Here is the list of all the approved elective graduate courses available for the 2025/2026 academic year. Please note that this list will be updated through the summer.
Instructor: Alexia Bloch
Teaching schedule: 2025 Winter Term 2
Credits: 3
Delivery Mode and Format: TBD, Seminar
Day and Time: TBD
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 labor, and family structures have shifted with transnational flows of labor 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: Sofia Noori
Teaching schedule: 2025 Winter Term 1/2
Credits: 3
Delivery Mode and Format: Seminar and Lecture
Day and Time: TBD
This course will introduce students to refugee studies in education. We will explore how refugees have portrayed themselves and have been portrayed in literature, memoir, film, and art. This course is transnational and interdisciplinary in analysis. With the current political crisis over refugees, we will focus mainly on the last 50 years and contextualize our study by reading academic articles, media coverage, policies, and law. This course will begin with understanding how the processes and legacies of colonization, imperialism, war, displacement, state violence, and globalization impact our conceptualization of refugees. We will consider how the experience of being in war zones, camps, journeying across borders, homelessness, familial loss, resettlement, and trauma shape the subjectivity and conditionality of refugeeness. Then we will discuss how refugees negotiate through the webs of imposed definitions and policies vis-à-vis their personal stories and art. Our examination of these aesthetic attempts will also bring to light the ways refugees respond to and at times reconfigure the socio-political discourses about those living in exile in Canada. We will address the intersections of ethnicity, race, class, gender, with pedagogical practices that refugees encounter during their journeys. Throughout the course, we will address the unique role of education, teachers and schooling on the psyche, language and development of refugees’ sense of self and belonging.
Classes include Constructing the Refugee; Critical Refugee Studies; Legacies of Colonialism; Refugees as Human; Media Coverage; and Refugee Camps. Three hour classes will be divided into 3 components: lecture and multi-media presentation, discussion and analysis of course readings, followed by cooperative group and/or class activities. Assessments include daily class discussion participation (15%), 2 article presentations (30%), 3 reading responses (45%), and KWL chart and feedback (10%).
Instructor: Desiree Valadares
Teaching schedule: 2025 Winter Term 2
Credits: 3
Delivery Mode and Format: In-Person Seminar
Day and Time: Fri, 11.00-14:00
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. Select soundwork submissions may be invited for preparation and further editing for submission to BC Studies: A British Columbia Quarterly Soundworks Project. Select research papers may be invited for preparation and further editing for submission to Trail Six: An Undergraduate Journal of Geography. Please note that for registration, graduate students will have to contact Suzanne Lawrence (undergraduate.program@geog.ubc.ca) to be manually registered into this seminar.
Instructor: Jemima Baada
Teaching schedule: 2025 Winter Term 1
Credits: 3
Delivery Mode and Format: In-Person Seminar
Day and Time: Wed, 11.00-14:00
The ongoing climate crisis affects every facet of planetary life, and human and non-human animal population im/mobilities are major responses to climate change. Climate change, migration and health are interdependent processes embedded within globalisation (i.e., the increased connectivity and movement of people, ideas, goods, services, etc.). This implies that climate change, migration and health issues are not confined to specific populations or geographical regions. This course examines planetary, global and public health as shaped by climate change and migration, and how planetary and global health in turn shape climate change and migration issues. Students will be introduced to the historical overview of these three issues. The course will also delve into the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings (e.g., power dynamics, politics, economics, knowledge production) of climate change, migration and health. Different case studies will be used to understand how these processes play out in everyday lives.
Instructor: Catherine Dauvergne
Teaching schedule: 2025 Winter Term 1
Credits: 3
Delivery Mode and Format: In-Person Lecture
Day and Time: Tues/Thurs, 14:00-15:30
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 regarding the refugee definition. 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
Teaching schedule: 2025 Winter Term 2
Credits: 3
Delivery Mode and Format: In-Person Lecture
Day and Time: Tues/Thurs, 14:00-15:30
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. Assessment for the course varies and students have some choice about which assessments to complete. JD students will have the choice of completing 0, 1, or 2 assignments worth 20% each + writing an exam that will be worth 60%, 80% or 100%. Graduate students will be required to complete either one or two assignments, and also submit a research paper worth 60% or 80%.
Instructor: Irene Bloemraad
Teaching schedule: 2025 Winter Term 1
Credits: 3
Delivery Mode and Format: In-Person Seminar
Day and Time: Tues, 14:00-17:00
This graduate seminar focuses on the policies that structure migration and migrants’ lives. We consider two sets of policies. The first concerns the rules, procedures, and barriers to entry into a state’s territory, spanning a host of legal statuses, including permanent admission, temporary visas and asylum. The politics of entry always entails policies of exclusion. Why do many advanced capitalist countries favor the free movement of goods, services, and capital, but balk at the free movement of people? Who is excluded, and why? What determines entry policy? A second set of policies encompasses programs and laws related to integration. Integration involves membership, and thus we consider the laws and procedures to access citizenship. Citizenship generally ensures the fullest set of rights, the greatest security of residence, and clearest path to political voice. Beyond citizenship, integration policies can also include initiatives like refugee settlement programs or policies of multiculturalism. Comparatively, across both entry and integration policies, scholars debate whether countries are converging toward a common policy stance, and what drives convergence, or whether instead we find variation. How do ideas, institutions and interests drive entry and integration policy? This class is open to students outside of political science, and will draw on a range of interdisciplinary scholarship.