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The Politics of Making Migrants

Course content

Migration is considered one of the key challenges for the 21st century. Ever more people appear to be ‘on the move’. This is often presented as a result of conflicts, inequality and climate change, although people also move for work, education and indeed love. What migration is and who is considered a migrant depends on conceptualisations. These conceptualisations have political effects: they have an impact on the extent to which those positioned as migrants are understood as an opportunity or challenge for the societies they live in. Although each state sets immigration rules, this making of migrants is at the same time impacted by how global politics is regulated and imagined, such as international norms on refugees or states’ self-perception as open to the world. This course explores how the question of how we frame migration is related to ideas about citizenship and belonging and to the racialization of those positioned as foreign. It draws together theorisations, historical background and concrete examples of contemporary politics. The course will also provide opportunities to reflect on and learn about writing.

Indicative topic list:

  • The Politics of Making Migrants: An Introduction
  • Being from ‘Here’: Citizenship and Belonging
  • Borders and the Ends of Empire
  • Geographies of Mobility and the Politics of Crisis
  • Counting People, Giving Voice, Telling Stories: Strategies for Research
  • Hostile Environments and Intersections of Class and Race
  • The Problem of Hospitality
  • Cross-Border Families
  • Living-With: Literatures of Diversity
  • The Risk of the Future
  • Work in progress workshop
  • Migration and the Economy
  • Writing Migrants
  • Conclusion

 

Education

Full-degree students enrolled at the Department of Political Science, UCPH

  • MSc in Political Science
  • MSc in Social Science
  • MSc in Security Risk Management
  • Bachelor in Political Science

 

Full-degree students enrolled at the Faculty of Social Science, UCPH 

  • Master Programme in Social Data Science
  • Master Programmes in Psychology
  • Bachelor and Master Programmes in Anthropology 
  • Master programme in Global Development

 

The course is open to:

  • Exchange and Guest students from abroad
  • Credit students from Danish Universities
  • Open University students

 

Enrolled students register the course through the Selfservice. Please contact the study administration at each programme for questions regarding registration.

Learning outcome

Knowledge:

Students will be able to

  • Explain and analyse how migrants and migration are conceptualised academically and politically
  • Analyse these conceptualisations as a problem of global politics
  • Discuss the politics of such conceptualisations, drawing on theory as well as on empirical evidence

 

Skills:

Students will be able to

  • Interrogate texts and engage with the conceptualisations they produce
  • Construct, defend and critique arguments

 

Competences:

Students will learn

  • Critical thinking
  • Independent working
  • Oral communication and writing

Classes will be interactive. They will combine group work and lecture-style elements. They will actively engage with a variety of texts. The starting assumption for all classes will be that students have completed the required reading beforehand.

Achiume, E. Tendayi, “Migration as Decolonization”, Stanford Law Review 71 (June 2019), 1509-1574.

Allen, William, Bridget Anderson, Nicholas Van Hear, Madeleine Sumption, Franck Düvell, Jennifer Hough, Lena Rose, Rachel Humphris and Sarah Walker. 2018. “Who Counts in Crises? The New Geopolitics of International Migration and Refugee Governance” Geopolitics 23 (1): 217-243.

Anderson, Bridget, Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2013).

Anderson, Bridget, “New directions in migration studies: towards methodological de-nationalism”, Comparative Migration Studies 7:36 (2019), 1-13.

Bhambra, Gurminder, “Whither Europe? Postcolonial versus neo-colonial cosmopolitanism”, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 18:2 (2016). 187-202.

Bulley, Dan, Migration, Ethics and Power: Spaces of Hospitality in International Politics (London: Sage 2017).

Fortier, Anne-Marie, Uncertain Citizenship: Life in the Waiting Room (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2021).

Getachew, Adom, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2019).

International Organization for Migration, World Migration Report 2022 (Geneva: IOM 2021).

Johnson, Heather L., “Narrating Entanglements: Rethinking the Local/Global Divide in Ethnographic Migration Research”, International Political Sociology 10 (2016), 383-397.

Mayblin, Lucy and Joe Turner, Migration Studies and Colonialism (Cambridge: Polity 2021).

Nyers, Peter, Irregular Citizenship, Immigration, and Deportation (Abingdon: Routledge 2019).

Sharma, Nandita, Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives and Migrants (Durham: Duke University Press 2020).

Squire, Vicky, Nina Perkowski, Dallal Stevens and Nick Vaughan-Williams, Reclaiming Migration: Voices from Europe’s ‘migrant crisis’ (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2021).

The Migration Observatory, Who Counts as a Migrant?  Definitions and Their Consequences, 5th edition (January 2017).

Valluvan, Sivamohan, The Clamour of Nationalism: Race and Nation in Twenty-first-century Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2019).

 

Continuous feedback during the course of the semester
Feedback by final exam (In addition to the grade)
Peer feedback (Students give each other feedback)
ECTS
15 ECTS
Type of assessment
Written assignment
Type of assessment details
Free written assignment
Marking scale
7-point grading scale
Censorship form
No external censorship
Re-exam

- In the semester where the course takes place: Free written assignment

- In subsequent semesters: Free written assignment

Criteria for exam assessment
  • Grade 12 is given for an outstanding performance: the student lives up to the course's goal description in an independent and convincing manner with no or few and minor shortcomings
  • Grade 7 is given for a good performance: the student is confidently able to live up to the goal description, albeit with several shortcomings
  • Grade 02 is given for an adequate performance: the minimum acceptable performance in which the student is only able to live up to the goal description in an insecure and incomplete manner

Single subject courses (day)

  • Category
  • Hours
  • Class Instruction
  • 56
  • English
  • 56

Kursusinformation

Language
English
Course number
ASTK18373U
ECTS
15 ECTS
Programme level
Full Degree Master
Bachelor
Duration

1 semester

Placement
Autumn
Price

http://polsci.ku.dk/uddannelser/eftervidereuddannelse/aabent_universitet/

Schedulegroup
.
Studyboard
Department of Political Science, Study Council
Contracting department
  • Department of Political Science
  • Department of Anthropology
  • Department of Psychology
  • Social Data Science
Contracting faculty
  • Faculty of Social Sciences
Course Coordinator
  • Maja Zehfuss   (12-6f636c63307c676a68777575426b6875306d7730666d)
Saved on the 30-04-2024
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University of Copenhagen
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