Borders and Migration

Catalog description

This course considers the historical underpinnings and contemporary manifestations of borders and their politics while thinking through the experiences of those who cross them. Together we will ask: How are borders constructed and contested? How do those who migrate experience borders? How do the intertwined discourses of citizenship, nativity, and autochthony become destabilized when movement and borders become central heuristics by which to understand belonging and membership? Throughout the course we will read academic texts as well as engage with films and literature to develop a theoretical and practical knowledge of borders and the nation-states they frame, in relationship to contemporary and historical migratory flows.