Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement, and Education
Student artwork on migration
In response to the unprecedented acceleration of forced migration throughout the world due to war, persecution, poverty, and climate change, Bard (Annandale and Berlin), Bennington, Sarah Lawrence, and Vassar colleges joined forces in early 2016 to found the Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education (CFMDE). While governments, NGOs, religious relief agencies, and tech innovators across the globe have devised an array of specific—and sometimes conflicting—responses to forced migration, we came together because we believe that institutions of higher learning can and must have a different, but equally vital, focus. Given the unresolved (and interrelated) challenges of climate change, global inequality, technological innovation, and war, forced migration will continue to increase and its implications, we believe, will dominate global politics as well as domestic debates for decades to come. As institutions of higher learning we are uniquely positioned to drawn on our robust local, national, and international educational and cultural networks to prepare our students for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of forced migration and displacement. Indeed, the coming era of human movement will, without doubt, challenge our existing national and global institutions, and our students must be able to respond to these challenges with intelligence, compassion, and ingenuity.
The CFMDE is dedicated to creating an innovative and shared migration studies curriculum. Our consortium uses the terms “forced migration” and “displacement” in the broadly inclusive sense to capture the range of people compelled to leave their homes. It is not limited to legal categories that privilege a particular “objective” determination of legitimate reasons to flee. Rather, it is deliberately intended to enable challenges to the legal or objective definitions and to rethink established categories. This intellectual work will go hand‐in‐hand with our efforts, as a consortium, to forge new relationships and asymmetrical co‐operations both within our own communities and around the world, and to develop our consortium’s public identity in order to attract new connections and share the ideas and practices we will develop as our initiative matures.
We came together because we believe that our students, given the scope of global forced migration, need opportunities to engage with this pressing global challenge during, not just after, their undergraduate education. Early exposure to refugee knowledges helps students develop as well‐educated, engaged leaders primed to pursue graduate studies or professional careers in the field. It is also crucial that these future leaders develop an historically informed and geographically comprehensive understanding of migration. Being able to draw on migrant knowledges and understand the historical conditions and current connections between migration taking place in different parts of the globe will allow students to respond to migration’s challenges in a truly innovative, forward‐looking manner instead of falling back on the standard assumptions and policies of their own national context.
Students in Prof. Hanan Toukan's "Postcolonial Politics: The Middle East and Beyond" course in a workshop and intervention led by the artist Hagar Ophir and occasioned by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay's exhibition "Errata."
CFMDE at Bard College Berlin
As a result of CFMDE funding, Bard College Berlin will be able to enhance its innovative curriculum in migration studies in a number of key ways. We are: bringing in faculty expertise on the Middle East and North Africa region in addition to developing new and expanding on-going courses on migration more widely; helping students across consortium campuses connect with each other in their classes and develop sound-related research and activism projects in a new transnational classroom and media lab; and creating a roster of events bringing students and the wider BCB community into contact with relevant experts, NGOs and community groups, artists and newcomer communities. These changes will enhance the consortium as a whole since Bard College Berlin serves as a key study-abroad site for CFMDE students, who can participate in a new semester study track called "Migration Perspectives."
Courses
Courses including the following were developed as part of this grant:
Europe’s “Others”: Race, Racialization and the Visual Politics of Representation
Europe’s “Others”: Race, Racialization and the Visual Politics of Representation
Following from Walter D. Mignolo’s proposition in “The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options ” that western civilization is a complex colonial matrix of power, class and race that has been created and controlled by men and institutions from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, this course examines this darker side’s historical and contemporary visual relationship to the varied religious, ethnic and racial minorities and migrants living in it’s midst. Specifically, it contextualizes various visual material produced about Europe’s “Others” and the public and scholarly discourses it propagates, within wider debates and scholarship on the construction of racialized subjectivities and the distribution of power. This advanced module places particular emphasis on visual theory, decolonization theory, critical race theory, gender theory and postcolonial studies to study issues of image making, circulation, translation and reception, in a global context and transnational frame. Key areas of focus include the aesthetics and politics of states and security, violence and memory, anti-Black racism, Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.
While postcolonial scholars have had enduring impact on disciplines such as anthropology, history, art history and comparative literature, their influence on the study of the political systems and political thought from and about the “Global South,” or the non-western world, has been less impactful. This opposition to postcolonialism as a theoretical and conceptual lens in the study of Comparative Politics is related to the endurance of Eurocentric perspectives on the Global South and the impact of their colonial histories. Dominant theories of democracy, revolutions, displacement, humanitarianism and civil wars, for instance, continue to be trapped in orientalist frameworks of analysis. Against this backdrop, this course has two central aims. The first is to encourage students to question the epistemological foundations of the study of postcolonial societies and politics so they learn to critically question the context in which the scholarly body of knowledge about non-western history, politics and society has been constructed and produced. The second aim of the course is to contextualize such theories by focusing on the region known as the “Middle East” with some cross-reference to various countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America in order to uncover the relationship between the political and the postcolonial. The course will run thematically and cover topics such as colonialism and decolonization, the authoritarian state, nationalism(s), the politics of gender and sexuality, the politics of culture, military states, development and humanitarian aid, oil, the “global war on terror”, wars, displacement and revolutions.
