Spring 2024 Migration Courses

As the Spring semester approaches, BIMI has curated list Migration related courses to take this upcoming semester! Delve into migration/immigration discourse in these amazing classes some of whom are taught by BIMI affiliates. 

  • Forced Migration - TU, TH 2:00 pm - 3:29 pm

    This course will introduce you to key concepts, issues, and legal frameworks around forced migration from legal, sociological, and normative perspectives. Using historical and contemporary examples, interdisciplinary scholarship, legal cases, media depictions of forced migration, and the voices of persons experiencing displacement, we will critically examine narratives about and responses to population displacement in international and domestic contexts.

  • Immigrants and Immigration as U.S. History - TU, TH 3:30 pm - 4:59 pm

    This course examines the coming together of people from five continents to the United States and provides an historical overview of the shifting patterns of immigration. The course begins in the colonial era when servants and slaves typified the migrant to America. It then follows the migration of the pre-industrial immigrants, through migration streams during the industrial and "post-industrial" eras of the nation.  

  • The Politics of Immigration - TU, TH 11:00 am - 12:29 pm

    This course starts by exploring such migration reasons and the scholarly understanding of the politics of immigration. We then move to discussing the processes of immigrant incorporation---do immigrants and their children enter the mainstream societal institutions, what are the policies that promote the social, economic and political participation of immigrants, and what are the conditions that hinder immigrants participation. The course ends with a discussion of policy interventions designed to ameliorate the conditions hindering immigrants' incorporation. 

  • Immigration and Citizenship - TU, TH 5:00 pm - 6:29 pm

    We often hear that America is a "nation of immigrants." This representation of the U.S. does not explain why some are presumed to belong and others are not. We will examine both historical and contemporary law of immigration and citizenship to see how law has shaped national identity and the identity of immigrant communities. In addition to scholarly texts, we will read and analyze excerpts of cases and the statute that governs immigration and citizenship, the Immigration and Nationality Act. 

  • Middle East: Post-Colonialism, Migration, and Diaspora - TU 4:00 pm - 6:59 pm

    The course focuses on the impacts of migration and displacement of people from postcolonial Middle East region and the U.S. legal, political, social, and religious discourse on cross-cultural and ethical issues which arise in immigration practice while placing the phenomena within a global and transnational context. Three separate groups in the US will be examined; Middle Eastern immigrants, El Salvadoran diaspora, and rightwing white communities. 

  • Caribbean Migration to Western Europe and the United States - TU 4:00 pm - 6:59 pm 

    The main goal of this course is to offer a broad and comprehensive understanding of the Caribbean migration experience to the United States. We will cover crucial issues such as the migration origins, modes of incorporation, racism, cultural/identity strategies, and the political-economic relationship between the country of origin and the metropolitan host society. 

  • Chinese Interactions with Early to Modern Southeast Asia - M 2:00 pm - 4:59 pm

    This multi-disciplinary graduate seminar introduces key sources and scholarship on Chinese interactions with, Chinese migrations to, and Chinese influences in, Southeast Asia.

  • Chinese Diaspora in Southeast Asia: Cultural Histories, Migrating Identities - TU, TH 2:00 pm - 3:29 pm

    This seminar will explore the cultural, economic, social, political and religious history of th​e Chinese diaspora in 19​ to 21​ century Southeast Asia. Our focus is the shifting contexts of migration, representation and strategies of cultural identification/survival. Our primary focus countries are Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand.

  • Harlem Renaissance - TU, TH 3:30 pm - 4:59 pm

    The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement of black artists and writers in the 1920s and 1930s. Centered in New York, the movement extended outward through international collaboration. Together we will be reading works by writers including Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston and as well as manifestos about the nature and function of black art. Course themes include migration and metropolitan living, primitivism and the avant garde, diaspora and exile, passing and identity, sexuality and secrecy, and the relationship between modern art and vernacular tradition.

  • Chicana/o Literature and Culture - TU, TH 2:00 pm - 3:29 pm

    What does it mean to be Latinx? This course will introduce students to major authors, genres, and movements in Latinx literary history. We will take a thematic approach, examining how Latinx writers from various communities (Puerto Rican, Mexican American, Cuban American, Dominican American, Central American) have characterized such concepts as language and assimilation, gender and sexuality, race and indigeneity, and borders and migration. 

  • Rewriting France - TU, TH 11:00 am - 12:29 pm

    For almost a century, francophone authors with ties to different parts of the former French empire have written about colonial and postcolonial subjects who travel into and out of France.  In this class, we will discuss several texts, dating from the mid-twentieth century onward, that foreground movement to (and from) the metropole. 

  • Jews and Judaism: From Paris to Jerusalem and Beyond - TU, TH - 12:30 pm - 1:59 pm

    This class treats France and the Francophone world as a laboratory for the study of Jewish civilization over the past millennium. France has the world’s second largest Jewish population outside of Israel. It has a rich and complex history that traces all the key developments of the Jewish experience since ancient times: expulsions and migrations; codification of Jewish law; religious reform; the rise of anti-Semitism and the tragedy of the Holocaust; struggles between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews; complex relations between Muslims and Jews; the emergence modern Jewish politics; and the impact of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

  • Blackness in Latin America and the Caribbean - TU, TH 12:30 pm - 1:59 pm

    The aim of this course is to examine black history, culture and politics across a number of countries in Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean, and Afrolatinidad in the U.S. In the final section of the class, we analyze the migration of Afro-Latin Americans to places like New York and Florida and the corresponding emergence of movements asserting afro-latin@/afro-latinx identity in the U.S. 

  • Cultures of US Imperialism and Filipinx Diaspora - TU, TH 9:30 am - 10:59 am

    This course examines how US imperialism and its legacies shape the contemporary landscape of politics, culture, and society in the Philippines and the Filipinx diaspora. Focusing on a diversity of cultural forms and mediums (including literature, film, art, music, fashion, and popular culture), students will learn about the narrative strategies of people caught in the entangled spaces of US-Philippine encounters, with a focus on Filipinx representation. 

  • History and Trauma: Modern Greek Literature and Film After 1923 - M, W 10:00 am - 11:29 am

    In this seminar, we will attend to the reverberations of trauma in Greek literature, film, and visual culture in the century following the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) and Population Exchange (1923-1924). The catastrophic Population Exchange between Greece and Turkey created a refugee crisis that entailed forced deportation, displacement, migration, and resettlement. As communities on both sides were expelled from their homes, and as they suffered the loss of life on a vast scale, the Population Exchange produced a crisis of belonging, identity, and survival.

  • South Asian Diaspora and Anti-Colonial Politics in a Decolonizing World - M, W 5:00 pm - 6:29 pm

    The course will situate this critical history against the backdrop of an expanding governmentality, emergent systems of surveillance and exclusionary immigration laws. The objective of the course is to familiarize students with the politics of South Asian diaspora in the 20th century and explore how the cultural and ideological worlds of modern anti-colonial traditions—the ideas young intellectuals imbibed and disseminated, the solidarities they established, and their engagements with race, gender, religion, class—were made and re-made by the cities they moved in.’

  • Rethinking the Model Minority - TU, TH 12:30 pm - 1:59 pm

    We will consider the limitations and untruths of the model minority, but also the ways in which it continues to animate contemporary Asian America. Examining pop culture and personal experience as well as scholarly texts, we’ll acquire the critical tools to rethink the model minority as stereotype, social formation, and set of expectations for second-generation life.