Peqod :: Classes - Columbia University Catalog of Classes

Refugees, forced migration, and displacement: these subjects top the headlines of the world’s newspapers, not to mention our social media feeds. Over a million refugees have reached Europe’s shores in recent years, and conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere continue to force people to flee their homes. In the aftermath of the financial crisis and 9/11, politicians in the Global North have focused on borders: who crosses them and how. Walls are being erected. Referendums are being held. We are consumed with thorny questions about who gets to join our political communities. Today there are over 65 million refugees, displaced persons, and stateless persons in the world, represented at last summer’s Olympics by their own team for first the time, a testament to their increasing visibility on the world stage. Global forced displacement recently hit a historical high. And while numbers are increasing, solutions are still elusive. The modern refugee regime, the collection of laws and institutions designed to address the problems faced by refugees, has developed slowly over the course of the last 100 years, first in response to specific crises. That regime has been shaped by a changing geopolitical landscape. At the end of the Cold War, institutions in the field expanded their mandates and preferred solutions to the “problem” of refugees changed. And yet today many scholars and policy makers argue the regime is not fit for purpose. They point to the European refugee crisis as the latest case in point. Why? What went wrong and where? Can it be fixed? This course will largely focus on the issues of forced migration, displacement and refugees related to conflict, although this subject is inevitably intertwined with larger debates about citizenship and humanitarianism. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, this course will address both scholarly and policy debates. Utilizing human rights scholarship, it will draw on work in history that charts the evolution of institutions; legal scholarship that outlines international and domestic laws; work in political science that seeks to understand responses in a comparative perspective, and anthropological studies that address how refugees understand these institutions and their experiences of exile and belonging. These topics are not only the purview of those in the academy, however. Investigative journalists have most recently provided trenchant coverage of the world’s refugees, especially the current European crisis, where many have reported from the shores of the

Department: Institute for Study of Human Rights
T 4:10 p.m.-6 p.m.
Instructor: Lara J Nettelfield
h-index: 8 Info
3 points

Details

HRTS GU4230

EMPIRES & MIGRATION IN THE PACIFIC WORLD

EMPIRES&MIGRATION; PACIFIC WRLD

This seminar examines how Asian, European, and American empires have channeled, categorized, and regulated human movement in the Pacific since the 1500s. The Mediterranean and Indian Oceans hosted dense networks of mobility before recorded history, while a single Atlantic World coalesced in the seventeenth century. Yet, the Pacific resisted such integration. Only the Polynesians traversed its vast expanses over centuries of migration. Chinese and Japanese merchants and later European empires were able to build segmented corridors during the early modern era, but mass migration awaited the California Gold Rush. Yet, then the prospect of mass Chinese migration elicited racialized hysteria throughout the Pacific basinâ€™s white settler nations. Their imposition of barriers against ordinary Chinese and later all Asian migrants engendered contemporary systems of policing state boundaries and re-divided the Pacific into contending spheres of state power, economic penetration, and racial imagining. As a result, twentieth-century historians largely wrote fragmented histories of the Pacific. By dividing East Asian, Southeast Asian, North American, and Latin American histories, scholars broke the Pacific into more manageable but bounded pieces. Their approach marginalized transpacific movement and the state systems that transected this region from global history. By contrast, this course reframes the Pacific as the central fulcrum in the making of the modern world. Together, we will explore and develop conceptual frameworks for thinking through a Pacific World. In that ambitious undertaking, we will read from traditionally disconnected historiographies, as well as the emerging field of Pacific World history. Our weekly endeavor will be to think holistically about different imperial and national formations and consider how shifting flows of state power have molded human geographies. As a result, we will also tackle a diverse set of analytical approaches toward the study of mobility. From migration and labor histories to environmental history and critical social theory, this spread will point us toward additional avenues to refine this Pacific World framework.

Department: East Asian Languages and Cultures
R 10:10 a.m.-noon
Instructor: Peter E Hamilton
CULPA: 1 Info
4 points

Details

HSEA GU4230