Suspended in 2025/26
SO237      Half Unit
Racial Borderscapes

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

This course explores the relationship between the racialised migration systems and the everyday life of borders. By working with the frame of ‘borderscapes’ this course provides opportunities to explore the spatial production of racialised borders across national, urban and intimate scales. The course critically examines border regimes by engaging in sociological and spatial perspectives. We will analyse how concepts such as ‘sovereignty’, 'citizenship', 'race' and ‘illegality’ are spatialised, bringing these into dialogue with formations such as camps, domestic interiors and workplaces. Through these spaces we will also explore practices of cultural debordering and political resistance that occur through the everyday and the commonplace. Our learning process is enlivened through student presentations and writing workshops.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

This course is usually delivered through a combination of lectures and seminars. There will be two hours or more of teaching each week in AT.

Students are required to attend lectures, seminars and workshops.

There will be student group presentations in seminars across most weeks, which forms 20% of the overall summative assessment. There is also a writing workshop to help prepare for the summative essay.

Essay plan

Students will be expected to produce an essay plan in the AT.

300-500 word essay plan to be submitted in Week 8 of Autumn Term in preparation for the writing workshop.

The formative classwork ranges from brief in-class writing exercises, to a short essay plan on which feedback is given in a writing workshop where essay plans are further developed. Attendance at the writing workshop is required.

Bhattacharyya, Gargi. Rethinking racial capitalism: Questions of reproduction and survival. Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018.

Çaglar, Ayse, and Nina Glick Schiller. Migrants and city-making: Dispossession, displacement, and urban regeneration. Duke University Press, 2018.

De Genova, Nicholas P. "Migrant “illegality” and deportability in everyday life." Annual review of anthropology 31, no. 1 (2002): 419-447.

Gupta, Monisha Das. Unruly immigrants: Rights, activism, and transnational South Asian politics in the United States. Duke University Press, 2006.

Hall, Suzanne. The migrant’s paradox: Street livelihoods and marginal citizenship in Britain. University of Minnesota Press, 2021.

Jones, Hannah, Yasmin Gunaratnam, Gargi Bhattacharyya, and William Davies. Go home?: The politics of immigration controversies. Manchester University Press, 2017.

Khalaf, Abdulhadi, Omar AlShehabi, and Adam Hanieh. Transit states: Labour, migration and citizenship in the Gulf. Pluto Press, 2015.

Landau, Loren Brett, Kaajal Ramjathan-Keogh, and Gayatri Singh. Xenophobia in South Africa and problems related to it. Johannesburg: Forced Migration Studies Programme, University of the Witwatersrand, 2005.

Mezzadra, Sandro, and Brett Neilson. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Duke University Press, 2013.

Valluvan, Sivamohan. The clamour of nationalism: Race and nation in twenty-first-century Britain. Manchester University Press, 2019.

Yuval-Davis, Nira, Georgie Wemyss, and Kathryn Cassidy. Bordering. John Wiley & Sons, 2019.

Walia, Harsha. Border and rule: global migration, capitalism, and the rise of Racist nationalism. Haymarket Books, 2021.

Presentation (20%)

This component of assessment includes an element of group work.

Essay (80%, 3000 words) in January

Group presentation during the Autumn Term.

Attendance at all classes and submission of all set coursework is required.