As one of the most important features of today's globalized world, migration remains highly debated on local, national, and international levels. Migration is assigned various meanings and statuses (high-skilled and low-skilled, legal and illegal, documented and undocumented, forced and voluntary, restricted and unrestricted), which are, in turn, contested in multiple ways through grassroots activism, academic and artistic interventions, as well as the work of local and international NGOs. Today, migration affects everyone regardless of their own migratory status, and many contemporary societies – especially but not exclusively their urban centers – have been described as pluralist, post-migrant, or super-diverse. The course critically explores the history of migration from global and local perspectives, emphasizing the uneven geopolitical developments that produce specific forms of mobility. The selected readings will help students examine diverse social experiences of migration, as well as a range of concepts such as belonging, border, movement, mobility, citizenship, and hospitality. Students will familiarize themselves with the UN refugee system, regional and national policies and procedures regarding migration, as well as the challenges and opportunities that emerge from them. By the end of the semester, students will have gained insight into histories of migration, migration regimes, and migrants’ cultural production. Designed by scholars and educators from across the Bard network, the course aims at advancing students’ understanding of migration both in the specific local contexts in which they study, as well as from an international perspective. Through a series of joint assignments, students will have a unique opportunity to engage with their peers and professors from other campuses.
History and Memory: Forced Migration from Nineteenth to Twenty-First-Century Germany
History and Memory: Forced Migration from Nineteenth to Twenty-First-Century Germany
This course is an introduction to the history of forced migration in Germany from WWI to the present day, in the light of recent experiences in Germany related to the ordeals and the designation of those who seek “refugee” status. The course proceeds from the fundamental assumption that the category of the “refugee” is a social construction, negotiated every day under specific conditions of power and hierarchy and tied closely to the memories of those who take part in this negotiation. Germany’s history has always been permeated by violent movements of forced migration. Memories of escape and expulsion have left deep marks in the culture of the country. We will acquire the historical knowledge and methodology needed to understand some of the conditions of these negotiation processes throughout the 20th century until today, and we will then seek, analyse and interpret the memory traces in German and non-German literature. Most importantly, our inquiry will be steered by the questions that the experiences of contemporary “refugeedom” in Germany impose on us. The class will include non-enrolled students and host guests with a personal background of forced migration. We will also make excursions to places where cultural memory is “institutionalized” to a greater or lesser degree.
How is it possible to narrate the experiences of estrangement, disorientation and surprise born out of the encounter with a foreign place which is also supposed to feel like "home"? How does life go when you look or sound different to the majority of people in that space? And what kind of voice, what kind of form, can make this experience visible? We look at three journeys taken by narrators who are connected to the imperial space they wander in: voices created by Jean Rhys, of Welsh, Scottish and Creole descent, born on the Caribbean island of Dominica and later resident in London, Paris, and Vienna; Sam Selvon, an Indian West-Indian writer born in Trinidad who also later lived in London, and finally the Nigerian-American author Teju Cole, who has become one of the major contemporary laureates of the city of New York. In considering the following works Jean Rhys's Voyage in the Dark (1934), Quartet (1928), Sam Selvon's The Lonely Londoners (1956) Teju Cole's Open City (2011), we also look at how the narration of exile becomes an exposure of the dreams, projections, and delusions of the imperial "center" and its ordering of the world.
Introduction to Comparative Politics of the Middle East
Introduction to Comparative Politics of the Middle East
This course offers students the opportunity to engage with and think about some of the most pertinent questions and fundamental debates in the study of the politics and societies of the modern Middle East. The course has two central aims. The first is to encourage students to question the epistemological foundations of the study of the region so they learn to critically question the context in which the scholarly body of knowledge about it has been constructed and produced. The second aim of the course is to contextualize the region’s modern history and politics within wider scholarly debates in comparative politics, international politics and area studies. The course is thematic rather than chronological and will cover weekly topics such as colonialism and decolonization, the authoritarian state, nationalism(s) and other ideologies, the politics of gender and sexuality and the politics of culture, the military, oil wars, states of security and the “global war on terror”, migration and displacement, revolutions, uprisings and mass mobilizations. Countries studied will include Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Palestine/Israel, Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and the Gulf States.