IE 272 World Interdependence – Current Global Issues [CRN 14754]

Overview of Course

Migration is a complex social phenomenon that influences lives and creates ties across all world regions. In this course, we’ll explore why so many people are “on the move” in the contemporary world, how present global pathways are tied to historical patterns of movement, and what happens when individuals and their families engage in migration-related practices from one place to another. We’ll consider questions such as: How does globalization influence migration? What kinds of social and (geo)political processes are involved with defining who “belongs” to a nation-state? When and how does violence occur as people move across national boundaries? What possibilities exist for migrant agency and empowerment? To answer these questions, we will focus on major theoretical frameworks that anthropologists and sociologists use for analyzing and interpreting migration processes, including migration motivation, transnationalism, citizenship, borderlands, and immigrant incorporation and belonging. We’ll examine these themes using clusters of readings for each topic—first addressing theoretical frameworks and then exploring case studies highlighting the interdependence of migrants, politics, and economic systems throughout Asia and Africa while also including comparative examples to other world areas. Our readings and discussions will explore the processes that diverse groups of migrants experience in common, even as we’ll also focus a critical eye on the variabilities of migration processes in each of these regions.