Migrant Women’s Political Activism: Global Perspectives
Still from short film, “My shadow is a word writing itself across time,” which examines histories of aggression in the abandoned site of Manzanar, California, one of many sites of Japanese immigrant incarceration in the US, Film by Gazelle Samizay and Sahar Muradi.
This engaged learning course examines the tools, ideas, and practices of migrant women-led political activism both historically and in the present day. We begin with the question of what insights do we gain when we foreground human mobility (i.e. migration) and gender in our understandings of political and social change? We look at the ways in which migrant women throughout the world have organized and mobilized around a range of causes and ideas, from political inclusion to decolonization to racial justice to reproductive freedom, among many others. Their experiences are a window into different ideas of what counts as a social movement, solidarity, intersectionality, and justice. Through examining the writings of migrant women activists alongside texts and media in anthropology, history, and cultural theory, we ask what such efforts can teach us about migrant women's roles in long-standing struggles for human flourishing and equality. Throughout the semester, we will be joined by guest lecturers who will discuss their own creative work, activism, and how art meets the political.
We ask how migrant women respond to conditions of economic, political, and cultural precarity during the migration journey through different modes of resistance and refusal. We will look at how political participation gets shaped by different national, regional, and local political agendas and policies, and how such forms of politics reshape regimes of border control. Drawing from anthropology, history, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, cultural theory, and migration studies, we will think about gender and human mobility together in order to reveal how women are resisting, refusing, and recreating politics, society, and culture. Through focusing on trajectories of activism that are non-linear (such as transnational feminism), we also ask how political solidarities and projects form across national boundaries. By privileging the voices of women from the global South who have experienced different aspects of migration, from the refugee camp, to the detention center, to resettlement, to citizenship (broadly defined), students will develop an introductory understanding of how gender and political recognition intersect to produce specific ideals around social justice that are emerging in the wake of the human fallout of racial capitalism, neoimperial wars, and protracted global conflict. Other questions this course examines include: What does it mean to address social injustice in the aftermath of displacement, migration, resettlement, and ongoing material and political uncertainty? How do migrant women and the communities to which they are attached, create a sense of place in situations of political transition, material precarity, and cultural marginalization? How do the enduring legacies of settler colonialism and imperialism impact what equality, justice, and community well-being look like for migrant communities today? What are the possibilities and limitations of political dissent, resistance, refusal, rejection, and disruption in building new liberatory imaginaries and futures.