MOBILITY AND BORDERS IN EUROPE

Course Objectives:

• To develop a theoretically and critically informed understanding of governance of migration and borders
• To assess and analyze contemporary debates around migration and borders based on critical theory, actual cases/materials and lived experience
• To facilitate nuanced and holistic engagement with experiences of mobility, security and borders by looking at a range of sites, actors, narratives, practices and technological developments particularly in the European context
• Be able to combine and work with interdisciplinary approaches in studying contemporary phenomena.

Course Content: Over the past four decades, the expansion of flows of people, capital and goods have been met by a proliferation of borders in Europe. The level of displaced populations across the world has reached its record since WWII. For millions of displaced people, escaping from persecution, violence, and human rights violations, simultaneously means beginning of another deadly journey at the European external borders. Drastically increased number of deaths, images of hundreds in shipwrecks, thousands climbing over barbed-wire fences, thousands more contained in refugee camps, have been filling the pages of reports and newspapers. This course is designed with the aim of understanding the governance of borders and human mobility – that is, ways in which lines, boundaries, filters are drawn between geographical entities, populations, identities and ultimately, people – establishing hierarchical and moral categories, authorizing certain modes of actions and violence. Drawing on insights from diverse range of scholarship across the social sciences, this highly interdisciplinary course design will address the general themes such as state, sovereignty, territory, nation, citizenship etc. within the context of European countries through reviewing a range of contemporary issues in the 21st century – such as migration, everyday experiences of security, borders and bordering practices, and surveillance. The major objective of the course is to introduce the scholarship on mobility, security and borders that has been growing tremendously in the last decade. Nourished with a range of disciplines, from critical international relations to political science, sociology and technology studies, the scholarship provides analytical tools to grasp key themes and theories in their connection to the human mobility and borders. With the aim of facilitating creativity, critical perspective and analytical reasoning, the course is designed in the way in which each topic in every week is enriched with a related visual material. The course requirements are also designated with the aim of facilitating active learning and participation, close engagement with the field and capacity to combine theory and practice.