Undergraduate Program Status
Elective | 4th year |
Refugees tend to be produced by historical, legal, anthropological, sociological and political scholarship as a distinct population and/or an area of study. ‘Refugees’ in all these disciplines tend to be studied as a population whose production and reproduction are of a very different order to that of ‘domestic’ populations within a nation-state. That is, an emphasis on state-centred national histories, and methodological nationalism, are used to ‘externalise’ refugees as ‘strangers’ to a state. This is to the detriment of relational sociological and anthropological accounts that seek to de-naturalise inside/outside boundaries and to class-based analyses of common marginalisations of groups similarly positioned before state-territorial and capitalist power.
By the end of the course, students should have: 1. A good grasp of how academic literature produces ‘refugees’ as externalised populations and to be able to connect these to state-making and global political-economic processes. 2. A good understanding of aspects of global capitalism in the contemporary period, in particular its instruments and processes of accumulation through dispossession. 3. A good understanding of how refugees and other marginalised groups (particularly in Europe but also elsewhere) are caught up in social processes of marginalisation and how they respond to these.