GMAP 483FResearch Methods in Prevention

Catalog

Description: In 2022, the world set a miserable new record for forced displacement: for the first time, more than 100 million people globally have fled their homes due to armed conflict, persecution, economic collapse, crime, climate change - and in most cases, novel combinations of all these factors. This number is more than double the world figure less than one decade ago. This crisis of global forced displacement has generated enormous challenges for national governments, international organizations, and civil societies. How should states respond to often unpredicted, massive influxes of refugees and asylum seekers into their territories? What legal, political, and moral obligations do states, including transit states, owe to international refugees, and how should they balance these obligations against other competing claims? How are increases in the volume and complexity of forced migration flows challenging traditional conceptions of national identity and state sovereignty? How does internal displacement - which accounts for the majority of the global number of displaced persons - call for policy responses distinct from international displacement? This course examines these and other questions through exploration of the spectrum of legal, political, policy-based, and normative responses arising from the contemporary crisis of forced displacement. We will examine the range of "push factors" behind the contemporary surge in human displacement, and will examine the ways in which they mutually interact, effectively multiplying threats of forced displacement. We will read the basic legal instruments of post-war refugee law, and assess how those instruments, and the legal duties they impose on states, have fared in the last decade. Normative theorists will offer different, often conflicting arguments for the moral as well as the legal duties of national and international actors. Several case studies will examine differing policy responses on the national and sub-national levels to flows of forced migration, from the reactive weaponization of refugee law and policy to more open and progressive options. We will also speak via zoom with a number of guests from state and international organizations, to help us understand the policy landscape of the displacement crisis from a practitioner perspective.GMAP 483F Social Marginalization&Trauma - Trauma, whether experienced in the context of weather disasters due to climate change, incidences of genocide or mass atrocity, familial histories of interpersonal violence, or trauma related to multiple forms of cultural bias, has long-term effects on both our physical and mental health. Recent developments in affective neuroscience provide a larger understanding of the way the physiology of trauma informs our relationships and ways of being. We will engage these developments alongside literary texts that represent this kind of experience, exploring the legacy of implicit cultural biases surrounding race, class, gender, neurodivergence, and sexuality in the intergenerational transmission of trauma and in occurrences of genocide and mass atrocity. Through graphic memoirs, creative nonfiction, novels, comedy, and film, we will see how cultural texts illustrate and understand traumatic experience, and how neuroscience is arriving at similar understandings. Cultural texts may include Toni Morrison, Beloved; Louise Erdrich, The Master Butcher's Singing Club; Alison Bechtel, Fun Home; Autism in Heels: The Untold Story of a Female Life on the Spectrum; Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis; Hannah Gadsby, Nanette, Paul Thomas Anderson, Magnolia; and will be paired with the most recent work in the neuroscience of trauma that locates mental health practice in an anti-oppression framework.