Seminar in Historical Analysis (405-0-22)

Topic

Migration

Instructors

Ipek Yosmaoglu
847/491-3154
Harris Hall Room 214

Meeting Info

Harris Hall room 101: Mon 2:00PM - 5:00PM

Overview of class

Topic: Agency

This seminar is about the concept of "agency" in historical writing. What does "agency" actually mean - is the capacity for resistance, the freedom to make choices, or just the ability to affect historical events? Most of us think we have agency, but do we really? Can historians "give people back their agency"? And who can we think of as having agency - do objects have agency? Do animals? What about very small children? Our readings will explore these questions from many angles. We will consider what "agency" means within specific fields of scholarship, concentrating on enslaved people, colonized people, peasants, and premodern women. Then we will consider how historians in other fields, particularly environmental history and the history of material culture, have repurposed and expanded the concept. Meanwhile, we will all exercise our own agency (if we decide we have it) in our analysis and discussion of this scholarship.

Learning Objectives

To understand the concept of "agency" as it appears in historical scholarship, to learn how to write graduate level analytical essays

Overview of class

Migration is a central theme of global history and a crucial driver of processes of globalization. Societies have developed a wide range of labels to categorize people on the move: the "undocumented migrant," the "guest worker," the "refugee," the "migrant woman," the "people smuggler," the "expatriate." All these categories are consequential, and all of them have a history. This course investigates those histories across the 19th and 20th centuries, reading classic and new works in global migration studies. We will read selected works to consider the methodologies that historians have used to study the movement of people in the modern world, as well as the political, cultural, and economic implications of those movements. As we discover how states have repeatedly used migration as a resource and constructed it as a threat, we will also pay careful attention to how historians have tried to use their knowledge in contemporary political debates, reading public history projects and editorials alongside academic articles and monographs. We will consider questions such as: • What are the historical processes that explain migration patterns? Are migration and migration restriction intrinsically linked to one another? • How are scholars globalizing what began as a Eurocentric field, and specifically an Atlantic-centric field? What are productive conversations that can be had between scholars who work on migration in different parts of the world? • What productive conversations can be had about migration across disciplines? What related social sciences have historians drawn from, and how has historical work on migration contributed to theorization in other social science fields?