Courses

Courses:
HIST 215/SOC 230 (Marcelo Borges; Italy and Global Migrations)
Migration Anxieties and the Cinema of Italy (Nicoletta Marini-Maio)
HIST215/ SOCI 240 or 340 (depending on students’ previous coursework)
HIST/ITAL/SOC 500 Independent Research/Study

Course Descriptions:
HIST 215/SOC 230 Borges and Rose Italy and Global Migrations

This class studies Italy’s recent history of immigration in the context of Italy’s place in the global migrations of the last century. It looks at Italy’s history as a country of emigration and its legacy; the changes from emigration to immigration; the reception of immigrants in diverse settings; the cultural, political, and legal debates; the diversity of immigrant experiences and trajectories; the contested meaning of citizenship; and the historical construction of the idea of borders and border-crossing in Italy, Europe, and the larger Mediterranean space in historical perspective.

HIST 215/SOCI 240 or 340 depending on students’ previous coursework Qualitative Research Methods will introduce students to ethnographic research methods, interviewing, oral history, mapping, demographic, and archival research. Students will be actively engaged in all phases of the research process from research design to data collection, analysis, and presentation. Fulfills qualitative research methods requirement in anthropology and socicology.

ITAL/FLST 310 Migration Anxieties and the Cinema of Italy Marini-Maio
In the late 19th century and part of the 20th century, Italy was a nation of emigration to the Americas and Northern Europe and of internal immigration from the rural South to the industrial North. Since the 1990s, because of geopolitical and economic circumstances, Italy has increasingly become a destination country for thousands of immigrants from around the world, in particular from the former Communist bloc and the global south. This massive phenomenon transformed the demographics of Italy and mainstream media coverage of it triggered anxieties across the nation with regard to geopolitical borders, socioeconomic changes, cultural and gendered identities, racialized bodies, and ideas of otherness. The cinema has intercepted these anxieties representing both the sense of displacement of the migrant populations and the feeling of destabilization perceived in the host country…To what extent is Italian society reconfiguring the boundaries of italianità (italianness) and resisting the fluidity of transnational mobility? Why has Mediterranean migration come to represent internal and external migration par excellence and what unresolved tensions emerge from the iconic representation of it? Are migrants depicted as passive, racialized bodies, thus following a stereotypical narrative of victimization (Bergfelder 2005)? Or, are they granted the status of subjects, who reflect critically on racism and economic oppression (Parati 2005)? Taught in English with alternate meeting time for Italian.

HIST/FILM/ITAL/SOC 500 Independent Research/Study 500 level time The first 4-5 weeks will take place on campus, and then the Mosaic research team will fly to Bologna to begin the three-week research trip to Italy. We then will return to campus to process and analyze our research data during the last 5-6 weeks of class. Students may be able to receive credit in other departments (Africana Studies, Anthropology, International Studies, Middle East Studies, Women and Gender Studies) depending on their projects and in consultation with their advisor. There will be a program fee.