HONR3301 The Border as Medium

Wednesdays 5-8pm

Dr. Alessandra Renzi
[email protected]

This course uses borders as media for interdisciplinary research and creation. As borders proliferate, they restructure our lives and ways of thinking in different ways along lines of geographical and political separation. Studying borders does not only require that we focus on issues of security and identity but also on the sociocultural, political and aesthetic dimensions of the movement of people and goods, and on the transformations of spaces, practices and temporalities borders produce. We will explore a variety of border themes ranging from migrant struggles to the geographies of borderlands, from the violence and militarization of borders to border art; from the mediatization of borders and the function of political concepts such as citizenship and sovereignty to the visible and less visible boundaries that surround us in the cities we live in.

The Border as Medium is divided in three parts: 1) a research methods section that covers ethnographic fieldwork and some video production techniques; 2) a theory component to study borders from a variety of perspectives (sociology, political economy, anthropology, geography and media studies); 3) and a practice component where students will apply the skills and theories learned to a border project of their choice. Students will have the opportunity to produce their own video, other forms of media, reports and/or ethnographic studies. This course may be of interest to students of sociology and anthropology, human geography, media and art, communication studies, journalism and political science.