Contemporary Challenges: Migrations and Cultural Diversity

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.

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.