This course addresses how human mobility across borders
and state policies of immigration control, shape, and change
intimate relations and family formations. In other words, it
asks how states make and unmake families through their
migration policies. It accordingly focuses on the
institution of marriage and processes of reproduction
(including having and caring for children), and questions
who 'deserves' to have a ‘right to family’ by examining
different country-specific cases of family reunification and
family separation. Issues to be discussed include:
governance of migrant reproduction, dynamics of mixed-
immigration-status families, challenges faced by
transnational families and their shifting care regimes, the
place of different kinds of children (left-behind,
unaccompanied and adoptee) in migration policy-making.
In tackling all these issues, the course aims to provide an
understanding of how migration and related state
responses disrupt, reinforce or rearrange gendered norms
of family-making.
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