Undergraduate Program Status
Elective | 4th year |
This course engages with borders and bordering practices in world politics – that is, ways in which lines, boundaries, caesuras are drawn between geographical entities, populations, groups, identities and ultimately, people – demarcating self and other, establishing hierarchical relationships and moral categories, authorizing particular modes of action and violence between them. Drawing on insights from critical international relations theory, critical border studies, critical security studies, political geography and biopolitics, as well as reviewing a range of contemporary issues – such as migration, counter-terrorism, surveillance and everyday experiences of (in)security – it engages with how contemporary security practices and assemblages operate with modes of separation and classification ranging from physical walls to instruments of social sorting in the digital age. Ultimately, the course maps out vistas of engagement and everyday practices of resistance that seek to challenge, subvert or collapse such distinctions.
By the end of the module students will:
- Be able to navigate and critically assess various strands of theorizing regarding contemporary security issues and practices and understand their main stakes
- Be able to confidently work with interdisciplinary approaches in studying contemporary phenomena
- Understand some of the most important ways in which different modalities of power and resistance operate through the lens of ‘bordering practices’ broadly conceived
- Have engaged with and analysed a range of empirical cases, practical examples and cultural artefacts in developing an in-depth understanding of the complexities of meaning making and interpretation at various sites and registers of politics and society
Active participation in seminars: 10%
Two position papers: 40% (20% each - to be discussed in first seminar)
Term paper: 50%
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