AMIS: International Migration

This course provides a basic understanding of the patterns of international migration. We will look into current theoretical accounts of causes and effects of different types of migration, and we will discuss the challenges and implications they give rise to for migrants as well as societies. We explore how the causes and dynamics of migration have been explained and understood from different perspectives. We reflect on classical migration theories on why people migrate, including theories on push-pull and network migration, climate change and conflict. To these we add takes on migration "from below", which engage with migration from the point of view of migrants themselves. We discuss historical and postcolonial perspectives on migration, and we take a critical approach to migration categories and the dynamics of migration, questioning and complicating the one-way, cause-effect approaches of classical migration theories. Here, we explore the complexity of migration trajectories, migration infrastructures, internal migration, south-south migration, transnationalism, etc. Further, the course explores how migrants and refugees have been framed, categorized, problematized and regulated/governed by others: nation-states, EU, UN or NGOs. We explore legal and policy framings of migrants and refugees, securitization and bordering in relation to the national order of things, the role of humanitarianism in responding to and framing migration, representations of migrants in popular discourse, and climate-related migration.

Exam code: HMGK03281E