Undergraduate Course: Migration, Borders, and Resistance (PLIT10184)
Course Outline
| School | School of Social and Political Science |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course explores contemporary struggles over migration and borders that have emerged across the globe as a key political flashpoint in the 21st century. While states build walls and fences to stop particular forms of mobility, and scholars and activists decry the resulting 'death of asylum', people continue to move, often at great risk. This course explores how states attempt to control mobility through bordering and the critical contestations that emerge as a result. It focuses on contemporary practices but seeks to understand them within longer historical trajectories. |
| Course description |
This course explores contemporary struggles over migration and borders that have emerged across the globe. In a world marked by grave injustices and inequalities, individuals and collectives work towards social change and contest forms of violence, exploitation, racialisation, and marginalisation. Questions of belonging, visibility and audibility are central for any form of political resistance and crystallise especially clearly in contestations over human mobility. Examining different forms of bordering and resistance, we can critically explore a plethora of significant concepts, including power, sovereignty, human rights, and citizenship. By investigating these contestations, we begin to understand how local and global regimes emerge that conceive of migration as a problem to be governed and seek to regulate human movement. These processes of governing, enacting decisions over inclusion and exclusion, require various governmental techniques that are often bound up with physical and discursive, racialised and gendered violence. We will follow political mobilisations that, in manifold ways, respond to border controls and might engender alternative imaginaries of what it means to live collectively in the 21st century.
Each session will involve a combination of short lectures, class discussion, and small-group activities. Students are expected to be prepared fully for each class: the lectures will serve as a general introduction to topics, and seminars will focus on student discussions. Specific examples of migrant struggles from across different regions will be used in class to foster discussion. Films, music, and other media will be used throughout to illustrate the content of the course. In addition, where possible, a fieldtrip will be organised to visit local groups (in Edinburgh or Glasgow) who are organising around mobility and migrant rights.
|
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | Visiting students should have at least four Politics/IR courses at grade B or above (or be predicted to obtain this). Only university/college level courses will be considered. |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
|
| Academic year 2025/26, Available to all students (SV1)
|
Quota: 0 |
| Course Start |
Semester 2 |
Timetable |
Timetable |
| Learning and Teaching activities (Further Info) |
Total Hours:
200
(
Lecture Hours 10,
Seminar/Tutorial Hours 10,
Programme Level Learning and Teaching Hours 4,
Directed Learning and Independent Learning Hours
176 )
|
| Assessment (Further Info) |
Written Exam
0 %,
Coursework
100 %,
Practical Exam
0 %
|
| Additional Information (Assessment) |
20% Blogpost (1000 words max)
20% Peer Review of Essay Proposal (1000 word proposal)
60% Essay (2000 words max) |
| Feedback |
Feedback on all assessed work shall normally be returned within three weeks of submission. Where this is not possible, students shall be given clear expectations regarding the timing and methods of feedback. |
| No Exam Information |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Demonstrate a critical understanding of the role and construction of borders in our contemporary world.
- Understand how historical forms of bordering relate to contemporary state borders and bordering.
- Analyse socio-political concepts, such as race, gender, belonging, solidarity, and nationalism in different regional contexts in relation to migration and bordering.
- Explore notions of resistance, power, government, and violence through an engagement with academic literatures on borders and through analysis of contemporary social struggles.
|
Reading List
Balibar, E (2002) 'What is a border?', in Politics and the Other Scene;
Rumford, C (2012) 'Towards a Multiperspectival Study of Borders', Geopolitics 17(4): 887-902;
Mountz, A (2015) 'In/visibility and the Securitization of Migration: Shaping Publics through Border Enforcement on Islands', Cultural Politics 11(2): 184-200.
Danewid, I (2021) 'Policing the (migrant) crisis: Stuart Hall and the defence of whiteness', Security Dialogue. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
The course will develop the following Graduate attributes:
curiosity for learning that makes a positive difference
courage to expand and fulfil their potential
passion to engage locally and globally
creative problem solvers and researchers
critical and reflective thinkers
skilled communicators |
| Keywords | Not entered |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Cetta Mainwaring
Tel:
Email: cetta.mainwaring@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | |
|
|
University Homepage