Lecture Videos: Migration, Refugees & the Politics of Sanctuary

With an eye firmly on the contemporary debate about Sanctuary, this course examines the history and activism of movements and communities that offer protections and rights for refugees, migrants, and precarious residents. The topics covered in the seminar include settler colonialism, citizenship, climate change, policing, militarism, ethnic and religious cleansing, gender regulation, labor exploitation, media infrastructure, healthcare provision, and the role of universities as speech centers and safe havens. The course will also offer resources for practicing the politics of sanctuary. 

 

The Sanctuary Syllabus can be found at Public Books here. This course reflects the realization of the Sanctuary Syllabus through a series of lectures, interactive activities, and collaborative group projects. Participating lecturers will include as many as twenty-five well-known NYU faculty, and there will also be guest appearances from advocates and activists across related social justice movements. This page will be updated weekly with lecture videos and course readings.

All filming and editing done by Vicente Cueto, NYU Urban Democracy Lab.

Schedule:

  1. 1/24: “Sanctuary Now!”: Historical and Contemporary Movements for Sanctuary – Instructors: Alina Das (Law) and Andrew Ross (SCA)
  2. 1/31: “No War, No Borders: Why we Need Sanctuary – Instructors: Monica Kim (History), Molly Nolan (History), and Sarah Sklaw (History)
  3. 2/7: Environmental Crises and Climate Refugees – Instructors: Julie Livingston (SCA/History), Andrew Ross (SCA), and Sonya Posmentier (English)
  4. 2/14:  “No Bans on Stolen Lands: Dispossession, Migration, and Settler Colonialism- Instructors: Dean Saranillio (SCA), Liz Ellis (History), and Rachel Kuo (MCC)
  5. 2/21: “No Person is Illegal”: Constructions of Citizenship – Instructors: Cristina Beltran (SCA/Politics), Christine Harrington (Politics/Law)
  6. 2/28: “Sin DACA, Sin Miedo”: Living and Being Undocumented – Instructors: Tao Goffe (SCA) and Diana Taylor (Performance Studies)
  7. 3/28: “#MuslimBan”: Geopolitics and Everyday Life  //“No Raids, No Broken Windows”: Police Violence- Instructors: Sinan Antoon (Gallatin), Nikhil Singh, SCA/ History and Sara Pursley, Middle Eastern Studies
  8. [TBA]: “No Ban, No Wall, Healthcare for All” – Instructors: Babak Tofighi (Medical School) and Shivani Srivastav (Medical School)
  9. 4/4: “Don’t Deport My Mom”: Regulating Intimacy, Family, and Reproduction – Instructors: Crystal Parikh (English/SCA) and Cecilia Marquez (SCA)
  10. 4/11: Immigrant Justice in a Fake News World: Media as Structure, Media as Tools – Instructors: Arun Kundnani (MCC) and Yoav Halperin (MCC)
  11. 4/18: “Si Se Puede!” Migrants and Workers – Instructors: Natasha Iskandar (Wagner) and Paula Chakravartty (MCC/Gallatin)
  12. 4/25: Decolonizing the University: Dissent and the Right – Instructors: Fred Moten (Performance Studies) and Asli Igsiz (Middle Eastern Studies)
  13. 5/2: “Sanctuary is Solidarity”: Resources for Building and Practicing Sanctuary – Instructors: Gianpaolo Baiocchi (Gallatin/Sociology) and Vasuki Nesiah (Gallatin) 

Week 1: “Sanctuary Now!”: Historical and Contemporary Movements for Sanctuary


Andrew Ross, NYU Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis


Alina Das, NYU Professor of Clinical Law, Immigrant Rights Initiative

Readings:

Multimedia and Storytelling:

  • Immigrant Nation!: The Battle for the Dream, directed by Esaú Meléndez (2010).

Tools and Policies:

Week 2: “No Wars, No Borders”: Why We Need Sanctuary


Molly Nolan, NYU Professor of History


Monica Kim, NYU Assistant Professor of History


Sarah Sklaw, PhD Student, NYU Department of History

Readings:

  • Hannah Arendt, “We, Refugees,” and Edward Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile, edited by Marc Robinson (Harvest, 1996).
  • Didier Fassin, “From Right to Favor,” The Nation, April 5, 2016.
  • Anna Holian and G. Daniel Cohen, eds., “The Refugee in the Postwar World, 1945–1960,” special issue, Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 25, no. 3 (September 2012).
  • Mimi Thi Nguyen, The Gift of Freedom: War, Debt, and Other Refugee Passages (Duke University Press, 2012).

Multimedia and Storytelling:

Tools and Policies:

  • United Nations High Commission for Refugees, “Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2016” (2017).
  • Neta C. Crawford, Catherine Lutz, and Stephanie Savell, project directors, “Costs of War,” Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, Brown University (2011–2017).

Week 3: Environmental Crises and Climate Refugees


Sonya Posmentier, NYU Assistant Professor of English


Andrew Ross, NYU Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis


Julie Livingston, NYU Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History
(Video edited by Amy Pelch).

