The Politics of Mobility, Displacement and Asylum

The course consists of Part 1 and Part 2 (six credits) supplemented by Part 3 (9-credits course only).
For PPPA students: 6 credit is the norm, the 9 credits option available only as "Free credits" the exception.
For Philosophical Sciences, Erasmus or other MA courses: both options, 6 or 9 credits, are available if allowed by your study plan.
The course presents a reflection on the contemporary tensions between globalization, human mobility, nation-states, and the creation of borders, considered at the heart of the current production of political identities and forms of citizenship. Its basic aims are to give a solid introduction to the global processes of human mobility, displacement and asylum and to offer, in part 2, a thorough analysis of specific case-studies from the perspective of political anthropology and ethnographic field-research.
Part 1. An introduction to the main elements and debates related to contemporary global migration dynamics:
South-North migration; categories, theories, policies, global dynamics; refugees and asylum; forced and irregularized migration.
Part 2. Understanding irregular migration and containment policies, from Africa to Europe:
through a series of case studies, this part will analyze the forms and motivations of irregular migration from Africa to Europe in an anthropological and historical perspective. In the background, this section addresses the dynamics related to forced displacement, refugees, and irregular migrants on the borders of Europe, analyzing the forms of containment and governance of forced displacement, with particular attention to cases of protracted crisis and the transformation of the regimes of mobility over time, between asylum and irregular mobility.

Part 3 (9 credits only). A Political theory of Migration, Asylum, Refugees and Citizenship:
This seminar-style section will offer a thorough analysis of the book "The figure of the migrant" by Thomas Nail. Rather than viewing migration as the exception to the rule of political fixity and citizenship, the book reinterprets the history of political power from the perspective of the movement that defines the migrant in the first place. Applying "kinopolitics" to several major historical conditions (territorial, political, juridical, and economic) and figures of migration (the nomad, the barbarian, the vagabond, and the proletariat), the book provides a political theory of the migrant and seeks to understand the material, social, and historical conditions under which something like the migrant has come to exist for us today. In this way, it is not only a theory of the migrant but also a theory of the social motions by which migration takes place.
Classroom lectures will involve reading, writing, discussion, presentations.