121-026 The Mobile World: Migrancy, Home & Exile

Completion of 100 points of first and/or second year subjects including at least 50 points at first year level from approved subjects in your home faculty.

The accelerated speed, frequency and commonality of the movement of people through space is an increasingly ubiquitous feature of the modern world. Consequently, migration studies has developed as an established field of enquiry, encompassing disciplines such as anthropology, development studies, geography, sociology and political science. Its key shortcoming, however, rests in its exclusion of other forms of human movement or mobility. In contrast, drawing widely on examples from within and between the developed and developing worlds, this subject considers human mobility in the fullest sense, providing an understanding of the structural and experiential differences and commonalities between different kinds of human mobility, from the forced migration of refugees to the nomadism of Gypsies to the leisure migration of 'old aged travellers' for example. In so doing, it explores a number of related questions that are simultaneously empirical, theoretical and methodological: how do people move? Where do people move to? How have human mobility, its impact on places and the identity-making processes that mobile people engage in been theorized. Given that most social science methodologies have been designed to study situations of its opposite, fixity, what particular approaches are required to research and write about human mobility? Finally, and centrally, the subject's objectives are political in hue. By investigating how nation states legislate and police human mobility, it seeks to offer an understanding of how mobility is experienced as a form of home or exile.

• have an understanding of the theorectical issues relevant to contemporary thinking about mobility in the modern world;

• have an understanding of the social construction of difference, mobility and a sense of place.

Written work totalling 4000 words comprising a 3000 word essay 65% (due at the end of week 9), a 1000-word tutorial paper 25% (due during semester) and a 10-minute tutorial presentation 10%.

• C B Brettell & J F Hollifield, Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines. Routledge 2000.