Early Childhood Language Socialization among Tibetans in British Columbia by Shannon Ward

“In 2010, former Prime Minister Harper finalized an agreement with the 14th Dalai Lama to settle 1000 Tibetan refugees in Canada. Resettlement took place from 2013 to 2017 at sites across Canada including greater Vancouver and the Sunshine Coast. The resettlement program provided pathways to citizenship for individuals and families who had been living in protracted exile since 1959, in remote settlements in
Arunachal Pradesh. After nearly 60 years in exile in the densely multilingual eastern Himalayas, Tibetans from Arunachal Pradesh have complex linguistic backgrounds. As these individuals build their lives in western Canada, they face challenges in supporting their young children’s continued connection to their heritage through language in a drastically new diasporic setting.

To better understand and ultimately address these challenges, this project examines the social and linguistic development of the first generation of Tibetan children born in Canada through this resettlement program. Using methods from ethnography and field linguistics, we are documenting and analyzing toddlers’ mother tongue language acquisition alongside cultural practices in their homes. We aim to understand the social, cultural, and linguistic facets of language shift as
manifested in individual children’s developing language repertoires.”

Research Partners
Shannon Ward, PI
Mark Turin, Collaborator
Nawang Seldon, Community Partner

Migration and Material Culture: Mobility Between China and Italy via America, 1980s-2010s by Gaoheng Zhang

The book offers an innovative critical framework to examine cultural dynamics pertaining to migrations between China and Italy, as well as their intersections in or through American culture. The book deploys the Chinese concept of 衣食住行 (clothing, food, residence, mobility) in structuring discussions about Italian and Chinese material cultures and their representations in primary sources culled from diverse media and archives. Ultimately, the book aims to refine theorizing concerning the relationships between migration and material culture.

A Solution to the Problems of the Racial Binary

This project examines how and what it means to take responsibility for various “isms”, analyzes the significance of the responsibilities, and focuses on critically understand belonging without the concomitant need to blame based on differential group membership.

Principle Investigator: Wilkes, Rima Department of Sociology, UBC

The New Media Aesthetics of Migration

By analyzing the function of mobile devices and social media in the lives of migrants and connecting it to the role of smartphone technologies and new media in representations (especially self-representations) of migrant experience, this project seeks to understand the significance of mobilizing the digital tools and technologies of migration in its narrativization.

Principal Investigator: Elizabeth Nijdam, Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies, UBC

Migration As Core Narrative Of Plural Societies Towards: An Aesthetics Of Postmigrant Literature (SSHRC Insight Development Grant)

This collaborative research project, together with collaborator Moritz Schramm from South Denmark University, focuses on refugees and immigrants being explicitly seen as agents who enhance societies. We will therefore investigate refugees’ and immigrants’ narratives as playing a crucial part in questioning, changing and creating collective core narratives of belonging in plural societies where an increased diversity demands a change in integration policies. This includes the hypothesis that immigrants and refugees tell their life stories, whether past or present, biographical, documentational or fictional, aesthetically differently from representations in mass media and national politics, where they are often dehumanized and marginalized. Our research project is therefore twofold: In a first step we will analyse recent German-language literature that deals with diaspora, exile, flight, refuge and displacement. Through these case studies from a sociological informed cultural studies perspective, we will demonstrate how migrant narratives have become a driving factor for societal change. Our aim is to establish a set of criteria for a new transformative aesthetics that constantly challenges and renegotiates political perspectives, social and cultural identities. In a second step, we will then critically discuss the theoretical implications of an aesthetics of postmigration as a possible new turn in literary studies.

Principle Investigator: Hallensleben, Markus Department of Central, Eastern and Northern European Studies, UBC, Collaborator: Schramm, Moritz Dr. Moritz Schramm, Department for the Study of Culture, SDU, Denmark

Research

Programs & Initiatives

Collaborators

Other Courses

MD615F20A: Migration and Displacement
Online
Sept 17 – Oct 30, 2020

Take a comprehensive look at migration as a form of displacement of peoples across the globe. Consider how contemporary migration is collapsing boundaries and changing how we think about the “First World” and the “Third World.” Explore the root causes of forced migration and how this is directly linked to survival, including the livelihood and well-being of families, communities and remittance-dependent economies. Take a critical look at present global policies, initiatives and alternatives to forced migration.

For more information, please click here.

ANTH 540C: Mobilities and Immobilities
Instructor: Alexia Bloch
2020-2021 academic year

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.

For more information, please click here.

Past Undergraduate Courses

SPRING 2020

POLI 328C(3): Topics in Comparative Politics
Instructor: Antje Ellermann
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:00 am – 12:30 pm

This course provides students with the analytical tools to understand the dynamics driving the politics of immigration in advanced democracies, focusing mostly on Canada, the United States, and Western Europe. The first part of the course examines the dynamics driving cross-border migration. Part Two investigates the factors that shape the making of immigration policy. In Part Three we engage with the normative question of whether liberal democracies should have the right to close their borders to migrants. Part Four grapples with the challenge of immigration control. We take a look at how states try to control their borders and what the consequences of these control efforts have been. In the final part of the course we focus our attention on the politics of integration. What is the meaning of citizenship, and why do the rules governing the acquisition of citizenship vary across countries? We will examine the economic, social, and cultural integration of immigrants and grapple with the challenges that linguistic and religious diversity poses to host societies.

