BASS Social Anthropology and Sociology

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. 

The course’s Intended Learning Outcomes are designed to help students to:

comprehensibly demonstrate knowledge and critical understanding of key theoretical approaches, debates, concepts and case studies within the history and vanguard of the anthropology of displacement and migration.

critically engage with 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.

draw connections between the course’s materials and other relevant anthropological insights examined in other undergraduate courses studied as part of their degree.

Develop understanding of the issues at stake in contemporary public debates about migration and displacement in the UK and beyond.

Develop and employ anthropological analysis to interrogate discourses and practices around migration in a format that extends beyond academic conventions.

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.

Communicate clearly and concisely your critical assessment of anthropological arguments through effective oral presentations.

Deploy the knowledge acquired through the course to articulate an evidence-based argument pertaining to contemporary and news-worthy events.

Collaborate as a team to research, prepare, and deliver a coherent and convincing argument.
 

Teaching will consist of ten two-hour lecture classes.  There will also be ten one-hour seminars with student-led discussions.  Online resources will include digitised copies of key texts on Blackboard.

Teaching will consist of ten two-hour lecture classes.  There will also be ten one-hour seminars with student-led discussions.  Online resources will include digitised copies of key texts on Blackboard.

The course’s Learning Outcomes are designed to support students in achieving the best outcomes in improving their learning experience and preparing for their future careers. The course is focused on a contemporary and politically contentious issue. As such, it is an opportunity for students to learn to decipher key processes related to migration, borders, and belonging, and to learn to deploy the knowledge acquired through evidence-based arguments tackling urgent and news-worthy issues. The course guides students in honing key employability skills such as communication, time-management, team-collaboration.

Blog Post (750 words) 25%, Essay (3000 words) 75%

Students will receive feedback via: comments and feedback on summative and formative assessments; opportunities for additional feedback in office hours. 

Andersson, R. 2014. Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe. California.

Bachelet, S. 2025. The Adventure: violent borders, illegal migration and the uncertain quest for life in Morocco. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Craig, S. 2020. The ends of kinship: connecting Himalayan lives between Nepal and New York. University of Washington Press.

De León, J. 2015. The land of open graves: living and dying on the migrant trail. California University Press.

Elliot, Alice. 2021. The Outside : Migration as Life in Morocco. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Hannoum, A. 2020. Living Tangier: migration, race, and illegality in a Moroccan city. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Khosravi, S. 2010. “Illegal” Traveller :  an Auto-Ethnography of Borders. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Jusionyte, I. 2018. Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border. California University Press.

Lems, A. 2018. Being here: place-making in a world of movement. Berghan Books.

Malkki, L. 1995. Purity and Exile: violence, memory, and national cosmology among Hutu refugees in Tanzania. University of  Chicago Press

Obeid, M. 2019. Border lives : an ethnography of a Lebanese town in changing times. Brill.

Schielke, S. 2020. Migrant Dreams: Egyptian workers in the gulf states. American University in Cairo Press.

Ticktin, M. 2011. Casualties of Care: immigration and the politics of humanitarianism in France. California Press.

Tuckett, A. 2018. Rules, Paper, Status: Migrants and Precarious Bureaucracy in Contemporary Italy. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press