300653 The Transnationalized Social Question: A New Approach to Migration Studies (S) (WiSe 2020/2021)

The social question is back. Yet today’s social question is not primarily between labour and capital, as it was in the nineteenth century and throughout much of the twentieth. The contemporary social question is located at the interstices of the global South and the global North. As in the nineteenth century, political conflicts arise, constituting social inequalities as a public concern. In earlier periods, class differences dominated conflicts. While class has always been criss-crossed by manifold heterogeneities, not least of all cultural ones around ethnicity, religion, and language, it is these latter heterogeneities that have sharpened in situations of immigration and emigration over recent decades. The social question has been both ameliorated and reproduced by social protection, and finds its expression in movements of people seeking a better life or fleeing unsustainable social, political, economic, and ecological conditions. It is transnationalized because migrants and their significant others entertain ties across the borders of national states in transnational social spaces, and because of the cross-border diffusion of meta-scripts such as market liberalism and human rights, but also populism, securitization and diaspora. Cross-border migration has become an issue of social inequalities in fields important to socio-economic opportunities in the emigration, transit, and immigration states—a transnationalization of national states.
Casting a wide net in terms of conceptual and empirical scope, this seminar tackles both the social structure and the politics of social inequalities. It sets a comprehensive agenda for research which also includes socio-ecological issues and the public role of social scientists in dealing with the transnationalized social question.

Bibliography

Required Reading:
Thomas Faist, 2019: The Transnationalized Social Question: Migration and the Politics of Social Inequalities in the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press.