The course looks at how bordering practices and people’s movements make migration as a key socio-political, historical, and everyday phenomenon. We study border regimes in Europe, Germany, and Berlin: policy, law, practices, and discourses seeking to control and categorize people as migrants. We also learn about how people live in these regimes, adapt, contest, or tacitly transform them.

Conceptually, the course relies on an understanding of borders not as geographical lines, but as “machines” producing difference, including race, social and global inequality, gender, and other asymmetrical social relations. We understand borders as always contested, in multiple ways, and take the “border as a method” (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013): a perspective to study any social institution or phenomenon, such as health, criminal justice, work, or war.

The lectures, weekly readings and other materials offer an interdisciplinary approach, building on social, legal, cultural, historical, and political perspectives, and engaging with social movements, audio-visual and web-based works, and art. The Berlin level will be discussed together with guests and during an excursion.