400013 SE Twenty Years of the Transnational Migration Paradigm: Conjuncture, Temporality and Agency (2016S)

This theory course aims to assess the usefulness, limitations, and challenges of the transnational migration paradigm in the current historical conjuncture. For 20 years ago, transnational paradigm for the study of migration as it was first formulated in Nations Unbound, challanged the researchers in multiple disciplines to rethink their approaches to immigration, ethnicity, nationalism, gender, class and status, racialization, religion, globalization, family studies, health, and social welfare. Since that time there has been a rapid growth of multi-disciplinary scholarship what has sometimes been called transnational studies and various agencies including the World Bank and non-governmental organizations began to celebrate transnational migrants as heroes of development. However, much of this work neither addresses the temporality of the paradigm nor speaks to the need to reconfigure the transnational migration framework within changing conditions. The aim of this course is to reflect on the relationship between the transnational migration paradigm and fundamental structural and cultural changes that are reconfiguring the conditions of migration, including its directionalities, actors, systems of governance, social movements, and academic frameworks of study. The course will focus on the different kinds of institutions involved in this process and their change in time; concentrate on the key concepts of transnational migration perspectives, like ethnicity, community, locality, sovereignty, and multiple membership. One of the main objectives of this course is to analyse the interface between migrant formations and the state and the challenges transnational migration poses to religious and political formations, citizenship schemes, agencies of development, and to urban politics ..