Courses

The following courses can be taken to meet the course requirements of the specialization. Required courses are MER 9000 plus a total of two half courses from the list below: One half course from your home program, and one half course from an outside program. To register for a MER approved course outside of your home program please contact the course instructor for approval, complete and sign the Request Form, and return the form to your home program’s graduate assistant for course enrollment. Contact departments or instructors for further course details.

MER 9000 - Colloquium Series in Migration and Ethnic Relations

Credited or Non-credited requirement (as determined by home department)
Haan, Full Year | Thursdays "roughly bi-weekly", 4:00 - 5:30 | 

Associated faculty, students, and guest speakers present their research. There will be at least ten colloquia per year, with some of the talks involving attendance at specific occasions in series organized by other groups. Besides the colloquia in which research is presented, there will be other scheduled meetings in which students will discuss professional issues, opportunities for collaboration, and other topics.

MER Specialization Courses 2024-2025

Please note that for all MER-related courses listed below, students must write their major paper for the course on a directly relevant MER topic.

Anthropology 9127A - Historical Material Culture
Trish Markert | Fall 2024
Material culture encompasses the relationships between people and their material world (e.g., objects, landscapes, written records, architecture). This course offers a hands-on approach to the archaeological theorization, identification, recordation, and analysis of material culture of the 19th and 20th centuries. Students will work with real collections to complete term projects. Students will learn to identify, catalog, analyze, conserve, and curate historic materials including glass, ceramic, and metal, as well as practice methods like photogrammetry for recording objects and buildings. Partnering with local organizations like TMHC Inc and the Museum of Ontario Archaeology, students will work with real historic collections from Ontario to complete term projects, which include a public-facing exhibit design and a research essay/material culture analysis. (MER students registered in this course should write their essay related to Migration and Ethnic Relations)

Anthropology 9225B – Faces & Phases of Nations & Nationalisms
 Randa Farah | Winter Term 
Airports, harbours, and militarized borders furnished with cameras and detectors are symbols of an era characterized by growing fear, discrimination, and dehumanization of migrants and refugees. Oceans and seas have become graveyards for many migrants as they crash against high waves and new technologies to keep them away from the borders of rich states, many of them imperial powers. Many of those who make it to Europe, North America, or Australia encounter racism and difficult struggles for survival. Asylum seekers may live for years without citizenship rights and hence are barred from equal treatment under the law, they become second-class citizens. Many scholars use terms such as “global apartheid,” and ‘Fortress Europe’ to describe the polarized world in which we live. In this global landscape, place of origin, class, national/ethnic identity, or religion are markers for inclusion-exclusion, acceptance-rejection, and mobility-immobility. In this skewed cartography, many of the migrants are victims of wars unleashed by the very states restricting or preventing entry. Many migrants remain trapped on borders in detention centres, miserable refugee camps, or within dangerous zones, unable to seek any form of protection or safety from any state. In this seminar, we will draw on theoretical literature and ethnographic materials to gain a critical approach that helps us analyze a world order that produces the ‘refugee’, evaluate such classifications, and the international humanitarian regime that caters to ‘beneficiaries’. We will read materials by Agamben, Arendt, and other scholars to trace how power orders territories, disciplines populations, creates ‘states of exception’, and exercises biopolitics on human bodies. At the beginning of the term, I will ask students about their research and ensure we include readings that are relevant to their areas of research and interests.

Hispanic Studies SP 9648B/CL 9722B - Testimony, Memory, and Fiction
 Felipe Quetzalcoatl Quintanilla | Winter 2025
This course will be devoted to the study of memory and its connections to writing modalities such as the testimonial, the memoire, auto-fiction and fiction, in Latin American and in US/Canadian Latinx contexts. The texts, films and artistic installations we will be exploring will range from those centered on the bitter fruits of the Cold War in Latin America, but also on more recent phenomena such as the various indigenous/student/feminist movements of self-determination, as well as on the complex migration flows across las Américas from the early 1970s to the present day. Along the way, we will be thinking about the nature of testimonial literature and its emergence in Latin America, its understanding as a literary genre and its positionality vis a vis the literary canon and vis a vis political action. The concepts that will inform our discussions will be subalternity, voice, social justice, human rights, transnational solidarity, reparations, and memory. We will be listening to the voices from various struggles, from women, youth, combatants, and the indigenous. We will end, finally, on a consideration of fiction as a potential tool for remembering and imaginative healing. (MER students registered in this course should write their essay related to Migration and Ethnic Relations)

