Culture, Migration, & Mobility

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Upon completion of this course, the student is able to: - Clarify the interplay between culture-formation, migration, and mobility in a number of different empirical domains of transnational practices; - Apply concepts, insights, research tools and methodologies deriving from the human and social sciences in general and anthropology in particular, to this field of study; - Critically analyse and interpret the complexities of the phenomena of culture-formation, mobility and migration in the context of globalization from an anthropological point of view. These objectives will be communicated to the students at the start of the semester. This course focuses on anthropological research, concepts and case-studies dealing with the complexities of the phenomena of culture-formation, mobility and migration within a context which is generally identified as globalization. Students gain a broad as well as in-depth understanding of the interplay between processes of culture-formation related to complex forms of migration and mobility. The guiding questions of this course are (a) How is culture constituted through processes of migration, circulation and mobility?; and (b) How are migration and mobility signified and imagined and construed through the lens of (changing) cultural ideologies and practices? The key theoretical concepts dealt with in the course are, among others, super-diversity, transnationality, multi-sitedness, complex migration trajectories, the multiplication of borders, transnational popular culture/heritage, diaspora, regimes of diversity and mobility, autochthony and indigeneity . The disciplinary range of the course occasionally exceeds Anthropology and ventures into Cultural Studies, Urban Studies, Social and Cultural Geography, and Sociolinguistics. The geographical focus is eminently global with a slight bias towards Europe and Africa.