Border Securities and the Humanities
FAIN: AC-50195-14
University of Texas, El Paso (El Paso, TX 79968-8900)
Sandra Ivanna Garabano (Project Director: July 2013 to May 2016)
A two-year program of curriculum enhancement using personal narratives, folktales, fiction, and scholarship to develop faculty perspectives on border security
Enhancing the Curriculum in Two Master of Art Programs is a Fellows Program that aims to increase the impact of the humanities in the conversation about border security. While border security has been at the center of public debates and has received the attention of scholarship in the social sciences, there is ample body of work on cultural understanding, language proficiency and the appreciation of different cultures that might deepen the conversation. This project proposes to study the experience of living and crossing the US. Mexico border as portrayed in fiction, personal narratives, folktales and anecdotes to contribute a renewed perspective on security that has been absent from national media and political discourses. Engaging the humanities in topics such as border security will probe the scope and reach of its various disciplines in addressing the contemporary problems of an increasingly interconnected world. The Program will begin January 1, 2014 and end December 31, 2014.
Associated Products
Communication in the U.S.-Mexico Border Politics of Border Security and Popular Cultures and Mass Media (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Communication in the U.S.-Mexico Border Politics of Border Security and Popular Cultures and Mass Media
Author: Barrera Eduardo
Abstract: This course will analyze the different theories and approaches that have been used to understand and explain popular culture and mass media in the U.S.-México border. We will analyze how the policies behind border security have evolved and how they impact and circulate in popular culture and mass media.
The course will start with an overview of the theoretical perspectives of the U.S,-México border. This will followed up by a section dealing with various conceptualizations of border identities and theoretical approaches to otherness. The third section will analyze the media systems in the area and the role of violence and development of security policies and their implementation.
Year: 1915
Audience: Graduate
Mapping the Line: Cultural Representations of Borderlands Security (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Mapping the Line: Cultural Representations of Borderlands Security
Author: Robert Gunn
Abstract: This course offers a long survey of cultural representations of the multiethnic geographical region understood now as the U.S./Mexico borderlands. How did the modern apparatus of the U.S./Mexico border come to be? What are the cultural practices, social understandings, and forms of economic traffic that both contribute to its enactment of national division and difference, and are in turn regulated by its legal enforcement of political inclusion and exclusion? And how might we fashion a critical dialogue that best negotiates enduring problems of democracy and difference, freedom and security, and regional autonomy within a transnational and multiethnic space that yet belongs to an increasingly integrated and borderless world? Examining historical clusters of texts that intersected public and private realms from the early 17th Century to the 21st Century, students will gain insight into these matters by investigating the multiple practices of social definition and political enforcement, national myth-making, and cultural boundary inscription that have contributed collectively to the construction of borderlands discourse over time. Guiding and informing this endeavor will be the development of an intellectual repertoire of critical methods through close engagement with a host of theoretical texts preponderantly from beyond the strict purview of literary and cultural studies as such, but which promise to foster sophisticated understandings of the traffic between varieties of cultural and political representation, including epic poetry, literary fiction, oral storytelling, government documents and treaties, travel narratives, diaries, letters, visual art, and film.
