Anthropology of Borders - JSM141

• Title: Anthropology of Borders
• Guaranteed by: Department of Sociology (23-KS)
• Faculty: Faculty of Social Sciences
• Actual: from 2025
• Semester: winter
• E-Credits: 9
• Examination process: winter s.:
• Hours per week, examination: winter s.:2/0, Ex [HT]
• Capacity: unlimited / unknown (5)
• Min. number of students: unlimited
• 4EU+: no
• Virtual mobility / capacity: no
• State of the course: taught
• Language: English
• Teaching methods: full-time
• Note: course can be enrolled in outside the study plan; enabled for web enrollment; priority enrollment if the course is part of the study plan
• Guarantor: doc. Mgr. Jakub Grygar, Ph.D.
• Teacher(s): doc. Mgr. Jakub Grygar, Ph.D.
• Incompatibility : JSM062
• Is incompatible with: JSM062

Annotation

The course provides a survey of main ideas underlying debates on international borders, cross-border migration, and politics of national/state belonging and control thereof. This course will consider the border politics involved in the making of state power, migrant strategies, and local and (trans) national communities based on assigned weekly reading. Using the EU/non-EU border as our primary loci of inquiry, we will explore the rights and reception of those who cross borders: not only geopolitical, but also linguistic, racial, economic, and cultural. Examining immigration policy and admissions policy, law enforcement along the border, media representations of migrants, and stories of border crossers, we will attempt to understand the forces that expand and constrain membership rights in these intersecting communities. How are borders constructed and contested by groups on both sides of the border? How are rights of belonging and membership transformed by migrants and “trespassers”? Border politics will be considered from an anthropological perspective allowing us to consider a wide variety of scholarly work in fiction and non-fiction, contemporary media, and border studies.

Last update: Grygar Jakub, doc. Mgr., Ph.D. (08.03.2023)

Aim of the course

In this class, students will gain a broadened perspective on the EU/non-EU border, and an awareness of the ways border politics are enacted locally as well as internationally. In particular, the students will:

• understand the border as a social construction, shaped by historical, political, social and cultural contexts;
• understand structural conditions that push people to cross borders;
• understand the unique experiences and perspectives of border crossers; and
• gain basic knowledge and understanding of the relationship between changing borders and identities, and changing patterns of migration and citizenship in Europe.

Last update: Grygar Jakub, doc. Mgr., Ph.D. (08.03.2023)

Course completion requirements

Course Requirements

1. Media analysis.
2. Two intermediate tests. The test examines knowledge of the factual realities, theories and concepts discussed in each thematic block.
3. The essay (or research paper) deeply exploring one concrete issue discussed in the course. The paper must be based on knowledge and critical debate of obligatory reading  For instructions on how to write a critical debate please look here.

The final grade for the class will be determined by:

• Media analysis: 20%
• Two intermediate test: 40% (20% each test);
• essay / research paper: 40%.

Last update: Grygar Jakub, doc. Mgr., Ph.D. (08.03.2023)

Literature

Obligarory readinig

ADEY, PETER. 2009. Facing airport security: affects, biopolitics, and the preemptive securisation of the mobile body. Environment and Planing D: Society and Space (27): 274-295.

AMBROSINI, Mauricio et al. (eds.) 2020. Migration, Borders and Citizenship. Between Policy and Public Spheres. Palgrave Macmillan.

ANDERSSON, RUBEN. 2014. Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine migration and the business of bordering Europe. University of California Press. Pp. 137 -176.

BOURDIEU, PIERRE. 1991. Identity and representation. Elements for a critical reflection on the idea of region.  In: Language and Symbolic Power, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

DE GENEVA, NICHOLAS. 2002. Migrant “Illegality” and deportability in everyday life. Annual Review of Anthropology (31): 419-447.

DONNAN, Hastings - Thomas M. WILSON. 1999. Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State. London: Berg.

FARMAN, Abou. (2017) The Political Aesthetics of Border Walls, Anthropology Now, 9:3, 3-5.

GUPTA, Akhil – FERGUSON, James. 1992. Beyond „Culture“: Space, Identity, and the Politics of Difference. Cultural Anthropology, 7(1): 6-23. 

LOW, Setha M. (2016) Spatializing Culture: The Ethnography of Space and Place. New York and London: Routledge.

 

Recommended reading

ANTONOPOULOS, GEORGIOS, A. 2008. The Greek Connection(s). The social organizationof the cigarette-smuggling business in Greece. European Journal of Criminology 5(3): 263-288.

BIERMANN, URSULA. 2002. Performing the Border: On Gender, Transnational Bodies and Technology. Globalization on the Line. Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (eds.) Palgrave.

BIGO, DIDIER; GUILD, ELSEPTH. 2005. Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement Into And Within Europe. Aldershot: Ashgate. Pp. 49-100.

CHAVEZ, Leo R. 2006. Spectacle in the Desert. The Minuteman Project on the U.S-Mexico Border.

DONNAN, HASTINGS; WILSON, THOMAS M. (eds.) 1998. Border Identities. Nation and State at International Frontiers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

FOLLIS, S. Karolina. Vision and Transterritory: The Borders of Europe. Science, Technology, & Human Values. XX(X): 1-28.

LYON, David.. 2017. The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life. Wiley: London.

HOLMES, Seth M. and CASTAÑEDA, Heide. 2016. Representing the “European refugee crisis” in Germany and beyond: Deservingness and difference, life and death. In American Ethnologist, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 12–24.

JASKULOWSKI, Krzysztof. 2019. The Everyday Politics of Migration Crisis in Poland: Between Nationalism, Fear and Empathy. London: Palgrave Pivot.

Last update: Grygar Jakub, doc. Mgr., Ph.D. (10.03.2023)

Syllabus

1. Introduction to the course

2. Borders, frontiers, boundaries

Thematic block I.: Borders and the national crises. Case studies

3. Ceuta and Melilla

4. State borders during migration cirisis 2015 (southern Europe, the Balkans)

5. Belarus migration crisis 2021-22

6. Seminar I: Reflection of the migration crisis in public and media discourse

Thematic block II.: Borders and social anthropology

7. Bordering - irdering - othering. Borders and the nation state

8. Walls and fences. On organzation of space

9. Fortification of Europe and surveillance

10. Borders and body politics

11. Local communities and the state. Power and resistance. Loyalty and illegality

12. Seminar II: Power and resistance at the EU border

Last update: Grygar Jakub, doc. Mgr., Ph.D. (08.03.2023)