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Summer 2020, CairoShort Course

Migration: Belonging, Dwelling and Laboring

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Course details

Cycle
Summer 2020, Cairo
Starts
Thursday, Jun 25
Meets
Thursday, 17:00–19:00
Length
10 weeks
Taught in
English

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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. Yet mobile subjects are categorized, sorted and governed in and through the international legal order by initiatives dealing with trafficking, refugees, border controls, terrorism, and sexual morality. The impact of these different initiatives on cross-border movements is mediated by gender, class, religion, sexual, and marital status. In this seminar, we will take a close look at how people - on the move, in the transition, contained, encamped or deported- really live, how the social are reassembled, and how practices of belonging, dwelling and laboring are negotiated in the everyday.

This seminar engages contemporary questions of migration. It explores the global movement of people and their lifeworlds as migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers. It introduces students to critical work about mobilities, citizenship and developmentalism through examining the effects of these strategies on practices of belonging, dwelling and laboring in the everyday.

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

    Requirements

    1. Class attendance

    2. Read readings assigned each week

    All texts will be shared through Dropbox.

    I would like to give special thanks to my advisor Dr. Martina Rieker who conducted graduate seminar Mobilities: Gender and Migration at the American University in Cairo, which I took once (Spring 2018) and audited for a second time (Spring 2020). This syllabus is mainly derived from her course.

Course flow

Showing 10 sessions

June 2020

    • They owned an island, now they are urban poor: the tragedy of AltamiraBrum, E. (2018). The Guardian.
    • Entry denied: Revolution in North Africa and the continued centrality of migration to European responsesPallister-Wilkins. (2011). The Jadaliyya.
    • The ‘other’ side of the legal regulation of globalizationKapur, R. (2003). Canadian Women’s Studies, 22 (3/4).

July 2020

    • Beautiful Dead Bodies: Gender, Migration and Representation in Anti-Trafficking Campaigns.Andrijasevic, R (2007). Feminist Review, 86, 24-44.
    • The Moral Order and Worries about Trafficking in Nepal.Asman, S. (2009). Pakistan Journal of Women’s Studies, 16 (1&2), 207-211.
    • Will the Real Sex Slave Please Stand Up?Davidson, J. (2006). Feminist Review, No. 83, 4-22.
    • Humanity as Identity and Its Political Effects (A Note on Camps and its Humanitarian Government).Agier, M. (2010). Humanity, 1(1), pp. 29-45.
    • Social Technology and Refugee Encampment in Kenya.Jaji, R (2011). Journal of Refugee Studies, 25 (2), pp. 221-238.
    • Making refugees.Latif, N. (2008). CR: The New Centennial Review, 8(2), 253-2.
    • Afterlives: Humanitarian histories and Critical Subjects in Mozambique.McKay, R. (2012). Cultural Anthropology, 27(2), 286-309.
    • Ways to Come, Ways to Leave: Gender, Mobility, and Il/legality among Ethiopian Domestic Workers in Yemen.DeRegt, M. (2010). Gender and Society, 24 (2).
    • Moving and Dwelling: Building the Moroccan Ashelhi Homeland.Hoffman, E. (2001). American Ethnologist, 29(4), pp. 928-962.
    • Figures of LabourMezzadra, S. & Nielson, B. (2013). In Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor, pp. 95-130.
    • Colour-blind discourses in paid domestic work: Foreignness and the delineation of alternative racial markers.Moras, A. (2010). Ethnic and Racial Studies, 33(2), 233-252.
    • Displacement, development, and modernity in the Colombian Pacific.Escobar, A. (2003). International Social Science Journal, 55(175), 157-167.
    • Moving targets: displacement, impoverishment, and development.Feldman, S., Geisler, C., & Silberling, L. (2003). International Social Science Journal, 55(175), 7-13.
    • Between global flows and local dams: Indigenousness, locality, and the transnational sphere in Jharkhand, India.Ghosh, K. (2006). Cultural Anthropology, 21(4), 501-534.
    • In and Out of Morocco: Smuggling and Migration in a Frontier Boomtown.McMurray, D. (2001). University of Minnesota Press.

August 2020

    • Women, Land Struggles and Globalization: An International PerspectiveFederici, S. Journal of Asian and African Studies 39(1-2), pp. 47-62.
    • The New Global Market for Land.Sassen, S. (2014). In Expulsions, pp. 80-116.
    • Struggles over Land, Livelihood, and Future Possibilities: Reframing Displacement through Feminist Political Ecology.Vaz-Jones, L. (2018). Signs, 43(3), pp. 711-735.
    • Spatial collisions and discordant temporalities: Everyday life between camp and checkpoint.Abourahme, N. (2011). International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 35(2), 453-6.
    • Active waiting and changing hopes: toward a time perspective on protracted displacement.Brun, C. (2015). Social Analysis, Volume 59, Issue 1, Spring.
    • Living an uncertain future: temporality, uncertainty, and well-being among Iraqi Refugees in Egypt.El-Shaarawi, N. (2015). Social Analysis, Volume 59, Issue 1, Spring.
    • Eviction time in the new Saigon: Temporalities of displacement in the rubble of development.Harms, E. (2013). Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 28, Issue 2, pp. 344–368.
    • On the durability and the decomposition of citizenship: The social logics of forced return migration in Cape Verde.Drotbohm, (2011). Citizenship Studies, 15(3-4), 381-396.
    • Autochthony, Citizenship, and (In)security: New Turns in the Politics of Belonging in Africa and Elsewhere.Geschiere, P (2013). In Gambetti, Z and Marcial Godoy-Anatvia. Eds., Rhetorics of Security: Belonging and Violence in the Neoliberal Era, pp. 40-68.
    • Xenophobia in South Africa: Order, Chaos, and the Moral Economy of Witchcraft.Hickel, J. Cultural Anthropology 29 (1), pp. 103-127.
    • The Return of Displaced Nuer in Southern Sudan: Women becoming Men?Grabska, K. (2013). Development and Change, 44(5), 1135-115.
    • Conflicts of Mobility, and the Mobility of Conflict: Rightlessness, Presence, Subjectivity, Freedom.De Genova, N. (2009). Subjectivity, 29(1), 445-46.
    • Everything Must Match: Detection, Deception, and Migrant Illegality in the India-Bangladesh Borderlands.Ghosh, S (2019). American Anthropologist, 121 (4), pp. 870-883.
    • Deportation, Expulsion, and the international police of Aliens.Walters, W. (2002). Citizenship Studies, 6(3), pp. 265-292.

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