2014-15 Pomona College Catalog 
    
    Dec 23, 2024  
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ANTH 140 PO - Love, Labor and Law Across Borders

CrsNo ANTH140 PO

When Offered: Offered alternate years; next offered fall 2015.
Instructor(s): P. Mahdavi

Over the past quarter century, women and men have migrated across borders to engage in different forms of intimate labor. They have done so formally and informally, as spouses, domestic workers and sex workers. This seminar invites students to question received categories for classifying and understanding these forms of migration by examining them as types of intimate labor that fundamentally reshape constructions of family, citizenship, labor, gender and sexuality across borders. The framework of intimate labor requires one to rethink scholarly, policy and activist formulations of migration and the phenomenon of ‘human trafficking’ premised on artificial distinctions between forced and voluntary movement, formal and informal migration and labor, and legitimate and illegitimate statuses in host and receiving countries. The course will look at readings in various transnational contexts to question ways in which intimate labor is being reconfigured through gendered migration practices and policies. The seminar will primarily look at these issues through an anthropological lens, but we will engage other disciplines such as economics, sociology and politics to enhance our understandings of convergences across modes of intimate labor and reduce gaps between policy and lived experience.



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