SHUM 6639 - [Global Currents: (Im)mobility and Multi-sited Ethnography]

Fall. Next Offered: 2019-2020. 4 credits. Student option grading.

Enrollment limited to: 15 students. Not open to: undergraduates. Co-meets with SHUM 4639.

C. Appert.

Ever-increasing global interconnection drives some of the most pressing political and ethical questions of our time. This seminar centers on two intersecting areas of inquiry. The first deals with the nature of global movements: how people, ideas, arts, and capital move through world. Engaging postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary migration and transnationalism, we will interrogate the idea of borders and nations as well as those categories—like diaspora—that surpass or circumvent them. The second area of inquiry involves questioning how and why we might study these processes ethnographically. Here we will consider the potential and limitations of multi-sited and global ethnography, and question the possibility of an activist ethnography of global interconnection. For longer description and instructor bio visit http://societyhumanities.as.cornell.edu/courses.