Spring 2023, CairoThematic Course
Being Displaced in the City: An Anthropological Approach
Course details
- Cycle
- Spring 2023, Cairo
- Length
- 11 weeks
- Format
- Online
- Taught in
- English
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About the course
This course uses ethnographic texts to study the contemporary experience of displacement in cities. Studies of the refugee experience often assume the refugee camp as the quintessential space of displacement, while migration studies assumes as its object of study “economic” migrants living in cities. This arbitrary divide between refugee studies and migration studies as academic disciplines has encouraged the theory that refugees and economic migrants are in fact two distinct categories of people on the move, while the reality is that refugees often end up to cities (rather than camps) for economic reasons and economic migrants are often fleeing their home countries because of state violence or political instability. Urban studies, on the other hand, rarely centers the migrant experience as essential to understanding contemporary cities. Schiller and Çaglar (2018) argue that we cannot understand how contemporary cities are made without attention to the lives of migrants in cities and conversely, we cannot understand migrants experiences in urban spaces without attention to the effects of city life on their everyday experiences. This course asks what cities and their residents’ lives look like when we consider (im)mobile peoples and urban spaces in the same geographical and temporal framework.
Who teaches it
Alexandra Schindler is a cultural anthropologist specializing in the topic of migration in the Middle East, and Egypt specifically. She received her undergraduate degree from Dartmouth College in the U.S. in 2010 and her Masters degree from the American University in Cairo in Gender and Women’s Studies in 2012. She received her PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City in Cultural Anthropology in 2021. Her dissertation explores the themes of mobility and temporality in contemporary Alexandria and is entitled “Living in Permanent Transience: An Ethnography of Contemporary Alexandria.” Alexandra has taught courses in Anthropology in New York City and Alexandria.
From the fellow Class Expectations:
- Class attendance and participation - Reading the texts prior to coming to class - Final “mini ethnographic” project (to be discussed with each participant on an individual basis)
Course flow
Sessions without a date
- Illegal Traveler: An auto-ethnography of borders – IntroductionShahram Khosravi
- Border as Method, Or, The Multiplication of Labor – IntroductionSandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson
- The new mobilities paradigmSheller, M., & Urry, J. (2006). Environment and Planning A, 38(2), 207-226.
- Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration – IntrodcutionSchiller and Çaglar
- Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration – Chapter OneSchiller and Çaglar
- Masculinities and Displacement in the Middle East: Syrian Refugees in Egypt – IntroductionMagdalena Suerbaum
- Masculinities and Displacement in the Middle East: Syrian Refugees in Egypt – Chapter OneMagdalena Suerbaum
- Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora – IntroductionNeha Vora
- Impossible Citizens: Dubai’s Indian Diaspora – Chapter OneNeha Vora
- Migration as hope and depression: existential im/mobilities in and beyond EgyptPettit & Ruijtenberg
In class
- PresentationPresentation of Class Projects
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