300179 International vergleichende Gesellschaftsanalyse (Ü) (SoSe 2005)

:Internationally Comparative Social Research: Transnational Relations and International Migration#

This course is about the responses of agents, organisations and states to processes usually labelled as "globalization". We focus on international migration and its consequences, more specifically on "globalization from below", namely how geographically and socially mobile persons - their networks, groups and organizations - entertain and use social and symbolic ties within and across borders of nation-states. We thus deal with a fundamental incongruence in the contemporary world between the "world of societies" on the one hand and the "world of states" on the other hand. The mobility of people is not simply viewed as a set of uni-directional movements. Rather, the point of departure is transnational social spaces or border-crossing formations where people on the move and migrants weave networks, groups and organizations of political, cultural and economic relations. In turn, such transnational social spaces are regulated and controlled by states and international organizations. In the first part of the course we survey the growing literature on transnational communities, diasporas, social movements and transnational spaces. In the second part we turn to selected examples dealing with transnational relations within Europe and between Europe and other regions of the world. Students will form small working groups to analyse transnational relations across a range of cases.

Bibliography

Website of the Transnational Communities Programme at Oxford University: http://www.transcomm.ox.ac.uk