issues related to land attachment, nationalism, and the property-territory distinction. In Part III, we explore the Westphalian system of territorial sovereignty, including its relationship to migration, borders, colonialism, and empire. In the concluding section of the course, Part IV, we will consider alternatives to the Western approach to territory by reading Indigenous scholarship on land, including Glen Coulthard’s Red Skins, White Masks and Audra Simpson's Mohawk Interruptus.

Instructor: Alessandra Santos

This seminar aims to examine a selection of texts and films through the lens of displacements. We will study the geographical, cultural and subjective dislocations that occur due to economic and political globalization after 1990, migration, (im)mobility, tensions and conflicts that arise from these processes. Topics to be examined: diasporas; wandering (literal and metaphorical); consumption; impact of cyber technological developments; violence; dissolution and construction of borders; new subjectivities; gender, sexuality and body; melancholy and humour. We will discuss a variety of works in their social, economic and political contexts and complexities. We will study how diverse films confront multiple discourses surrounding displacements.

Instructor: Kim Beauchesne

This course examines the diverse body of travel narratives written by Latin American and Spanish authors from the conquest of the Americas to the present day. These narratives will guide us through worlds that are sometimes exoticized, threatening, mysterious, or dystopian. Within this context, we will discuss issues related to mobility, such as the development of intercultural contacts, border crossings, the impact of exile, and increasing globalization. Furthermore, we will complement the analysis of the primary works with a selection of critical and theoretical texts, the cartography specific to each period studied, and some filmic representations.