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79517-01 - Proseminar: Homes, Paperwork and Kinship Across Borders (3 CP)
| Semester | fall semester 2026 |
| Course frequency | Once only |
| Lecturers | Claudine Rakotomanana (claudine.rakotomanana@unibas.ch, Assessor) |
| Content | This proseminar explores how people create homes, sustain relationships, and negotiate belonging across borders in contexts shaped by social mobility regimes, unequal mobility, and bureaucratic control. Rather than approaching migration through policy or economics, the seminar focuses on the everyday: documents, houses, intimacy, obligation, and the emotional work of maintaining relationships, particularly across distance. It asks how documents become tied to intimacy, legitimacy, morality, and social recognition, and how homes themselves become spaces shaped by aspiration, uncertainty, and postcolonial histories. |
| Learning objectives | The course is organised around one central question: How do people create “home” under conditions of mobility, uncertainty, and bureaucratic regulation? This question runs throughout the seminar, connecting romance and documentation, houses and visas, care obligations and family expectations, language and belonging. The course examines how colonial histories continue to shape racialised imaginaries, intimate relationships, and aspirations for mobility, while also exploring the role of children, translation, and multilingual domestic life in the making of transnational homes. Rather than focusing primarily on how societies are organised, the seminar shifts the analytical lens toward the intimate and material dimensions of everyday life: how people attempt to make life livable through documents, houses, care, and fragile forms of stability across unequal political worlds. Thanks to its ethnographic focus, the course encourages students to connect theoretical concepts to lived realities and to think critically about how large-scale structures such as the making of home(s), colonial histories, and bureaucratic systems become embedded in everyday life. |
| Bibliography | - Leinaweaver, Jessaca B. 2008. The Circulation of Children: Kinship, Adoption, and Morality in Andean Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. - White, Hylton. 2004. "Ritual Haunts: The Timing of Estrangement in a Post-Apartheid Countryside." In Producing African Futures: Ritual and Reproduction in a Neoliberal Age, edited by Brad Weiss, 141-166. Leiden: Brill. - White, Luise. 1990. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. - Stoler, Ann Laura. "Carnal knowledge and imperial power: Race and the intimate in colonial rule." In The new imperial histories reader, pp. 177-194. Routledge, 2020. - Heller, Monica. "The commodification of language." Annual review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 101-114. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.012809.104951 - Meiu, George Paul. 2017. Ethno-erotic Economies: Sexuality, Money, and Belonging in Kenya. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. |
| Admission requirements | The number of participants is limited to 25 people. The places are assigned according to date of enrollment and subject of study. Priority will be given to the subjects listed under "modules". |
| Language of instruction | English |
| Use of digital media | No specific media used |
| Interval | Weekday | Time | Room |
|---|---|---|---|
| wöchentlich | Tuesday | 14.15-16.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
Dates
| Date | Time | Room |
|---|---|---|
| Tuesday 15.09.2026 | 14.15-16.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Tuesday 22.09.2026 | 14.15-16.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Tuesday 29.09.2026 | 14.15-16.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Tuesday 06.10.2026 | 14.15-16.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Tuesday 13.10.2026 | 14.15-16.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Tuesday 20.10.2026 | 14.15-16.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Tuesday 27.10.2026 | 14.15-16.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Tuesday 03.11.2026 | 14.15-16.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Tuesday 10.11.2026 | 14.15-16.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Tuesday 17.11.2026 | 14.15-16.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Tuesday 24.11.2026 | 14.15-16.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Tuesday 01.12.2026 | 14.15-16.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Tuesday 08.12.2026 | 14.15-16.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Tuesday 15.12.2026 | 14.15-16.00 | Ethnologie, grosser Seminarraum |
| Modules |
Module: Topics and Theories of Social Anthropology (Bachelor's degree subject: Social Anthropology) |
| Assessment format | continuous assessment |
| Assessment registration/deregistration | Reg.: course registration; dereg.: not required |
| Repeat examination | no repeat examination |
| Scale | Pass / Fail |
| Repeated registration | no repetition |
| Responsible faculty | Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, studadmin-philhist@unibas.ch |
| Offered by | Fachbereich Ethnologie |