MA Anthropological Research

Migration remains one of the most politically contentious issue of our times. Whilst the world seems to be increasingly on the move, the ability to cross borders is not equally distributed. Border regimes facilitate the mobility of some while filtering, managing, deterring, stopping, and deporting those deemed and constructed as undesirable. Often through violent yet obscured processes and policies involving a wide range of (non-)state actors and the production of categories.  This course focuses on how anthropologists go beyond dehistoricizing and depoliticizing discourses of crisis that peddle dehumanizing and harmful tropes. Anthropology provides crucial insights to examine the lived realities, political constructions, and imaginaries of im/mobilities. 

This course aims to introduce students to the anthropology of migration, displacement, and borders through critical engagements with contemporary debates within the discipline and beyond. By supporting students in comprehending and deploying theoretical and ethnographic materials in anthropology, the course examines relevant debates, practices, and policies in a range of contexts on this controversial and highly politicised issue. The course addresses salient topics such as border regimes, bureaucratic processes, crisis discourses, violent containment, place-making, illegality industry, inequities of im/mobility, criminalisation of solidarity, gendered and racialised aspects etc. 

On completion of this course successful students will be equipped with sufficient knowledge and skills to:

• comprehensibly demonstrate detailed knowledge and critical understanding of major theoretical approaches, debates, concepts and case studies within the history and vanguard of the anthropology of displacement and migration;

• critically assess arguments and practices amongst anthropologists as well as other professionals in the field of migration such as charity workers, immigration officials, human rights activists etc.;

• constructively apply insights and knowledge gained from the study of migration to examine other fields of study and practice within and beyond academia such as development, security, conservation, humanitarianism etc.;

• effectively distil and articulate knowledge, arguments and data about theoretical debates and interlinked issues of migration and displacement gained throughout the course into clear, discursive written forms.;

• better understand the issues at stake in contemporary public debates about migration and displacement in the UK and beyond.

Blog post (500 words) 25%, Essay (2500 words) 75%