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But what exactly does it mean to be displaced? Who counts as a refugee, and what makes them different from labor migrants? How have certain forms of migration come to be labeled “illegal”? Why are some forms of migration deemed “voluntary” in contrast to others? Where do these distinctions come from and how do they matter in everyday life? This course sets out to address such questions, among many others, by introducing students to the anthropological study of displacement, migration, and transnationalism. Through a close engagement with scholarly texts and visual media, we will pursue two interrelated tracks of inquiry that extend across the arc of this course. 

One track is historical: we will continuously revisit the historical legacies of the 20th-century transnational migration regime, the postcolonial formation and partition of nation-states, the emergence of an uneven and globalized division of labor across the world, and how these fraught histories continue to shape the politics of transnational human mobility until today. 

Our second line of inquiry is primarily ethnographic: it concerns the paradoxical conditions of displacement in everyday human experiences, such as waiting in transit, being-in-place while being displaced, making a home in exile, pursuing the “good life” in conditions of alienation, and the striking capacity of borders to seem invisible or real to the point of being deadly, depending on who or what crosses them, and how. 

The course is organized into six thematic units, guided by questions such as: What kinds of social relationships and conflicts are formed through migration? How are borders governed and contested? How are classed, gendered, and racialized notions of labor, the self, and the family reconfigured by human migrations and immobilities across borders? How are the legacies of colonialism and capitalist extraction embedded in contemporary population movements and states’ efforts to manage them? And how do such histories shape the possibilities and limits of transnational solidarity today?

By the end of the semester, students will be able to:

• Identify major debates, aims, and methods in the anthropological study of displacement, migration, and transnationalism

• Gain new analytical tools for understanding the historical, cultural, and political  significance of human migratory processes in the 20th- and 21st-century 

• Understand the politics of representing displacement through analysis of visual media and material culture, particularly ethnographic films

• Develop empirically-grounded and theoretically rigorous critiques of many taken-for-granted assumptions about displacement, particularly the conventional dichotomy between migrants and refugees

• Gain comparative knowledge of specific practices and ideas related to human migration and displacement in a range of global and regional contexts. These include, among others, the partition of the Indian subcontinent, the making of British colonial subjects into “immigrants,” women electronic factory workers in China’s Special Economic Zones, Mexican farmworkers in the United States, Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and the making of the modern humanitarian refugee regime, struggles over Central Asia’s post-Soviet borders, the politics of displacement in austerity Europe, North American indigenous politics across borders, and Black feminist practices of transnationalism