How does one account for the ever-present and growing phenomenon of displaced people on the move in a world of bounded nation-states and citizens? How does one make sense of temporary encampments and refuge in a world of stable home/lands, and exile and fugitivity in a world of legal belonging?
As key political figures, refugees and migrants contest and transect our normative ideas about the national and the global. They force us to reckon with the hardened and profoundly consequential legal categories of borders and citizenship around which our world is organized. This course takes a deep dive into the modern experience of displaced people to understand their predicament and how it unsettles our fundamental notions of the political, nation-states, freedom, home, crises, violence, human rights, and humanitarian care.
Texts: Hannah Arendt, Zora Neale Hurston, Lori Allen, Julie Peteet, Urvashi Butalia, Giorgio Agamben, Amitav Ghosh, Saida Hodzic, Miriam Ticktin, Liisa Malkki, Judith Butler, Justin Hoseby, Simone Browne, Neil Roberts, and others.
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