VISST-3000 seminars continue developing students' visual analysis and research skills while providing students the opportunity for in-depth study of the visual/structural artifacts associated with a particular topic, region, or movement. Students will also engage with the relevant primary/secondary literature for the specific topic/theme. Courses will pay particular attention to the larger cultural, historical, and theoretical/ideological contexts in which the visual artifacts and structures under consideration were created. This course cannot fulfill the VISST-2000 requirement.COURSE DESCRIPTIONIn this course, we will explore recent cinematic and artistic works that concern mobility, migration, refugeehood, and borders in diverse geographical contexts. We will examine films, videos, and cinematic installations that engage with (or emerge from) the experiences of postcolonial and diasporic communities, undocumented migrants, and refugees within the context of European borderlands, US-Latin American borderlands, the Middle East and Africa. With a specific focus on different forms of mobility such as labor migration, postcolonial migration, undocumented migration, and refugee im/mobilities, we will investigate the ways in which recent cinematic aesthetics can communicate the bodily, spatial and temporal dimensions of the experience of migration, displacement, and border-crossing. Moreover, we will examine how films express and contest issues of the global and the local, home and away, and the networks of power relations associated with race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality.

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