Instructor: Dr. Sarah Bishop

Office Hours: Flexible hours Monday-Friday by appointment via Zoom

Office: NVC 7-253

Mailbox: NVC 8-240

Email: [email protected]

Required Readings are all linked from the class calendar below. You do not need to buy any books.

Student responsibility: It is the responsibility of the student to know and follow all policies in this syllabus. Please read it in full and raise any questions you might have.

Course Description: In this interactive, seminar-style course, students will investigate the intersection of communication and migration.  We will consider how first and second-hand narratives about migrants are told across academic and non-academic contexts, in news and social media, political rhetoric, fiction, and film.  Students will have opportunities to critically analyze historical and contemporary representations of migration in oral histories, museums, and memorials, but will also be called upon to theorize about instances in which migration narratives are missing, disregarded, or irrecoverable.  To guide us in these pursuits, students will learn and employ a methodology of narrative analysis.

Learning Goals: At the conclusion of this course, you should expect to possess the skills needed to:

• Apply theories of communication studies to processes of transnational migration
• Critically analyze representations of migrants in multi-platform media
• Demonstrate excellence in the methodology of narrative analysis
• Apply an intersectional lens to the interaction of migration with other facets of one’s identity and lived experience

Course Overview:

A migrant is any person who “moves away from his or her place of usual residence, whether within a country or across an international border, temporarily or permanently, and for a variety of reasons.” This class will address a few overarching questions about migration: How to media and governments talk to and about migrants? How do migrants tell their own stories? How do representations of migration shape and reflect the ways others understand the motivations for and impacts of migration?

Because migration is occurring all over the world all the time, it is impossible to study this theme in full. Instead, we’ll be using migration across the U.S./Mexico border as a case study through which to answer the questions above. Focusing on this case will mean we leave out a LOT, but I invite you in your presentations and final project to bring in examples from other instances of migration outside this context and from around the world.

This is a project-based course. We will use smaller-stakes scaffolded assignments to build toward a final narrative analysis project.

Because of this year’s extenuating circumstances, the class materials have been pared down to allow for deep engagement rather than superficial review of lengthy texts. We will watch, listen, and read a range of perspectives, some of which disagree with each other. I welcome your feedback at any point this semester, and if you ever need clarifications or support, please reach out to me via email.

A note on course materials: Instead of lengthy readings, we’ll be reading very short texts, watching films and television, looking at art, and listening to podcasts and songs. These materials were selected in an effort to acknowledge you all are probably spending more time in front of your computer screens than normal this year. I encourage you to do something else while you listen to the podcasts and other recordings—take a walk, do the dishes, doodle. You can jot down notes in a notebook or a reminders list on your phone and copy/paste them into the blog later.

We will be focusing on contemporary firsthand stories of migration that highlight personal experience rather than taking a macro-historical or policy centered approach. If you don’t have a foundational knowledge of the history of migration in the United States, you may find that this brief overview of U.S. migration policy by Walter Ewing is helpful. 

Artist Credit: The image in the header of this blog was created by artist, organizer, and activist Favianna Rodriguez.