ETHNC 3790 - Politics of Borders & Migration

In this course, we will explore the ways in which borders are constructed, imposed, and policed in relation to profit,resources, and power.What are borders anyway? We often take borders for granted as natural boundaries between “us” and “them.” Going beyond this standard view, we will explore how ideologies of race, racism, gender, and sexuality form the basis for the invention of modern borders and immigration control. We will examine the ways in which migrants themselves bring attention to the economic and political processes which displace them, while at the same time advocating for the right to freedom of movement.While the idea of freedom of movement as a human right has been championed by different actors throughout the last century including as part of the formation of an entity such as the European Union, we will explore the ways in which this right is bestowed unequally with regards to class, race,and social status. Our social conditions, no matter who we are, are thoroughly transnational. Whether we ourselves have crossed borders or not, or been dispossessed by them, whether we buy products produced by labor in other parts of the world, or whether we support family in other countries, we are enmeshed in a deeply unequal global economy. While mainstream approaches to migration erase such inequities and understand it as a problem to be solved, this course approaches migration asa site for creative world-making and social transformation. In this course, we will foreground these questions with particular attention to the stories of migrant youth, both in the United States and transnationally.