Co-Taught by Miriam Ticktin (CUNY Graduate Center) and Sofya Aptekar (CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies).

ANTH 81600
IDS 81640
WSCP 81000

Course Description:

The displacement of people has been noted as the biggest and most urgent global challenge, next to climate change. This class explores how we might understand the movement of people today, in critical terms that move beyond the older political and scholarly literatures on migration. These often take sovereign nation-states for granted as the spatial basis of political life, where migration across borders is seen as a linear movement from one nation-state to another, ending with the process of “integration.” Critical migration studies draws attention to major transformations in the way that global migration works today that have not been sufficiently accounted for by established theories of immigration, especially theories of immigrant integration and assimilation. Mobility and its counterpart, immobility, help us to widen the frame beyond both migrants and the nation-state, to look at movement and emplacement, and how these work together, in intersection or at cross-purposes—never alone—but also how movement itself generates new political possibilities. We will look at migration – also known as “people on the move” – in relation to the politics of empire, labor, the military, prisons, racial capitalism, climate collapse and gender.

Location

In-person at the GC in Spring 2025.