Refugees and the Biopolitics of Citizenship

Catalog description

The refugee is caught between national and international political logics. Each country applies its own calculus for deciding which asylum seekers should be granted the status of refugee, and how refugees should be accommodated or denied access to public goods, rights and residency. This course examines the politics of national responses to record numbers of people seeking asylum, including bureaucracies of (in)validation, xenophobia, the construction of walls and detention centres, international accords, multicultural solidarity, and novel categories of citizenship. Contemporary responses to refugees reveal the interconnectedness of political and structural violence, the limits of humanitarianism and hope for new forms of international cooperation. 001798