Immigration Politics
Term:
Spring 2012
Subject Code:
GPOL
Course Number:
6473
This seminar explores the dynamics of immigration politics
in the United States through new intellectual work on the senses, hence the
course sub-title “sensing the political.”
Part one of the course maps demographic shifts and the political
contestation such changes have engendered over the past four decades.
Part two introduces new bodies of scholarly
work on the senses:
visual, olfactory,
and auditory in particular all have become areas of innovative research.
Key works here include David Howes on the
senses; Alain Corbin, on
Odor and the French Social Imagination,
Marita Sturken on memory and Japanese
Internment; Diana Harris on race and visibility; and Brandon Labelle on
Acoustic
Territories.
Part three of the
course brings parts one and two together to see if attending to a wider body of
evidence might allow us to rethink immigration politics from a new angle.
Topics covered will include borders and
border walls; day laborers, race, and the 2006 May Day rallies.
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