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This module explores the relationship between mobility, freedom and racialisation – between movement and the racial ordering of space, populations, and markets. We begin the module by engaging with some broad theoretical and historical questions: what is the relationship between movement, freedom and ‘race’? How can we understand histories of modernity through the lens of mobility? We will discuss the colonial management of mobilities, capitalist development as the setting of things in motion, and nationalism as a cultural force of territorialisation and enclosure.

In the middle block of sessions, we examine some key issues, dynamics and debates that define the contemporary politics of migration and bordering. We focus here on the entanglement of development/aid with bordering; the politics of anti-trafficking and modern slavery; the proliferation of detention camps and deportation power in recent decades; and finally, the development of digital borders in contemporary migration regimes.

The module concludes with two sessions on futures, reflecting critically on both the moves towards greater closure in the context of climate breakdown, as well as the utopian, collectivist and planetary possibilities of a world without borders.

Movement, bordering, race-making will encourage students to think critically about ‘race’ and racialisation; statecraft; capitalism and modernity; citizenship and sovereignty; nationalism and nativism; freedom and unfreedom; and climate change and the future. We will draw on literature from several disciplines – including anthropology, social and political science, history, geography, law, and philosophy – applying theory to a range of empirical contexts. Emphasis will also be placed on the social and political movements working to resist contemporary forms of bordering and closure.