Migration Futures is a transdisciplinary course that is open to undergraduate students in all faculties, degrees and majors.
Migration Futures explores the global and local systems, patterns and experiences of international migration. The course places particular emphasis on transdisciplinary understandings of migration that highlight matters of governance, economics and politics; health, wellbeing and identity; and social justice in the context of diverse societies. Students will learn about migration and its implications through lectures by experts from across the university and studio-based learning that will provide opportunities to examine the workings of migration policy, the lives of migrants and the social and cultural spaces of migrant communities.
Migration is fundamental to the worlds that we live in and is frequently thought of as one of humanity’s greatest challenges. Human histories have been shaped by complex and shifting migratory patterns, settler colonial and other nations have been formed through the mass movement of people, and migration policy and border control represent perhaps the apogee of state sovereignty. Globally, migration is a complex and contentious political and societal issue, especially in relation to the movement of refugees, asylum seekers and irregular migrants. Migration is also framed as a key component of economic growth, and an opportunity for livelihood improvement for people around the world.
In Aotearoa New Zealand, our society has been formed through the arrival of Māori over 800 years ago and their establishment as tangata whenua, the mass immigration that underpinned settler colonisation and Indigenous dispossession, the growth in Pacific communities through labour migration, Asian migrations and settlements especially since the 1980s, and more recently processes of significant ethnic and economic diversification as part of government aspirations for economic development. Today, Tāmaki Makaurau | Auckland and the staff and students of Waipapa Taumata Rau are representative of these shifting patterns of migration and the diverse social and cultural forms that constitute our place in the world.
The Migration Futures course will provide students with a transdisciplinary introduction into the complex dynamics of international migration, giving attention to global histories and contemporary patterns of migration while highlighting the present realities and future possibilities of migration in the settler colonial context of Aotearoa New Zealand.