MA Social Anthropology

Seminar: ”Studying Transnational Lives: Care, Borders, and Mobility”

Instructor: Dr Victoria Kumala Sakti

This seminar offers students an opportunity to deepen their understanding of empirical research by focusing on the dynamic and interconnected fields of transnationalism, care, migration, and border regimes. It accompanies the Foundations of Empirical Research course and builds on its methodological foundations to explore how we study transnational lives across geographic, political, and affective borders.

How do families maintain care relationships across distance? What does it mean to live under a strict border regime? How can researchers trace the everyday practices of mobility and immobility? This seminar introduces students to ethnographic and qualitative approaches for investigating such questions in contexts shaped by migration, displacement, inequality, and global interdependence.

Using key texts, including ethnographies on transnational families, care chains, migrant labour, and the politics of bordering, along with audiovisual material and multimodal formats, we will examine both theoretical debates and practical strategies for conducting research in complex transnational settings. The seminar will engage with themes such as:

• Transnational family networks, ageing, and care infrastructures
• Migration, borders, and legal precarity
• Gendered dimensions of mobility and immobility
• Fieldwork ethics and researcher positionality in transnational contexts
• Multi-sited ethnography and digital methods
• Narrative, memory, and life course approaches

Students will be encouraged to reflect on their own research interests and develop the analytical and methodological tools necessary to study lives shaped by movement, attachment, and constraint. Throughout the course, we will connect theoretical discussions with case studies and hands-on exercises that enhance students’ capacity to design and carry out fieldwork-based research on transnational topics.

Course Requirements. Active Participation (‘aktive Teilnahme’): Includes attendance, active contribution to discussions, moderation of a session, and short written response papers.

Kurs im HIS-LSF