Borders Bodies

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course will provide an entry into critical humanitarianism and border regimes as they pertain to migration studies with a special focus on the Middle East, South Asia, and North Africa. Though border regimes are often imagined as closing off movement, we will also consider the directed, strategic enactment of borders and frontiers by nation-states. This will open paths to inquiry into questions of sovereignty, belonging, and how asylum-seekers are mobilized to refashion the borders of the contemporary nation-state. Whereas much attention has been directed at efforts at entrenching racial and sexual borders, renewed interest in the materialities of border regimes in the form of documentation, physical constructions (walls, checkpoints), and topographic elements (bodies of water, deserts, mountains), disregards the projection of bodies themselves as border-making technologies. Through an interdisciplinary corpus of works of anthropologists, philosophers, literary critics, and political scientists, we will consider law and asylum, governmentality, policing, surveillance, borders, and frontiers, as well as how those in movement and confronting borders are classified, categorized, and fixed. In addition, we will read essays and political tracts written by emigrants.