240090 SE Transnational Migration: Challenges and Blindspots (P4) (2012W)

Description and the Aims: This course will explore the flow of people across national boundaries in the late twentieth century and how migrants build and sustain border-crossing connections and networks; focus on the different kinds of institutions involved in this process and their change in time; concentrate on the key concepts of transnational migration perspectives, like ethnicity, community, locality, sovereignity, and multiple membership. The aim of the course is to familiarise the students with the main theories of transnational migration, their conceptual network, and their distinct trajectories of development in the US and Europe, as well as their blind spots in close relation to these trajectories. The latter point will be addressed throughout the course not as a separate weekly topic. On the basis of selected case study material addressing transnational migration and the related processes in different parts of the world, we will focus on transnational migration patterns and the social, economic, cultural and political repercussions of migrant transnational social formations on the nation-states involved. One of the objectives of this course is to analyse the interface between migrant formations and the state and the challanges transnational migration poses to religious and political formations, citizenship schemes, agencies of development, and to urban politics .