Irregular Migration and the Politics of Urban Space. Global Cases (LV / Seminar) Irregular Migration and the Politics of Urban Space. Global Cases (LV / Seminar)

This seminar course looks at the administration of Displaced Persons (DPs) from the early 20th century until roughly the present. Population Displacement is a topic of pressing importance, impacting lives, shaping politics, transforming cityscapes across the globe. Despite cutting across a variety of disciplines, though, population displacement – its causes and consequences – tends to be viewed in relative isolation. Residents of the Shatila camp in Lebanon, for example, are never compared to Haitians who were displaced by the 2010 earthquake, despite the fact that many of the same organizations, infrastructure, and planning instruments are critical in the response to each displacement event. The Lebanese and Haitian cases may share some characteristics, but in other ways, Shatila (a refugee camp) is more like Dharavi (one of the largest informal settlement in the world) in Mumbai, where residents are displaced neither by political persecution, war, or natural disaster. The Camp (Shatila) and the Slum (Dharavi) both, for example, have a density well above 200,000 persons per square kilometer.  How do we account for the similarities and differences across cases? How should we understand a refugee camp that in most ways is more like a city than a temporary settlement? 

This seminar suggests that we look at Population Displacement in a global comparative context, situating the topic in the historical matrix of capitalism, imperialism, the human sciences, and international knowledge networks. 

The course suggests that a global history of displacement can learn not just from cross case comparison, but from scholarship on informal settlements (slums), precarity (surplus labor), the carceral society (prisons), but also the experiences of high mobility persons (expats etc). One primary goal of the course is to explore how the shared vulnerabilities – of selves and others – can help us to think the core structural elements of displacement. And to think better about the complicated logics which lead to displacement, from development projects and wind farms to land-grabbing, ecological degradation, and communalized politics.

The readings are drawn from a variety of different disciplines. Where possible, we will also explore the methodological tools being used to think displacement, from ethnography and interviews to archives and contemporary media.