Global Migrations Program Curricular Initiatives

Over the course of its three years, the Global Migrations Program has introduced an exciting array of courses that established a strong foundation for curricular innovation at Hampshire. Some of these courses encourage faculty-student collaborative research and are linked to opportunities for intensive collaborative study in field locations such as India, Mexico and China. Others encourage students to reflect on and integrate critical theoretical perspectives with their international field research or internship experiences.

Below are some examples of courses developed with the support of the Program or that were designed to connect with its central themes.

''Being Political: Historical and Psychological Perspectives on Resistance Fall 2004 Professors Kimberly Chang and Vivek Bhandari''

For centuries, expressions of resistance have taken myriad forms, ranging from everyday acts of individual dissent to organized protests of non-violent groups, from impassioned writings employing the power of words to the use of violence and "terror." What constitutes resistance? What determines the forms that it takes? What distinguishes it as a form of human agency? Drawing on both theory and case studies drawn from different parts of the world, this course will explore historical and psychological perspectives on resistance, the various individual and collective strategies people use to articulate dissent, and the forms of power in which these strategies are embedded. This course is especially suitable for students returning from international programs and/or internships with community organizations who want to critically reflect on their own ways of being political.

''Fluid Border: Mexico and the U.S, Fall 2004, Fall 2007 Professor Flavio Risech-Ozeguera''

Gloria Anzaldua describes the U.S.-Mexico border as a "thin edge of barbwire...where the Third World grates against the First and bleeds." Nowhere else in the world is there such a close and extensive physical proximity of a post-industrial nation with a developing one. While capital and goods are ostensibly freely traded with Mexico, the economic relationship between the produces deeply unequal outcomes. The movement of Mexican workers into the U.S. is strictly regulated in law but only poorly controlled in fact, and deeply held notions of racial, ethnic and cultural boundaries--and their policy implications--are challenged by the growth of transnational communities on both sides of the line. Emphasizing historical analysis and contemporary theories of nation-state formation and deterritorialization, globalization, and identity construction, the course will challenge students to investigate a range of controversies of the border area, including labor, immigration, cultural and environmental issues.

''Border Crossings, January Term 2003, 2004 and 2005 Professor Flavio Risech-Ozeguera''

''Rethinking Citizenship in a Globalizing World, Spring 2003 Professor Margaret Cerullo''

This core Social Science course will introduce students to the work and interests of a range of faculty around a theme of signal importance: the meanings of citizenship in a world where the boundaries of the nation state, as the site of belonging and identification as well as rights and duties, are highly contested. The class will be held as a combination lecture/seminar discussion once a week in the evening, with ten different faculty participating in each session. Some of the specific themes to be addressed include: (1) US citizenship and the reconfiguration of race, ethnicity, nationality and immigration, along with civil liberties, since September 11; (2) African American conceptions and practices of citizenship and their historical development in post-Emancipation African American communities; (3) gender, social policy, and the contested meanings of women’s citizenship; (4) the anthropology of cultural citizenship as both entitlement and belonging; (5) indigenous politics and national citizenship in Latin America; (6) citizenship and mistaken identity, both historical and contemporary; (7) citizenship, social class, and ethnicity in US history; (8) nationalism in post-colonial South Asia and the nation as a locus of identification and belonging; and (9) the political economy of citizenship and the role of the global economy in eroding national sovereignties and calling forth their reassertion in restrictive trade agreements.

''Returning to Hampshire: Reflective Writing and Project Workshop Professor Vivek Bhandari, Fall 2002 Professor Flavio Risech Ozeguera, Fall 2003''

This course brings together students returning from international programs, and organizations working with the following Hampshire programs: Community Partnerships for Social Change, Civil Liberties and Public Policy, and Population and Development. The purpose of the course is to help students integrate their off-campus learning experiences with their academics. Opportunities are provided for students to share and critique reflective writing and project work related to their off-campus studies or internships. The course also introduces students to questions of subjectivity and complex dichotomies such as global/local, structure/agency, etc. These themes are meant to provoke students into discussing the limits of their own understanding, while exploring the possibilities of finding new spaces for engagement. Additional themes and readings will be decided upon based on the interests of those participating in the seminar.

Questions include: How do students respond to the attributes of, and boundaries that define specific social groups? How are the boundaries of such groups determined, policed, or transcended? What is the relationship between the “autonomy” of a social group (generally seen as a good thing) and the boundaries that circumscribe the group (potentially, a bad thing)? Do categories like “cultural/multi-cultural” help us in this dilemma, or do they end-up distracting us from a fruitful understanding of the connection between culture and power?

''Mobility and Modernity, Fall 2002 Professor Tim Cresswell, Visiting Professor of Geography''

This four-session “mini-course” was experimental in the sense that both students and faculty participated in it as joint learners. Over shared readings and dinner, students and faculty explored such questions as: In what ways is mobility central to modernity? What kinds of mobility are valorized v. marginalized? What knowledges have been developed to rationalize and discipline moving bodies? How has the production of order through space produced people without place? If mobility is central to modernity, why have certain kinds of mobile people—vagrants, gypsies, refugees—been metaphorically described as weeds, disease and pollution? What do airports tell us about the politics of mobility?

Information Taken From: http://www.hampshire.edu/ss/4834.htm