Overview

This course intends to subvert the relation of the academy with the “field” by bringing the field to the classroom – with all the challenges that such an interactive and experiential learning poses to the authority of the academy over questions of theory, method, and truth/representation. The course emerged and was designed out of the lives the island has shared with us all: refugees, migrants, activists, and researchers. The people who will share their experiences and reflections are or have been participants in collectives and/or direct actions that we are/were part of and support. It is also shaped with theories of Autonomy & the autonomy of migration in the context of self-organization and self-representation. Apart from reflecting on the minor resistance points of migrants at the political level, which aim to bring the migrant existence far away from their definition as “bare life”, defined by Agamben, we will also explore the potentials of bringing the autonomy of migrants to the academic field as a “constitutive (subjective, creative and productive) power” (De Genova, Garelli and Tazzioli, 2018).