This course is one of the Global Engineering Humanities SDG Course Series that aims to offer engineering undergraduates a community engagement opportunity to learn borders, migration, and citizenship across cultures, by investigating the following questions: (1) What are the forces—political, cultural, and environmental—that facilitate or inhibit human circulation? (2) How do governments, NGOs, scholars, and wider publics draw distinctions between legitimate and illegitimate forms of human mobility (e.g., “economic migrants” versus “refugees”)? (3) How are migrants from different geographic regions affected by efforts to regulate their movement, and what alternative forms of identity and belonging have they created?
We will first read literature across anthropology, history, and political theory to understand the key concepts on mobility, migration, borders and citizenship. We will take students into a local indigenous community use two specific case studies–Naluwan Tribe in Hsinchu Taiwan and Chumash Tribe in South California coastal region–to collectively explore the ways that global im/mobilities have been lived, and how they shape our world today.