My Teaching

Refugees: Seeking Protection in a World of Nation-States

In the aftermath of World War II, Hannah Arendt wrote, "refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their people." The laws designed to protect them saw their plight as exceptional and temporary. Today, over 120 million refugees, internally displaced, and stateless persons seek refuge, the most ever recorded. The predicament of so many forced migrants has brought renewed scholarly attention to the age-old but enduring figure of the refugee. Giorgio Agamben wrote that the refugee, "formerly regarded as a marginal figure, has become now the decisive factor of the modern nation-state by breaking the nexus between human being and citizen." Indeed, the contemporary refugee is a liminal figure whose very being gives substance to theoretical musings on the spaces of the nation-state and the supranational, while presenting a challenge to human rights. To be sure, transnational laws are in place to protect individuals who flee their home countries, but the nation-state remains the primary site of refuge. Only if a nation-state recognizes them, may refugees attain some protection.

This course employs an analytical lens to introduce students to the enduring figure of the refugee and considers what the refugee crisis means about our modern world and what it says about our common humanity. The question the course investigates is: Why must we live in a world of refugees?

The Anthropology of Law

Drawing from classical and contemporary studies in the anthropology of law, this course explores the meaning of law in societies near and far, how it is created, asserts power, and is enforced in diverse societies on different societal scales, both inside and outside of formal juridical institutions. We will consider anthropology's contribution to better understanding foundational legal questions related to themes such as liberalism, sovereignty, personhood and status, property, crime and punishment, and human rights, while inquiring into law's role in social control and its potential for transforming societies. In so doing, we consider the role of anthropology in helping us to make sense of modern ideas around law — as a tool for justice and a means towards peace, a vehicle providing structure and meaning to life, and a means for social control and even violence. This course is situated along three axes of anthropological approaches to the study of law:

1. early debates about the object of law, both near and far;
2. analyses of juridical domains and their effects; and finally;
3. contemporary engagements with the capaciousness of law in a connected, contested, globalized, and networked world.

As we encounter the scholars and scholarship of this sub-discipline, the Anthropology of Law, we consider an over-arching and persistent disciplinary question: Does Anthropology matter to the study of Law?

Human Rights Law in Culture and Practice

Since the end of WWII, human rights have been the "idea of our time," the one idea that people in most every part of the world can be said to have accepted. Yet, human rights have not been fully realized; indeed, atrocities continue in every corner of the globe. In this course, students explore this seeming puzzle: Why do human rights violations persist, when so many people, groups, nations, and countries have assented to these principles? This course explores this question by situating the concept of human rights within ideological, historical, and political conjunctures.

Through a variety of readings, students investigate key human rights issues with the aim of gaining a deeper understanding of their meanings and how they take shape in practice. Through an examination of the philosophical and theoretical foundations of human rights, students develop a critical understanding of the historical conditions that have shaped human rights principles, treaties, and rhetoric over the years. Student then examine some of the key institutions that make up the international human rights system. Then, through case studies, students analyze the myriad complexities, interests, and contradictions that lie beneath human rights ideals and the atrocities that persist.

Ethnographies of/as Justice

The reading of ethnographic texts, like the writing of such works, is itself a disciplined practice or even an art. While most scholarly disciplines distinguish their contribution to knowledge production through scientific method and hypothesis testing, around a hundred years ago, some anthropologists added to these methods with a different kind of contribution, a qualitative method centered on cultural interpretation through storytelling. Building on that initiative, contemporary ethnographers trace struggles for justice, document setbacks in movements for rights, narrate hopes and strategies of activists, and reveal the scope of conceivable claimants and interests. Ethnographies of justice, moreover, call attention to the limits of liberal values upon which movements for justice rest and shed light on wider debates about the kind of world we live in, create, or aspire to. By centering the innovative approaches of recent monographs, the course asks how ethnographic writing enriches studies but also advances movements for justice themselves.