Course description
The course aims to provide students with the historical, theoretical and critical tools to reflect on the relationship between technology and the environment, with a specific focus on the geopolitical implications of contemporary media. Through lectures, screenings and discussions, students will be invited to reflect on how contemporary political borders are managed through technology.
With the processes of globalization, migratory phenomena, and climate change, Europe is paradoxically facing what we can define as the “centrality of the border”, which cannot be conceived as a simple physical barrier between two or more sovereign state territories but asks to be considered as a complex area, characterized both by the presence of control technologies (such as surveillance cameras, radars and biometric detectors) and by peculiar geographical and environmental conditions.

Moving within this scenario, the main objective of the course is therefore to focus on the reciprocal relationship between “media environments” and “elemental media” as a constitutive feature of our present. On the one hand, through specific readings from the field of both border studies and media studies, we will reflect on the capacity of technologies to design and establish environments. On the other hand, through reference to the most recent studies in the field of media philosophy and ecology, we will consider “natural environments” (think of the sea, a river, a mountain range, etc.) as media, capable of separating and joining, interrupting or facilitating the exchange of information and contact between subjects that find themselves on different sides.
The course is developed through theoretical investigation and identification of specific case studies. In particular, it will draw on official documents disseminated by agencies that monitor Europe's borders, journalistic investigations and documentary films made on European borders. Through this approach, which holds together reading, analysis and critical reflection, students will acquire transdisciplinary and cross-sectoral skills to understand the ways in which contemporary political borders operate.

Lectures will be structured in such a way as to answer such questions as:
- What technologies are employed with the purpose of monitoring and managing national and continental borders?
- Are such technological tools employed in order to shorten or widen the distances between those living on either side of the border?
- Does the technologization of borders accentuate or reduce geopolitical asymmetries?
- What are the tactics adopted by migrants to circumvent border management strategies?
- Historically, have things always been this way?
- Is a world "without borders" possible and what would it look like?
- Is it possible to reconstruct a media archaeology of European borders?
- How have documentary cinema and the visual arts addressed this issue?

Learning outcomes of the course
At the end of the course, students:
- will have acquired awareness regarding the hybrid, at once natural and artificial, character of any border;
- will be able to recognize the main technologies used in border areas as well as reflect on their functionality;
- will be able to reason about borders as “spectacular” zones characterized by the intensification of media performances and thus about the forms of detection, recognition, reception and rejection that take place in such areas;
- will be able to describe and understand the battle between governmental strategies and the tactics of resistance adopted by migrants aiming to cross the border;
- will be able to reflect in an original and informed way on the concepts of political symmetry and asymmetry;
- will be able to reflect on the geopolitical and ecological implications of media practices.
- will be able to reflect on the role played by the arts and documentary cinema as arenas for casting a critical gaze over contemporary borderscapes;
- will thus be able to use the tools acquired to contribute to the renewal of the idea and functioning of borders, under the banner of dialogue, translation and, therefore, mutual recognition.

Evaluation methods
- 60% oral presentations and participation in class / discussions of movies
- 40% final research paper

Bibliography
Bhabha, H.K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Casetti, F. “Mediascapes: A Decalogue,” Perspecta, n. 51 (May 2018). Chambers, I. Mediterranean Crossings. Duke University Press, 2008.
Chouliaraki, L. and Georgiu, M. The Digital Border: Migration, Technology, Power. NYU Press, 2022.
De Genova, N. “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and deportability in everyday life”, Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 419–447.
Dijsselbloem, H. Borders as Infrastructure. The Technopolitics of Border Control. MIT Press, 2021.
Gates, K.A. Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance. NYU Press, 2011.
Heller C. and Pezzani, L. “Forensic Oceanography: The Deadly Drift of a Migrant’s Boat in the Central Mediterranean 2011,” in Forensis. The Architecture of Public Truth, eds. Eyal Weizman, Anselm Franke, and Forensic Architecture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 639–648.
Mezzadra, S. and B. Neilsen. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Duke University Press, 2013.
Peters, J.D. The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media. University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Rajaram, P.K. and Grundy-Warr C. (eds.). Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge. University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Simondon, G. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. Univocal, 2016.
Weizman, E. Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability. Zone Books, 2017. Zucconi, F. Border Mediascapes: A Geopolitics of Environmental Media, expected 2024.

Last updated: March 7, 2024