AANK16101U The Anthropology of Migration, advanced course

Anthropologists no longer view migration as necessarily antithetical to settled life, but rather as a resource that is integral to ongoing social, economic and cultural mobilities. This course will look at different forms of migration and how they are shaped by migrants as well as the migration regimes that seek to control them. This will be done by exploring some of the ethnographic case studies and related theoretical and methodological approaches that have appeared in recent years.

We will investigate how migration, on the one hand, is perceived and practiced as a resource and, on the other, viewed and treated as a potential security risk in different socio-economic and cultural contexts. Central questions will be: What kinds of social and personal aspirations and which structural opportunities and constraints shape current migration processes? How can we capture these processes in ethnographic research? And what is the methodological and analytical purchase of concepts such as social imaginaries, mobility/immobility, adventure, migratory paths, borderlands, securitization, legality/illegality, uncertainty and potentiality?