Migrancy, Home and Exile

This subject has the following teaching availabilities in 2008:

For the purposes of considering request for Reasonable Adjustments under the Disability Standards for Education (Cwth 2005), and Student Support and Engagement Policy, academic requirements for this subject are articulated in the Subject Overview, Learning Outcomes, Assessment and Generic Skills sections of this entry.

It is University policy to take all reasonable steps to minimise the impact of disability upon academic study, and reasonable adjustments will be made to enhance a student's participation in the University's programs. Students who feel their disability may impact on meeting the requirements of this subject are encouraged to discuss this matter with a Faculty Student Adviser and Student Equity and Disability Support: http://services.unimelb.edu.au/disability

The accelerated speed, frequency and commonality of the movement of people through space is an increasingly ubiquitous feature of the modern world. Consequently, migration studies has developed as an established field of enquiry, encompassing disciplines such as anthropology, development studies, geography, sociology and political science. Its key shortcoming, however, rests in its exclusion of other forms of human movement or mobility. In contrast, drawing widely on examples from within and between the developed and developing worlds, this subject considers human mobility in the fullest sense, providing an understanding of the structural and experiential differences and commonalities between different kinds of human mobility, from the forced migration of refugees to the nomadism of Gypsies to the leisure migration of 'old aged travellers' for example. In so doing, it explores a number of related questions that are simultaneously empirical, theoretical and methodological: how do people move? Where do people move to? How has human mobility been theorised, focusing on the impact it has on places and the identity-making processes that mobile people engage in. Given that most social science methodologies have been designed to study situations of its opposite, fixity, what particular approaches are required to research and write about human mobility? Finally, and centrally, the subject's objectives are political in hue. By investigating how nation states legislate and police human mobility, it seeks to offer an understanding of how mobility is experienced as a form of home or exile.

This subject is not available as a breadth subject.

• Independent research for essay preparation using a variety of media

• Exercise of critical judgement in written assignments and group discussion

Students who have completed 121-026 The Mobile World are not eligible to enrol in this subject.