This course has an optional Community Service Learning (CSL) component which allows a limited number of students to complete a placement in community organizations serving immigrants and refugees.

Syllabus to come.

LAW 377.001: Immigration Law
Instructor: Asha Kaushal

Days and times TBC

Immigration law determines who gets into Canada and on what terms. This course will examine the framework for entry, residence, and citizenship established by the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. Students will learn the criteria for the various immigration classes. Topics will include: family immigration, skilled workers, international students, temporary foreign workers, provincial nominee programs, criminal and medical inadmissibility, and removals (including detention and deportation). We will also examine the intersection between immigration law and other fields of law such as constitutional law. This course focuses primarily on the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and its regulations and case law, but attention will be paid throughout to the historical, philosophical, and normative aspects of immigration law. Students will be asked to think critically about how immigration law treats different classes of people.

Law 378C covers refugee law. The two courses complement each other and students interested in research or practice in this field are advised to take both courses.

Evaluation: students may choose either: (a) a 100% final exam or (b) a 30% case comment and a 70% final exam.

Syllabus to come.

SOCI 303: Sociology of Migration
Instructor: Amira Halperin
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30 – 2:00 pm

This course will focus on current trends and approaches to understanding migration both as a complex global phenomenon and with particular attention to Canada. We will explore migrants’ communities and migrant-support organisations across Canada. Students will learn the social integration of diverse ethnic and religious groups of migrants and refugees, including women, youth, LGBT2Q, torture survivors and more. The course will explore the influence of digital technology on migrants’ integration. In addition to what is learned in the classroom, students will meet refugees, NGO’s and policymakers.

To view the course syllabus, please click here.

FALL 2019

GERM 302-001: German Literature after 1945: Exile, Flight, Refuge and Migration (in English)
Instructor: Markus Hallensleben
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 2:00 – 3:30 pm

This undergraduate course focuses on transnational literature affected by migration. It introduces to the themes and settings of flight, refuge and (im)mobility. One part covers historical facts, cultural theories and primary sources on exile, diaspora, immigration, integration, belonging, transculturality and European cultural identity. The other part features the analysis and critical reading of select primary literature by and on immigrants and refugees, such as Bertolt Brecht’s Refugee Conversations, Ernst Heppner’s Shanghai Refuge, Zafer Şenocak’s Perilous Kinship, Navid Kermani’s Upheaval, Abbas Khider’s A Slap in the Face, the film comedy Welcome to Germany and videos by YouTube star Firas Alshater.

To view a draft of the syllabus, please click here.

POLI 328C (3): Topics in Comparitive Politics
Instructor: Salta Zhumatova
Tuesdays & Thursdays, 11:00 am – 2:00 pm

This course examines how contemporary liberal democracies of Western Europe and North America manage immigration and migrant integration. We will analyze current migration policies, the causes and consequences of migration, and the challenges it presents to receiving countries. The course begins with a brief historical overview of policy responses to immigration in the major receiving countries and a review of key theories of migration. The first part of the course focuses on policies and policy determinants in the main immigration areas – labour migration, asylum, family migration and irregular migration – across liberal states. The second part of the course discusses policies that seek to enable the economic, social and cultural integration of migrants into destination countries, with reference to multiculturalism, assimilation and other integration models. The course discusses both the national governance of migration and international cooperation in migration management.

SUMMER 2019

SOCI 303: Sociology of Migration
Instructor: Amira Halperin

Tuesdays & Thursdays, 9:00 am – 12:00 pm

By the end of 2017, 68.5 million individuals were forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conﬂict, or generalized violence. The Syrian Arab Republic accounts for the largest forcibly displaced population globally. As of the end of 2017, there were 12.6 million forcibly displaced Syrians (UNHCR, 2017). Canada has been a country of immigration, and increasing its immigration targets (Canada’s Multi – Year Immigration Plan 2018 to 2021). This course will focus on current trends and approaches to understanding migration both as a complex global phenomenon and with particular attention to Canada. We will explore migrants’ communities and migrant-support organisations across Canada. Students will learn the social integration of different groups of migrants and refugees: women, youth, LGBT2Q, torture survivors and more. The course will explore the influence of technology on migrants and the citizens of the host society. Students will meet with Middle Eastern refugees, and will visit migrant-support organisations. Students will receive updated information relating to events organized by refugees and for refugees, as well as academic talks on migration.

To view the syllabus, please click here.

SPRING 2019

POLI 449B 001/521A 001, Contested Territory
Instructor: Anna Jurkevics
Wednesdays, 9:00 am – 12:00 pm

This course surveys Western approaches to land, place, and territory. We begin with the phenomenology and economy of place through readings of Hannah Arendt, GWF Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, and David Harvey. Part II of the course covers theories of territory, and will address issues related to land attachment, nationalism, and the property-territory distinction. In Part III, we explore geopolitics through readings of Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt and Hans Morgenthau. In the concluding section of the course, we will consider the pathologies of the Western approach to territory by reading indigenous scholarship on land, including Glen Coulthard’s Red Skins, White Masks.