Readings:

Multimedia and Storytelling:

  • Bessie Smith, Back-Water Blues. 1927. Columbia 14195-D
  • Bessie Smith, Homeless Blues. 1927. Columbia 14260-D
  • Brown, Sterling A. “Ma Rainey.” In The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown, edited by Michael S. Harper, 62–63. Evanston, Illinois: Triquarterly Books, 1996
  • Climate Refugees, directed by Michael Nash (2010).

Tools and Policies:

Week 4:“No Bans on Stolen Lands”: Dispossession, Migration, and Settler Colonialism


Elizabeth Ellis, Assistant Professor of History (Video edited by Mark Yokoyama)


Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis

Readings:

  • Leanne Betasamosake Simpson (2016) “Indigenous Resurgence and Co-resistance.” Critical Ethnic Studies 2(2): 19-34.
  • J. Kēhaulani Kauanui and Patrick Wolfe (2012) “Settler Colonialism Then and Now.” Politica & Societa 2: 235-258
  • Philip J. Deloria (2004) “Introduction.” In Indians in Unexpected Places, 3-17. 
  • Audra Simpson (2014) “Indigenous Interruptions: Mohawk Nationhood, Citizenship, and the State” and “A Brief History of Land, Meaning, and Membership in Iroquoia and Kahnawà:ka,” Chapters 1–2 in Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States. Duke University Press.

Multimedia and Storytelling

Tools and Policies

Week 5: “No Person is Illegal:” Constructions of Citizenship

 Christine Harrington, Professor of Politics (Video edited by Amy T. Pelch)

Cristina Beltrán, Associate Professor of Politics and Social and Cultural Analysis
(Video edited by Josh Gleiser)

Required Readings:

Migrant Visions: Activism and Legislative Process

  • Olson, Joel and Luis Fernandez. “To live, love, and work anywhere you please.” Contemporary Political Theory, Vol. 10 (2011): 412-419.
  • Gonzales, Alfonso. Reform Without Justice: Latino Migrant Politics and the Homeland Security State (Oxford University Press, 2014). Chapters 1 and 6 (pp. 21-47; 152-174).

Law and the rule of immigration

  • Motomura, Hiroshi. “Immigration Law After a Century of Plenary Power: Phantom Constitutional Norms and Statutory Interpretation.” Yale Law Journal 100 (1990):545-613.
  • Reiter, Kerament, and Susan Bibler Coutin. “Crossing Borders and Criminalizing Identity: The Disintegrated Subjects of Administrative Sanctions.”  Law & Society Review 51 (2017):567-601.
  • Immigration Law Professors. “Dear President Trump.” August 14, 2017.

Recommended Readings:

  • Jean v. Nelson 472 U.S. 846 (1985) vote: 7-2
  • Beckett, Katherine, and Heather Evans. “Crimmigration at the Local Level: Criminal Justice Processes in the Shadow of Deportation.” Law & Social Inquiry 49 (2015):241-277.
  • Provine, Doris Marie, Martha Luz Rojas-Wiesner, and German Martinez Velasco. “Peripheral Matters: The Emergence of Legalized Politics in Local Struggles Over Unauthorized Immigration.” Law & Social Inquiry 39 (2014):601-620.
  • Unzueta Carrasco, Tania and Hinda Seif, “Disrupting the dream: Undocumented youth reframe citizenship and deportability through anti-deportation activism. Latino Studies (Vol. 12, no. 2, 2014): 279–299
  • Golash-Boza, Tanya. Immigration Nation: Raids, Detentions, and Deportations in Post-9/11 America (Paradigm Publishers, 2012). Chapters  1 and 2 (pp. 15-79). ​

General Recommendations:

Readings

  • Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America(Princeton University Press, 2004).
  • Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton University Press, 2008).
  • Susan Bibler Coutin, Nations of Emigrants: Shifting Boundaries of Citizenship in El Salvador and the United States (Cornell University Press, 2007).
  • Leo Chavez, The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (Stanford University Press, 2013).
  • Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review, vol. 106, no. 8 (1993).

Multimedia and Storytelling

  • Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf, 2014).
  • Jill Anderson and Nin Solis, Los Otros Dreamers (independent, 2014).

Tools and Policies

Week 6: “Sin DACA, Sin Miedo”: Living and Being Undocumented



Diana Taylor, University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies and Spanish  (Video edited by Mark Yokoyama).


Tao Leigh Goffe, Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow of Social and Cultural Analysis

Readings:

  • Roberto G. Gonzales, Lives in Limbo: Undocumented and Coming of Age in America (University of California Press, 2015).
  • Anne McNevin, “Political Belonging in a Neoliberal Era: The Struggle of the Sans-Papiers,” Citizenship Studies, vol. 10, no. 2 (2006).
  • Esther Yoona Cho, “A Double Bind–‘Model Minority’ and ‘Illegal Alien,’” Asian American Law Journal, vol. 24 (2017).
  • Denise Brennan, Life Interrupted: Trafficking into Forced Labor in the United States (Duke University Press, 2014).

