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War in Ukraina Contested

Class at Faculty of Arts |
APOV50434E

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.