What happens to your identity when you are displaced? How do migrants use literature, film, art, and culture to gain insights into their lives and create themselves anew? This cluster invites students to understand immigration through the larger processes that structure people’s lives, like state-making, laws and the economy, politics, history and memory, wars, and climate change. Courses explore how artistic production can influence social change, how people write and film to document immigration for themselves and their communities, how diasporas are transforming our world, and the cultural processes through which territories are made into homelands. Drawing on a variety of disciplines and diasporic Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latinx cultures, students in this cluster will learn about immigrant communities in the United States and Europe, and their connections to other parts of the world. They will be poised to understand the often insurmountable barriers that migrants navigate in a challenging, globalized, and hostile world and also to challenge the forces through which that world came to be and persist.
This cluster will be offered throughout 2025-27.
