Network Collaborative Course
Cross Reference: Course,Education,Network Collaborative Course
Research Creation on Forced Migration
This course explores the way research-based art-making generates new kinds of knowledge about migration and displacement as urgent global challenges. Building on a Research-Creation approach to teaching migration history in dialogue with the visual arts, students will develop individual or collaborative open-media artistic projects relating to the discourses of the “modern refugee” and their impacts on the lives of forced migrants. Thematically, the course revolves around the dilemma of finding humanitarian responses to forced migration: On the one hand, there are nation-states and the international community seeking to mitigate, to alleviate, to control and to hedge, even to “solve” the humanitarian, social and civic consequences of forced migration. On the other hand, these institutions never intended to address the political causes that produce forced migration. Not getting at the roots of the underlying political and social problems, the institutions failed to keep the promise that every displaced, stateless person would eventually get on a road to state-citizenship, through integration, repatriation or resettlement. And still, a world without the Geneva Refugee Convention, the UN agencies, and national Asylum and refugee laws,would be a place even more hostile, even more dangerous and deadly for the forcibly displaced than the world that we live in now. The research dimension of the course will address this dilemma with readings, lectures and discussion sessions from a European perspective, in close exchange with a parallel course taught at the Universidad de los Andes, that approaches these questions from a Latin-American perspective. Guest lectures from the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research/South Africa will add an African perspective, as much as new thinking about migration and mobility. In the creation dimension of the course, research-based artistic projects will be produced that will be presented in a public (online) exhibition at the end of the semester.Cross Reference: Course,Education,Network Collaborative Course