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Instructors: Kine Valvik Mitchell, Amber Kepple Jones
Contact: rethinkingthemigrant@gmail.com, office hours by appointment
Language: English B2+, some German helpful but not required.
Course Description: In January 2016, The Sun, the most highly read “newspaper” in the UK, published an article with the headline: “Refugee Crisis: Berlin so swamped by migrants that city is in ruins”. Though such hyperbolic claims are often quickly dismissed, they also echo and reiterate fears existing within hegemonic discourses surrounding “migrants” and reflect public consciousnesses about the “crisis” in not only the UK but in Berlin, Germany and more generally, the global north. This interdisciplinary course will give an overview of migration and border studies, as well as postcolonial approaches to the figure of the migrant while deconstructing the figure of the “migrant” and the concept of “crisis” while placing them into wider discussions of “raceless” Europe.
The lecturers will present the texts and add relevant supplementary information so that lecturers and students may discuss and engage with the readings together.
Students will
- learn to critically engage with and deconstruct, more generally, structures, norms, ideologies, “objectivities”, binaries, and categories,
- learn to destabilize and contextualize notions of the migrant within regional, national and European discourses whether it is policy, law, news, (social) medias, documentaries, or social acts as well as,
- learn to critically reflect on topics while reflecting their own place in the discourse,
- work towards an interdisciplinary, more comprehensive understanding of the figure of the migrant in Berlin and wider Europe.
Course Assessment: Attendance and active participation based on completing the readigns, critical reflection journals, essay topic proposal, individual essay, class project - photo essay (which will be displayed online as part of an upcoming BIM web project called “Berlin in dialogue”). |
