Summer 2021, CairoShort Course
Human Flow: Migration and Refugee Encampment (at CILAS)
Course details
- Cycle
- Summer 2021, Cairo
- Starts
- Monday, Jul 12
- Meets
- Monday, 19:00–20:30
- Length
- 8 sessions
- Format
- In person
- Taught in
- English
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“Earth, who was it who measured and divided you with walls, wire, enclosures?” - Pablo Neruda “No Human is Illegal” - Chants outside the Internment Center for Foreigners, Barcelona (Spain), 11. January 2014 The consul banged on the table and said; “If you’ve got no passport you’re officially dead”: But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive. - Auden WH. 1962. “Refugee Blues.” In Collected Shorter Poems 1930- 1944, pp. 256-57. “A specter haunts the world and it is the specter of migration. All the powers of the old world are allied in a merciless operation against it, but the movement is irresistible... The legal and documented movements are dwarfed by clandestine migrations: the borders of national sovereignty are sieves. - Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Empire
About the course
Migrations do not just happen - they are produced. Capitalist modernity requires massive displacement that seamlessly supports the free flow of labor in the context of globalization. Mobile subjects are being categorized, sorted and governed in and through the international legal order by initiatives dealing with trafficking, refugees, immigrant labor, sexual morality and border controls. The impact of these different initiatives on cross-border movements is mediated by gender, class, religion, sexual, and marital status. Together we will examine people’s lifeworlds - on the move, in transition, contained, encamped - and study citizenship, division of labor and developmentalism through a critical lens.
Who teaches it
Shan Yang is a Post-MA Fellow for the 2019-2020 academic year at HUSSLab after obtaining an MA at the American University in Cairo. Her MA Comprehensive Examination covered three domains: political economy, time and temporality and the urban. She is currently working on a research project-Being and Living in Spaces of Global Capitalism: Time, Gender and Lifeworlds of Rural Migrant Laborers. She obtained her Bachelor's degree (2012) and first MA (2015) at Fudan University in Shanghai.
From the fellow As part of CILAS’s efforts to build social infrastructure for caring commons, this summer course attempts to open up the following possibilities: - Participants from financially disadvantaged backgrounds are welcome to apply for course fee waiver and a subsidize for commute cost. - CILAS will offer one “study day” each week for participants to use CILAS as a space to read, discuss and chill out. - Tea and refreshments will be served during course meetings.
Course flow
July 2021
- They owned an island, now they are urban poor: the tragedy of AltamiraBrum, E. (2018). The Guardian.
- Climate of Anxiety in the Sahel: Emigration in Xenophobic TimesRibot, J.R, Faye, P and Turner, M. (2020). Public Culture 32(1), pp. 45-75.
- Tomatoes and greed – the exodus of Ghana's farmers | DW DocumentaryDocumentary.
- The "other" Side of the Legal Regulation of GlobalizationKapur, R. (2003). Canadian Women's Studies, 22 (3/4).
- Beautiful Dead Bodies: Gender, Migration and Representation in Anti-Trafficking CampaignsAndrijasevic, R (2007). Feminist Review, 86, 24-44.
- Will the Real Sex Slave Please Stand Up?Davidson, J. (2006). Feminist Review, No. 83, 4-22.
- Managing the undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government.Agier, M. (2011). Polity.
August 2021
- Managing the undesirables: Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government.Agier, M. (2011). Polity.
- Social Technology and Refugee Encampment in KenyaJaji, R (2011). Journal of Refugee Studies, 25 (2), pp. 221-238.
- “Everything Must Match”: Detection, Deception, and Migrant Illegality in the India-Bangladesh BorderlandsGhosh, S (2019). American Anthropologist, 121 (4), pp. 870-883.
- Biopolitics Multiple: Migration, Extraction, SubtractionAradau, C. and M. Tazzioli (2020). Millennium 48(2), pp. 198-220.
Guest Lecture
In class
- ScreeningA film screening event for documentary “Human Flow” will be held in advance
- PresentationGuest Lecture: Human Flow
- Migrant “Illegality” and Deportability in Everyday Life.De Genova, N. P. (2003). Annual Review of Anthropology, 31(1), 419- 447.
- Lifetimes of disposability and surplus entrepreneurs in Bagong Barrio, Manila.Pratt, G., Johnston, C., & Banta, V. (2017). Antipode, 49(1), 169-192.
- Cheap and disposable? The impact of the global economic crisis on the migration of Ethiopian women domestic workers to the GulfFernandez, Bina (2010). Gender & Development, 18: 2, 249 — 262.
- The lives of domestic helpers the Modern SlavesDocumentary.
with Karim-Yassin Goessinger
(Readings to be confirmed..)
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