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Contemporary Challenges: Migrations and Cultural Diversity

A.Y. 2024/2025
6
Max ECTS
40
Overall hours
SSD
SPS/10
Language
English
Learning objectives
The course aims to provide students with critical lenses to understand the process of migration in relation to systems implemented to govern human mobility at the global level. It aims to provide the knowledge and ability to understand complex social phenomena like international migration and the production of borders. The course focuses on four main topics: the government of human mobility at the global level (how containment policies implemented to govern migration produce inequalities); borders (how the bordering process works on the ground, which are the actors involved in the negotiation of borders, and how borders affects migrants' everyday lives); asylum (as example to analyze the power relationship between the state, the forms of government of the population, and the subjects governed); solidarity (as space and practice of autonomy and resistance). The course aims to offer a deep knowledge on these four topics through the understanding of key issues and through the analyses of case-studies in empirical research.
Expected learning outcomes
At the end of the course, students should be able to deeply understand key issues of contemporary migration processes, to critically discuss the bordering process in relation to human mobility and systems to govern it, and to engage with related topics like racism, forms of resistance and solidarity in the field of asylum and migration. The analyses of specific case-studies combined with individual/group presentations, in-class discussions and exercises, should provide students with the ability to apply their acquired knowledge. Ultimately, students should be able to recognize and discover the new and relevant challenges posed by the process of migration.

Lesson period: Third trimester

Lessons timetable

Assessment methods: Esame
Assessment result: voto verbalizzato in trentesimi

Exams calendar

Single course

This course can be attended as a single course.

Take a single course
Course syllabus and organization

Single session

Responsible
Fontanari Elena
Lesson period
Third trimester
If the standard face-to-face classes should be impossible due to health restrictions, lessons will take place online through Microsoft Teams. Exams will be taken as online oral tests through Microsoft Teams. Content of the course and evaluation criteria remain the same.
Course syllabus
First part: basic knowledge about migration and the systems to govern migration

- basic knowledge from the perspective of sociology and border studies
- who is a migrant? Historical excursus on the figures of migrants, refugees, and citizens
- what is a border? Policies of externalization and internalization of borders

Second part: following a hypothetical migratory route

- autonomy of migration: de-constructing migrants' linear trajectories
- policies of externalisation of borders
- crossing border zones: Mediterranean sea and Sahara Desert
- focus on the structure of camp: reception centres, deportation prisons, transit camps
- arrival in Europe and reception systems: the cases of Italy and Germany
- differential inclusion: limited access to rights and resources
- differential inclusion: relation to the labour market
- the legal status as internal borders: the containment of intra-EU mobility
- spaces and practices of solidarity: everyday resistance practices and organised collective protests
- deportation regime and "voluntary" return programs
- when is a migration experience over? Structural racism and the European societies

A more detailed Syllabus of the course will be available three months before the first session.
Prerequisites for admission
The course has no specific prerequisites for the admission, it is open to all students who are interested in international migration processes and have basic knowledge of general sociology, anthropology, or social and humanistic sciences.
Teaching methods
Lectures are combined with interactive teaching sessions, in-class group discussions and exercises and individual/group presentations. The course will also make use of video and multi-media materials, the readings of direct narrations produced by refugees and migrants, and the presence of guest-teachers that are experts in migration fields as well as guest-practitioners working in the field (like journalists, layers, social workers). The teaching lessons will be intertwined with the activities of the CRC (Coordinated Research Center) Escapes. Laboratorio di studi critici sulle migrazioni forzate embedded in the Department of Social and Political Science. Escapes aims to work on the topic of migration and asylum connecting the academic world with the field of practitioners.
Teaching Resources
The list of readings will be made available in the first session.
Assessment methods and Criteria
The final exam and the criteria of evaluation will be available three months before the first session.
SPS/10 - URBAN AND ENVIRONMENTAL SOCIOLOGY - University credits: 6
Lessons: 40 hours
Professor: Fontanari Elena
Shifts:
Turno
Professor: Fontanari Elena
Professor(s)