Multimedia and Storytelling:

  • No Le Digas a Nadie (Don’t Tell Anyone), directed by Mikaela Shwer (2015).
  • Edwidge Danticat, Brother, I’m Dying (Vintage, 2007).

Tools and Policies:

Week 7: #MuslimBan”: Geopolitics and Everyday Life  & “No Raids, No Broken Windows”: Police Violence

Sara Pursley, Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies

Listen: Sinan Antoon (Associate Professor at NYU Gallatin), “If Death Is A Postman” (WNYC)

Listen: Nikhil Singh (Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis), “The Laundering of American Empire” (The Intercept)

Readings (#MuslimBan)

  • Malcolm X, “Letters from Abroad,” in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, edited by George Breitman (Grove, 1965).
  • Mahmood Mamdani, “Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: A Political Perspective on Culture and Terrorism,” American Anthropologist, vol. 104, no. 3 (2002).
  • Saba Mahmood, “Religion, Feminism, and Empire: The New Ambassadors of Islamophobia,” in Feminism, Sexuality, and the Return of Religion, edited by Linda Martín Alcoff and John D. Caputo (Indiana University Press, 2011).
  • Yassir Morsi, Radical Skin, Moderate Masks: De-radicalising the Muslim and Racism in Post-Racial Societies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017).
  • Moustafa Bayoumi, “Racing Religion,” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 6, no. 2 (2006).

Assigned Readings (No Raids, No Broken Windows)

Generally Recommended

  • Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Migra!: A History of the US Border Patrol (University of California Press, 2010).
  • Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
  • Nikhil Pal Singh, Race and America’s Long War (University of California Press, 2017).
  • Ruben Andersson, Illegality, Inc.: Clandestine Migration and the Business of Bordering Europe (University of California Press, 2014).
  • Jason De León, The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail (University of California Press, 2015).
  • Angel Island Poems, Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.
  • Coco Fusco, A Field Guide for Female Interrogators (Seven Stories Press, 2008).
  • Swet Shop Boys, “T5” (2016).
  • Immigrant Defense Project, “Ending ICE/Police Entanglement: From Street Encounter to Custody.”
  • National Immigration Law Center, “How ICE Uses Local Criminal Justice Systems to Funnel People into the Detention and Deportation System” (March 2014).

Multimedia and Storytelling

  • Kiana Karimi, “At JFK,” LRB blog, London Review of Books, January 29, 2017.
  • Narcy, “Phatwa” (music video).

Tools and Policies

Week 8: “Don’t Deport My Mom”: Regulating Intimacy, Family, and Reproduction

Assigned Readings

  • Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute, 1987), Chapter 1-2
  • Priscilla Huang. “Anchor Babies, Over-Breeders, and the Population Bomb: The Reemergence of Nativism and Population Control in Anti-Immigration Policies,” Harvard Law & Policy Review, vol. 2, no. 2 (2008).
  • Patricia Zavella, “Migrations,” “Migrant Family Formations,” and “The Divided Home” in I’m Neither Here Nor There: Mexicans’ Quotidian Struggles with Migration and Poverty (Duke University Press, 2011).

Generally Recommended

  • Amplify(Her) (zine).
  • Warsan Shire, “Conversations About Home (at a Deportation Center),” in Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (Flipped Eye, 2011).
  • Javier Zamora, Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon, 2017).
  • Eithne Luibhéid, Lionel Cantú, eds., Queer Migrations: Sexuality, U.S. Citizenship, and Border Crossings (University of Minnesota Press, 2005).
  • Shirley Hune and Gail M. Nomura, eds., Asian/Pacific Islander American Women: A Historical Anthology (New York University Press, 2003).
  • Miriam Ticktin, “Sexual Violence as the Language of Border Control: Where French Feminist and Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Meet,” Signs, vol. 33, no. 4 (2008).

Week 9:  Immigrant Justice in a Fake News World: Media as Structure, Media as Tools


Arun Kundnani, Visiting Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication


Yoav Halperin, PhD Candidate, Media, Culture, and Communication

Assigned Readings

  • Stuart Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media,” in Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Critical Reader, edited by Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez (SAGE, 1995).
  • Arun Kundnani, The Muslims are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (Verso, 2014).
  • Cristina Beltrán. “‘No Papers, No Fear’: DREAM Activism, New Social Media, and the Queering of Immigrant Rights,” in Contemporary Latina/o Media: Production, Circulation, Politics, edited by Arlene Dávila and Yeidy M. Rivero (NYU Press, 2014).

Generally Recommended

  • Otto Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse (University of Texas Press, 2002).
  • Karma R. Chávez, Queer Migration Politics: Activist Rhetoric and Coalitional Possibilities (University of Illinois Press, 2013).
  • Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa, “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States,” American Ethnologist, vol. 42, no. 1 (2015).
  • Rupi Kaur’s Instagram.
  • Clarion Project, Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West (2006).
  • Carl Miller et al., Brexit: The Digital Aftermath, Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, Demos.