Professor: Tobin Hansen

credits 4.00

• CRN 22629: Tuesday & Thursday, 8:30-9:50am @ CHA 202

This course explores expulsion from the United States in historical and contemporary social and political context. Our examination of the logics of and mechanisms for expelling “undesirable” populations provides an entrée into three central inquiries: Who belongs? How is belonging regulated? And what are the consequences of expulsion? These questions illuminate the course’s concern with the U.S. government’s increasingly robust deportation machinery and its effects on communities and individuals.

The course traces the influence of criminalization, race, and deportation on membership in and exclusion from North American communities, from the English colonies through the contemporary United States, and explores the aftermath of deportation. It also considers philosophical frameworks for outlining notions of belonging in and banishment from social and political communities.

We will bring into focus the rationalization of population management through coercive technologies whereby people are identified, apprehended, and expelled and find themselves on the outside looking in and consider how social identities such as race, gender, and class shape social and legal belonging. The course takes a humanistic social scientific approach to belonging and removal, engaging ideas from anthropology, sociology, philosophy, human geography, history, and political science.