College Seminar (101-7-1)
Topic
Currencies, Passports and Visas
Instructors
Emrah Yildiz
1819 Hinman Ave, #103
Office Hours: Tuesdays, 1-3pm
Emrah Yıldız joins the Department of Anthropology and the Middle East and North African Studies Program and as an Assistant Professor. His work is a historical anthropology of routes of mobility in the tri-border area among Iran, Turkey and Syria. His research lies at the intersection of historiography and ethnography of borders and their states; ritual practice, visitation and pilgrimage in Islam as well as smuggling and contraband commerce in global political economy.
Meeting Info
ANTHRO Sem Rm 104 - 1810 Hinmn: Mon, Wed 5:00PM - 6:20PM
Overview of class
As the era of digital currencies and Global Entry, one might assume that paper money, passports and visas—printed licenses to mobility—are fast becoming relics of an analog past. Yet for whom holds that assumption hold true? With border walls and offshored asylum processing centers troubling that rosy picture of borderless global mobility, this assumption seems begs a reexamination. In this course, we ask: who gets to assume and who is categorically denied the privileges of these mundane papers? How do papers serve that divide between the haves and have-nots of global mobility?
In probing these questions we will read across several different academic disciplines and investigative journalism to become familiar with key analytic concepts, methods, and historical phenomena, such as citizenship-for-investment schemes, the US Green Card lottery, emergency responders across US-Mexico borderlands, methodological nationalism, ethnography, and political economy. Our goal in the seminar is to critically assess how seemingly mundane papers make or break the possibilities of movement across modern state borders, differentiated along axes of ethnicity and race, class, gender, and geography.
Registration Requirements
First-year students only
Learning Objectives
By the end of the course, student will be able to
• recognize prevalent interpretations of mobility and its global architecture in anthropological and allied disciplines,
• evaluate core concepts related to transformation of mobility through proliferations of papers authorized by state fiat,
• generate different theories of mobility and its paper licenses by analyzing ethnographic evidence drawn from multiple world regions.
Evaluation Method
Active participation, discussion co-facilitation, reading responses, research paper
Class Materials (Required)
Readings: All required text apart from book-length manuscripts can be found under files on the course website. The ethnographic monographs are available at the Northwestern Bookstore.
Kath Weston. 2008. Traveling Light: On the Road with America's Poor. Boston: Beacon Press. ISBN-13: 978-0807041383
Ieva Jusionyte, 2018. Threshold: Emergency Responders on the US-Mexico Border. University of
California Press. ISBN-13: 978-0520297180.
Charles Piot. 2019. The Fixer: Visa Lottery Chronicles. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN-13: 978-1478003045
Class Attributes
WCAS College Seminar
Enrollment Requirements
Enrollment Requirements: Reserved for First Years and Sophomores.
Add Consent: Department Consent Required
Drop Consent: Department Consent Required