The National and the Transnational

Some see the current nationalist turn in politics worldwide, with its crackdowns on international migration, and proposals to limit trade and slash budgets for humanitarian and development aid, as the beginning of the end of globalization. In actual fact, global flows continue to challenge long-standing assumptions about how people live and work and about how social institutions function—how and where families raise children and care for the elderly; how livelihoods are earned; the multiple communities with which people identify, and where the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and partial membership get fulfilled. As nation-states mobilize the “re-enchantment of culture” (Aihwa Ong), art and museums become increasingly important arenas in which national and transnational agendas collide or intertwine. The double movement of nationalism and globalization demands that we look closely at how nations and migration are purposely produced by state policies, institutions, and categories aimed at creating “stable” units and unstable flows. This requires a new transnational perspective on global processes.

This course aims to further the understanding of how national agendas and transnational processes co-produce new forms of governance, citizenship, social movements, health and social care, museums, and artistic practices. Such entanglements are produced by the migration of people and also by the migration and stretching of models, frameworks, structures, institutions, epistemologies, etc. across borders. Sometimes these things actually move and sometimes borders, individuals (or some segments of the population) and institutions stay in place. The course invites Ph.D. students to work with an interdisciplinary faculty to analyze cases of such entanglements. In each module, we will pay particular attention to new methods better suited to such analysis. In addition, participants will be asked to translate their findings into usable outcomes by designing their own museums, universities, or healthcare systems that concretely address the realities of transnational practices.