Professor: Tobin Hansen
4 credits
This course examines the bordering of the United States and Mexico. We will consider the historical processes that have brought together and separated the peoples, cultures, politics, and geographies of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. The course also explores the contemporary circulations, encounters, blending, thickening, and partitions that the U.S.-Mexico border facilitates. The focus on the U.S.-Mexico borderlands will enable insights into nation-state and territorial bordering more broadly as well as common bordering features, such as ports-of-entry, checkpoints, walls and fences, digital and human surveillance, and border patrols. We will also consider concepts such as linguistic and cultural change and hybridity, center and periphery, and the possibilities of local or national cultures. Lastly, the course will use the lenses of Indigeneity, citizenship, and race to examine human experiences of colonization, movements and stasis, forcible displacement, and being subjected to policing. We will rely on concepts and methods in scholarly texts from the disciplines of history, anthropology, and philosophy. Moreover, we will explore first-person narrative accounts, material culture, and popular culture.
Graduation Requirement: This class will fulfill a Social Science Colloquium and the US: Difference, Inequality, Agency (US) cultural literacy requirement. If the student has already taken a Social Science Colloquium, this class will fulfill both of the following requirements: an Elective Colloquium and the US: Difference, Inequality, Agency (US) cultural literacy requirement.