240510 VO MM3 Migration and anthropology as a discipline (2023W)

Description and Aims: This course aims to approach the development of migration studies in relationship to the changes in the discipline of anthropology in a particular conjuncture. The course will assess how the changes in anthropology as a discipline had an impact on the way the migrations scholarship evolved: how its focus and questions took shape together with theoretical, methodological and ethical questions in anthropology. The entanglements between anthropology and migration studies would be then situated into the particular world conjuncture (development and then the crises of welfare states, recessions, capital restructuring, neoliberal transformations and their effects on the immigration policies and imaginaries). In this context the cours will discuss the ways the key concepts of anthropology as a discipline like ethnicity, community, locality, racialization, and multiple membership and identities unfold in migration scholarship. The course aims to reflect on the relationship between the migration studies and fundamental structural and cultural changes that are reconfiguring the conditions of migration especially in cities, including its directionalities, actors, systems of governance, and social movements. The recent emphasis on migration/refugee industries, agencies and actors involved in the management and governance of migrants and refugees and their mobilities will also be approached from this perspective. The way migration studies took shape in different parts of the world again in relation to the geographies of anthropology as a discipline will also be part of the course.

Structure: This class will be based on lectures. The students are expected to participate into the class around the questions the instructor will formulate during her lectures.

Learning Outcomes: At the end of the course, the students are expected to: Have an understanding of the entanglements between the development of migration studies, its key concepts through the lens of anthropology as a discipline; their interrelated trajectories of development; Have a critical understanding of the key concepts of transnational migration, namely of “ethnicity”, “community”, “sovereignty”, locality, and “citizenship/membership”; Understand the importance of processes of capital restructuring and urban transformation in studying migration.