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.
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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.
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