Syllabus
24. February 2022
Introduction. 3. March 2022
Understanding the governance of mobility and diversity: overview of key theories and concepts
Reading: Casas-Cortes, M. et al. (2015). New Keywords: Migration and Borders. Cultural Studies, 29(1), 55–87 (only pp. 61-85) 10. March 2022
Recent controversies related to (the politics of) mobility and diversity
Key points: The refugee wave 2015-2017 – a crisis discourse; Brexit; Poland-Belarus border; attitudes towards immigrants; populism, the far right and anti-immigrant campaigns.
Reading: Crawley, H., & Skleparis, D. (2018). Refugees, migrants, neither, both: Categorical fetishism and the politics of bounding in Europe’s ‘migration crisis’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 44(1), 48–64. 17. March 2022
Asylum and immigration policies in the European Union
Key points: comparison of immigration regimes; EU asylum politics; asylum and humanitarianism; brain gain and the discourse on deservingness; shifts in restrictiveness; the production of illegality
Reading: Haas, H. de, Natter, K., & Vezzoli, S. (2018). Growing Restrictiveness or Changing Selection? The Nature and Evolution of Migration Policies. International Migration Review. 24. March 2022
Building Fortress Europe: borders and bordering
Key points: border management; surveillance; externalisation of the EU border; pushbacks and deaths at sea; deportations and detentions; the securitisation of migration; exceptionalism and encampment.
Reading: De Genova, N. (2019). Detention, Deportation, and Waiting: Toward a Theory of Migrant Detainability. Gender a Výzkum / Gender and Research, 20(1), 92–104. 31. March 2022
Citizenship in a neoliberal context
Key points: recent trends in citizenship policy; citizenship deprivation; neoliberal discourse; civic citizenship vs. national belonging; citizenship tests
Reading: van Houdt, F., Suvarierol, S., & Schinkel, W. (2011). Neoliberal communitarian citizenship: Current trends towards ‘earned citizenship’ in the United Kingdom, France and the Netherlands. International Sociology, 26(3), 408–432. 7. April 2022
“Integration nations” – debates on assimilation and social cohesion
Key points: integration research vs. integration policy; debates on “assimilability”; integration courses; the social imaginary of integrationism
Reading: Favell, A. (2014). Integration policy and integration research in Europe: A review and critique. In Immigration, integration and mobility: New agendas in migration studies. Essays: 1998—2014 (pp. 69–122). ECPR Press. 14. April 2022
No class (Děkanské volno) 21. April 2022
Religious and cultural clashes and the debate on multiculturalism
Key points: multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism versus assimilationism and nativism, superdiversity; the Muslim “other”; gendered constructions (case study: the headscarf debate)
Reading: Korteweg, A. C. (2017). The failures of ‘immigrant integration’: The gendered racialized production of non-belonging. Migration Studies, 5(3), 428–444. 28. April 2022
The nation-state and its “others” in a globalised world
Key points: tensions between the national order and global capitalism; the liberal paradox; migration and national belonging; the case for open borders
Reading: Kukathas, C. (2012). Why open borders? Ethical Perspectives, 19(4), 650-675. 5. May 2022
Racism, neocolonialism and the imperial roots of “Fortress Europe”
Key points: “Birth right lottery” – the passport as the new privilege; colonial legacies in diversity management, racial/class/gender/heteronormative hierarchies, within-Europe east-west hierarchies, the racial state.
Reading: Rodríguez, E. G. (2018). The Coloniality of Migration and the “Refugee Crisis”: On the Asylum-Migration Nexus, the Transatlantic White European Settler Colonialism-Migration and Racial Capitalism. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 34(1), 16–28. 12. May 2022
Critical and decolonial approaches to the management of mobility and diversity: key take-aways
Key points: coloniality/modernity school, critical race theory, migration as decolonisation, reflexive migration studies, methodological (de)nationalism, postsocialist critique
Reading: Carver, N. (2019). The Silent Backdrop: Colonial Anxiety at the Border. Journal of Historical Sociology, 32(2), 154–172. 19. May 2022
Recapitulations, feedback, key take-aways, class evaluation.
Annotation
This course will focus on key contemporary trends and debates that are currently shaping European societies. From the recent “refugee crisis” to the rise in populist rhetoric, from Brexit to Islamist radicalisation – the question of diversity is at the heart of current political debates and subject to much contestation. The salience of issues such as migration, integration, and security is causing polarisation not only in public discourse, but also in the academic literature. Such issues are now shaping political programs, social policies, voting behaviour, new modes of social stratification, and profoundly affect the lived experience of immigrants and minorities. At the same time, disruptive debates are emerging that question the legitimacy of the expanding EU border regime and re-centre the discussion of mobility and diversity around issues that have thus far been suppressed in Europe, such as the problem of race and racism, colonial legacies and the crisis of liberalism.
A key question addressed throughout this course is: how do European states respond to mobility and diversity in an increasingly hostile, contested and securitised context? Through engaging with state-of-the-art literature, we will discuss how these questions are dramatically reshaping Europe and how they are situated within wider postcolonial, postsocialist and post-Cold War global contexts. The course will deal with all of these issues from an interdisciplinary and critical perspective, engaging both with key European and North American scholarship and with non-Eurocentric and socially transformative approaches. The approach is to problematize mobility and diversity politics by questioning common value-laden assumptions, including in (academic) knowledge production, in order to understand the historically contingent normative nature of some of the most highly politicised problems of our time.