Course Description & Objective

This interdisciplinary course examines im/migration and culture embedded in a transnational field of social, economic, and political processes. We follow current approaches in social sciences that view (im)migration as the effect of a patterned process of globalization of capital and culture. This process builds objective and subjective “bridges” that historically link migrants’ homelands to their “host” societies, both in the U.S. and around the world. Drawing on empirical research and theoretical analyses, topics we study include:

• how options to migrate are socially constituted, and examine the recent emergence of “transmigrants” whose lives cut across national boundaries.
• how both long-standing and recent structural processes and international connections underlie contemporary migrations: colonialism, war and military occupation/intervention, development, globalization of labor recruitment and economic interactions, global flows of technology, information, media, and culture.
• major cities as strategic sites in the postcolonial global economy where a multiplicity of migrants, cultures, and identities that have been deterritorialized from local settings all over the world are reterritorialized in urban centers.
• how migrants are situated in and navigate through social processes of migration.
• how migrants negotiate their contradictory experience of being caught between the nation and the globe, and manipulate their diasporic identities to adjust to their shifting positioning.
• how migrants resist their devaluation as Other within nations of settlement, and their subordination within a transnational capitalist system that increasingly depends on their labor even as this contribution appears devalued
• discourses about im/migration, by policy makers, citizens, and migrants in public and popular culture
• local, national, and global immigration debates, with an eye to how the cultural hybridity of diasporic communities has challenged native citizens worldwide to re-imagine their own national communities in this transnational era.