Critical Border Studies

3.00 credits · Undergraduate

Prereq: 6 credits from SOCI at the 2000 level; or permission of the Department This course explores how borders are used not only to demarcate physical boundaries between nation states but also as more comprehensive political tools to maintain and reinforce multiple social boundaries and inequalities symbolically and materially. Border walls, detention centres, and the more everyday practices of passport control regulate the movement of people practically and symbolically. Importantly, borders have become essential devices for the articulation of the contemporary global order. Borders do not just nestle within the geographic domains of the nation state but are mobilized in and through international and national laws, social institutions, and culture as a means to block and at times facilitate the mobility of people, knowledge, things, and capital. Borderlands have therefore become the sites of struggle for some of the most pressing issues in the contemporary global order. Borders and borderlands are also undergoing significant transformation through globalization as cross-border and transnational experiences, identities, and solidarities form and proliferate. Borders in this sense are constantly transforming practices, evoked for particular means at particular moments, spurring resistance of various kinds. (Format: Lecture 3 Hours)