NEH Syllabus Page Content

The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants, and their Homelands
A Proposal to the National Endowment of Humanities for a Summer Seminar for College Teachers
Roger Waldinger
Department of Sociology - UCLA
February 2014

Syllabus and schedule


Week 1: Perspectives and approaches
  • Days 1 and 2 (sessions from 9-12): Introductions and discussion of readings
  • Day 3: Workshop: discussion of scholars’ projects

- Stephane Dufoix, Diasporas, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, introduction, chapter 1 

- Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc‐Szanton. "Transnationalism: A new analytic framework for understanding migration."Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 645.1 (1992): 1-24.

- Sanjeev Khagram, and Peggy Levitt. "Constructing transnational studies." In L. Pries, ed. Rethinking Transnationalism: the Meso-link of Organizations. London: Routledge, 2008 

- Alejandro Portes, Luis E. Guarnizo, and Patricia Landolt. 1999. "The Study of Transnationalism: Pitfalls and Promise of an Emergent Research Field." Ethnic and Racial Studies 22(2):217-37.

- Roger Waldinger, The Cross-Border Connection: Immigrants, Emigrants, and their Homelands, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Chapter 3


Week 2: Historical perspectives

Visiting scholar: Jose Moya, Department of History, Columbia University

  • Day 1: Discussion with visiting scholar
  • Day 3: Visit to US-Mexico Border
- Jose C Moya, and Adam M. McKeown. World Migration in the Long Twentieth Century. American Historical Association, 2011.

- American Historical Review “Conversation on Transnational History,” 2006

- Mark I. Choate "Sending States’ Transnational Interventions in Politics, Culture, and Economics: The Historical Example of Italy." International Migration Review 41.3 (2007): 728-768.

- Nancy Foner “Transnationalism old and new” Chapter 3 in Foner, ed. In a new land: A comparative view of immigration, NYU Press, 2005

- Donna R. Gabaccia, “Is Everywhere Nowhere? Nomads, Nations, and the Immigrant Paradigm of United States History,” Journal of American History (1999): 1115-1134


Week 3: Communication and social ties across borders
  • Days 1 and 2: Discussion
  • Day 3: Workshop: discussion of scholars’ projects and papers

- Joanna Dreby, Divided by Borders: Mexican Migrants and their Children, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009, Chapter 3,

- Douglas Massey, et al. Return to Aztlan: The Social Process of International Migration from Western Mexico (1987).

- Valentina Mazzucato. "The double engagement: Transnationalism and integration. Ghanaian migrants’ lives between Ghana and the Netherlands." Journal of ethnic and migration studies 34.2 (2008): 199-216.

- Raelene Wilding, “Virtual” intimacies ? Families communicating across transnational contexts », Global Networks, vol.6, n°2 (2006), pp.125-142.

Optional field trip of ethnic neighborhoods in Los Angeles (on non-session day)


Week 4: Emigrant politics and emigration policy

Visiting scholar: Laurie Brand, University of Southern California

  • Day 1: Discussion with visiting scholar
  • Day 3: Visit to Colegio de la Frontera Norte
- Laurie Brand. 2006. Citizens Abroad: States and Migration in the Middle East and North Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 1; chapter on Morocco.

- David Fitzgerald. (2009). A nation of emigrants: How Mexico manages its migration. Univ of California Press, Chapter 2; conclusion

- Gamlen, Alan. "The emigration state and the modern geopolitical imagination." Political Geography 27.8 (2008): 840-856.

- Carlos Gonzalez Gutierrez, “Fostering Identities: Mexico's Relations with Its Diaspora,”
The Journal of American History, Vol. 86, No. 2, (Sep., 1999), pp. 545-567.


Week 5: Home country impacts
  • Day 1: Discussion
  • Day 3: Workshop: discussion of participants’ papers and projects
- Paolo Boccagni. "What’s in a (Migrant) House? Changing Domestic Spaces, the Negotiation of Belonging and Home-making in Ecuadorian Migration." Housing, Theory and Society ahead-of-print (2013): 1-17.

- David Fitzgerald, “Colonies of the Little Motherland,’ Chapter 4 in David Fitzgerald (2009). A nation of emigrants: How Mexico manages its migration. University of California Press

- Sarah Lopez, The Remittance Landscape, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014, chapters to be selected

 


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Published: Monday, November 10, 2014