Socio-cultural anthropology and gender studies have been involved in an interesting and productive conversation for the last five decades: both are areas of enquiry grounded in a “passion for difference” (as Henrietta Moore puts it), which analyse and highlight the difference that cultural differences make to our experience of social life and the world. In both, there is also a subtle link between analytical practice and empirical questions, which has led to a high degree of reflexivity. By drawing on the discipline’s critical engagement with the question of our gendered lives and relationships and the nuanced insights of ethnographic and comparative investigations, this course will provide students with ways to interrogate and critically situate historical and contemporary issues in the process of migration. We will explore how the framing of difference and diversity, as through tropes and uses of culture and ideas of gender, influences and structures gender ideologies and social relations in the context of the global flows of people within and between modern states. First, we will review key concepts and theoretical developments in gender and migration studies. Then, as we read a mix of classical texts and contemporary ethnographies on migration and its gendered process, we will locate the salience of the contributions of an anthropological perspective to these interdisciplinary fields of studies.

We will ask fundamental questions such as: Why does gender matter in the studies of social life? How does gender influence the migration experience, and in turn, how does migration affect gender relations? How do migrants of various circumstances negotiate their social and gendered relations in the way they position themselves just as they are positioned in certain regulatory regimes, different cultural settings, and contexts of migration? How may such relationships change in those migration processes? What insights from feminist and anthropological studies across the world put to the test our ways of studying and understanding difference and the diverse experiences of migration? This course will thus encourage students to situate cultural variations and contextualise the relationships that emerge from the politically and economically differentiated migration experiences. Finally, by using anthropological concepts and tools of enquiry, students should be able to critically engage in current debates on our diverse gendered and migratory lives and questions on the drivers of inequalities and conditions for social change surrounding gender relations and migration.