WGSS 66.03 Transnational Migration: Critical Ethnic, Indigenous and Queer Crossings
This course introduces undergraduate students in programs across the college to research practices, theories and methodologies commonly used in cultural analysis, with the intent of increasing their knowledge of the interdisciplinary fields of critical ethnic and gender studies around the theme of migration. Students will read a range of texts, performances, films and learn the different approaches that migration has come to shape transnational sensibility. The course is designed to individual research/analysis projects to emerge around various constellations of issues, such as where questions of ‘queer’ and ‘migrations’ intersect, or figures of diaspora, the undocumented and the transmigrant meet. This mode of investigation will enable students to develop research interests in cultural processes, discourses and forms across a range of historical periods, on diverse topics (neoliberalism, disability, humanitarian violence, security/securitization, war, terror, prison, border, law, etc.), and in conversation with interdisciplinary themes that are organized by the week. Students will be introduced to the key debates in the field as they interrogate social and political apparatuses of power (sexism, racism, classism, xenophobia, homophobia/heterosexism, transphobia, ableism, and others), and how those apparatuses determine which migrant bodies are recognized and valued both in the United States and the rest of the world.