Hispanic Studies 9724B - Language Attrition
 Yasaman Rafat | Winter Term
This course examines language change, variation, relearning, and reactivation in bilingual and multilingual immigrant communities through linguistic, social, and cognitive lenses. We will explore empirical studies on significant phenomena in the speech of bilingual and multilingual communities worldwide. Languages considered will include, but are not limited to, English, Spanish, Italian, Persian, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, and German. (MER students registered in this course should write their essay related to Migration and Ethnic Relations)

History 9718B - Race and Gender on Imperial Frontiers: Comparative Settler Colonialisms
Laurel Clark Shire | Winter 2025
(contact instructor first for space availability)
Course Description: In this course we will read and discuss recent literature on the history of settler colonialism in North America alongside comparative studies of other settler societies around the globe. In the past few decades, scholars have begun to use “settler colonialism” to describe societies in which outsiders (white Europeans in most cases) invaded a place in order to settle there permanently, and used political, legal, cultural, and economic structures to transform it into their space, turning themselves into its “natives.” Unlike other kinds of imperial regimes, large numbers of women from the invading culture helped to colonize settler colonies, but they were otherwise very similar to other imperial ventures, and to varying degrees most combined the appropriation of indigenous land with resource extraction and forced labor. New gender norms and racial hierarchies arose from white settler colonial methods of taking land and extracting labor. These new relations of power and privilege had very different consequences for white settlers, displaced Indigenous people, and imported laborers. Due to time constraints, this course will focus mainly on the experiences and interactions of Indigenous peoples and invading settlers, with less time (though not importance) given to the forced migrants and enslaved people that European empires and settlers exploited. NOTE: For MER students, essay topics must be related to Migration and Ethnic Relations

Political Science 9511A – International Relations
 Adam Harmes | Fall Term 
This course provides students with an advanced introduction to the politics of international relations and foreign policy with an emphasis on contemporary issues and cases. The first part of the course examines different approaches to foreign policy and international relations including realism, liberalism, neoconservatism, libertarianism, populist conservatism, social conservatism, and progressivism. The second part of the course examines the debate between these approaches across different issues and cases. The course also examines the institutions, history, and politics of Canadian foreign policy.

Sociology 9177B  - The Social Context of Racial Inequality
 Kate Choi | Winter Term 
This course provides an in-depth overview of sociological understandings of race and ethnicity, with a particular focus on the institutional underpinnings of racial and ethnic inequality in the United States and Canada. The core question we seek to address is: What are the sociological origins of racial inequality? To answer this, we begin by investigating how sociologists understand racial and ethnic distinctions. What comprises a racial or ethnic group? We then shift our attention to patterns of racial and ethnic inequality, focusing on the major institutions through which racial inequality is generated: the housing market, the labor market, schools, and the criminal justice system.

Sociology 9258A  - Inequality Over the Life Course
 Anders Holm | Fall Term 
This class is designed to introduce you to the Life Course Perspective as a lens for viewing and understanding social inequality. A Life Course Perspective focuses on the intersection of individual lives, social structure and inequality, and social change. It emphasizes inequalities in experiences across individual lives and the way those patterns are shaped by broader social inequalities, history and change. This approach can be combined with other theoretical frames and applied to a wide range of substantive questions related to health, work, family, education, migration, political attitudes, and criminal careers and course readings provide some examples of these applications. A main goal of this course is to apply aspects of a Life Course Perspective to your own substantive interests to gain greater understanding of social inequality. MER students have to write their essay/assignment related to Migration and Ethnic Relations.

Women's Studies and Feminist Research 9592B - Gender and Development
 Bipasha Baruah | Winter Term 
This course seeks to provide an introduction to ‘gender and development’ as a domain of theory, practice, advocacy and interaction. The course is informed by the needs and interests of future ‘practitioners,’ i.e. students who hope to engage in research, project design and implementation, policy analysis, advocacy and/or networking in the ‘gender and development’ field or a closely related domain. To best serve the needs of such students, a few lectures of the course are devoted to providing students with a historical perspective on the evolution of the theory and practice of gender and development discourse, and rest of the course focuses almost exclusively on key contemporary and emerging gender issues and debates. Students who do not intend to work as gender and development ‘practitioners,’ but who want to acquire an up-to-date.