Course Catalogue

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"Smart solutions", "artificial intelligence", and "digital innovation" are buzzwords of contemporary border and migration control and politics. In this course, we trace the role of communication and technology in how borders are constituted, normalised, and resisted. Engaging with theories from media and communication studies, science and technology studies, as well as critical border studies, the course offers students the tools to explain, evaluate and critique how migration regimes are increasingly cast as information systems. We will explore how communication and technology structure violent border regimes, emerge from historical structures of racial capitalism, and are resisted through abolitionist thinking. As a challenge-led course, Migration, Technology and Communication offers students relevant skills, methods and theories to evaluate and assess new media technological developments and contemporary trends global migration governance.

10 x 2hr seminars over 10 weeks as scheduled on MyCampus

Standard entry to Masters at College level.

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None.

The standard assessments for this course are: 

■ Portfolio - 50% 

■ Essay - 50% 

If required, for instance where a disability prevents a student from undertaking a specific method of assessment, the following alternatives are available: 

■ There are no alternatives to the assessments, but flexible deadlines can be offered as reasonable adjustment (Students should follow the usual process for extensions). 

Further reasonable adjustments may be provided where necessary. Students are encouraged to consult with the course convenor.  

This course aims to: 

■ offer PGT students critical tools to engage with two contemporary trends and challenges: the wide-scale digitalisation of social life and state governance as well as the increasing concern with and tightening of migration and borders.

■ equip students with relevant skills of understanding, critiquing and envisioning technological systems and public communications in contexts of migration

■ familiarise students with justice- and liberation-oriented ethical frameworks to understand intersections of borders, technologies, and communication

By the end of this course students will be able to:

■ Identify and critically explain roles of media, communication, and technologies in migration and border regimes

■ Demonstrate and critique how media, communications and technology affect structures and agencies within unequal power dynamics

■ Demonstrate interdisciplinary theoretical, empirical, and methodical understanding of how historically unjust migration regimes are shaped through media, technology and communications

■ Apply knowledge and methods to real-world cases by identifying relevant information for critical investigation of concrete cases