This course addresses how human mobility across borders and state policies of immigration control, shape, and change intimate relations and family formations. In other words, it asks how states make and unmake families through their migration policies It accordingly focuses on the institution of marriage and processes of reproduction (including having and caring for children), and questions who 'deserves' to have a ‘right to family’ by examining different country- specific cases of family reunification and family separation. Issues to be discussed include: governance of migrant reproduction, dynamics of mixed-immigration-status families, challenges faced by transnational families and their shifting care regimes, the place of different kinds of children (left- behind, unaccompanied and adoptee) in migration policy-making. In tackling all these issues, the course aims to provide an understanding of how migration and related state responses disrupt, reinforce or rearrange gendered norms of family-making.