Year: 1915
Audience: Graduate
Discourses of Displacement: Citizenship, Sovereignty and Dissolution (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Discourses of Displacement: Citizenship, Sovereignty and Dissolution
Author: Lowry Martin
Abstract: Despite the contemporary narrative of globalization that pushes us to believe that we are moving towards a world citizenship that transcends regional and national loyalties, the paradox is that contemporary globalization has generated a proliferation of borders that impacts migratory movements, guides capitalist investment, and influences political life. Borderlands, whether historic or contemporary, have relied on various forms of legal logic to underpin their existence. This course looks at the laws, assumptions, and consequences of legal rulings in creating borders, classes and citizens. First, “Discourses of Displacement” will explore the idea of “borders” as a method that will allow us to explore new perspectives on the process of nation-building. We will question how the idea of borders invites us to reassess political concepts of citizenship, sovereignty, and the function of law as an equitable social mechanism. Lastly, we will simultaneously explore representations in literature and film of borders challenge us to reexamine our ideas about justice, citizenship, and the precariousness of national identity
Year: 2015
Audience: Graduate
Fronteras y Seguridad Humana: narrativas sobre migración y violencia (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Fronteras y Seguridad Humana: narrativas sobre migración y violencia
Author: Maria Socorro Tabuenca
Abstract: En este curso se hará un análisis multidisciplinario de diversas narrativas de frontera, o de las zonas fronterizas (gente, cultura, etc.) entre México y Estados Unidos principalmente. En este curso se cubrirán ensayos de diversas disciplinas como historia, sociología, antropología, cultura, cine y literatura. En particular se estudiarán textos literarios y fílmicos en la producción de los siglos XX y XXI y el apoyo crítico contextual se dará a través de artículos o libros de las disciplinas mencionadas. Las actividades de la clase incluyen conferencias por parte de la profesora, presentaciones y discusiones de los estudiantes sobre las lecturas asignadas, “response papers” sobre algunas lecturas, proyectos individuales y en grupo, historias de vida, conferencias con investigadores expertos en la región, y presentaciones de películas dentro y fuera de clase.
Year: 2015
Audience: Graduate
Border crossings: Humanizing the History of the US-Mexico Border, 1880-2000 (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Border crossings: Humanizing the History of the US-Mexico Border, 1880-2000
Author: Yolanda Leiva
Abstract: This graduate course explores the on-going creation of the US-Mexico border as well as the diverse ways in which migrants have negotiated crossing the US-Mexico border from the 1880s through the end of the 20th century. The dividing line was created following the US-Mexico War and the signing of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. As border scholars have argued, however, border making does not end with the creation of a border line. During the time period covered by this class, the border shifted from a relatively open border to one increasingly surveilled and controlled. Immigration laws such as the 1917 Immigration Act, the 1924 creation of the Border Patrol, and the implementation of operations such as Operation Hold the Line in 1993 and Operation Gatekeeper in 1994 hardened the borderline. Yet, unequal economic developments, US federal policies, as well as political and social instability have continued to motivate on-going movement across the border. The border and border crossers remain controversial today as they have for over a century.
The course will combine historical analysis of the border with personal accounts, bringing a human face to this history.
Year: 2015
Audience: Graduate
Blood and Belonging: The Ethics of Membership and the Politics of Security Along the U.S.-Mexico Border (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: Blood and Belonging: The Ethics of Membership and the Politics of Security Along the U.S.-Mexico Border
Author: Ignacio Martinez
Abstract: This course will analyze the juncture between the historical and political evolution of the border and personal narrative in order to decipher the ways in which the rhetoric of belonging and border security intersect. This class advances the belief that in order to understand the policies behind border security we must utilize both a micro and macro approach, while looking at changes in policy over time and space.
In order to provide the broadest possible perspective, therefore, this class will start with an inquiry into the global idea of security, its meaning and utility, and of the ethics of membership (i.e. policies of inclusion and exclusion).
Year: 2015
Audience: Graduate
The Children’s Story Hour: Narratives by and about Unaccompanied Children Crossing Borders in to U.S. (Course or Curricular Material)
Title: The Children’s Story Hour: Narratives by and about Unaccompanied Children Crossing Borders in to U.S.
Author: Kirsten Nigro
Abstract: The recent influx of unaccompanied children from Central America crossing into the United States illegally has shone a spotlight on a phenomenon that has a decades’, if not centuries’ long history.This course proposes to listen more carefully to the narratives told by and about immigrant children, in a variety of “textualities”: literature, drama, film, legal documents, human rights reports and charters, blog postings, transcripts of political debates, TV news clips. Whether framed as humanitarian, immigration or security crises, the stories of these children cross interdisciplinary borders for graduate-level research in border/national security and the humanities.
Year: 2015
Audience: Graduate