POLI 388 - Policing Borders and Transnational Solidarities

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as INTL 388) This seminar offers a range of critical-historical perspectives on contemporary bordering practices, the policing of transnational communities and movements, new regimes of immigration management, and transgressive performances of identity and difference. Among other phenomena, students analyze the development of new, national, transnational, and global regimes of “securitization” as well as proliferating, quotidian practices of border production and control in the context of the “war on terror”; the resurgence of militant, xenophobic nationalisms; the recruitment, gendered racialization, and exploitation of non-citizen workers; and the historical contexts, including imperial and colonial contexts, that continue to shape and animate these practices and developments. Through close readings of testimonies, auto-biographical and ethnographic narratives, films, and other forms of “transpolitical” representation, we seek throughout the course to understand transnational solidarities that unsettle dominant narratives and imagined communities produced and policed by new regimes of border control. Mr. Hoffman.

Prerequisite: permission of the instructor.

One 2-hour period.