Toronto is a city increasingly configured through transnational connections and practices. It is a city defined by the scale at which its residents live their lives; a scale that is no longer (if it ever was) parochial, but extends across time and space to connect people and practice across a multitude of locales. Contemporary understandings of Toronto can only be reached through adopting a transnational lens. This course will examine the processes that have produced Toronto as a transnational city over time, including the dynamics of immigration and mobility, experiences of alienation, the global extension of capitalism, and the (re)formation of communities grounded in the complex dynamics of identities produced in a space that is both ‘home’ and away’. We will also explore the specific practices, and connections that produce “Toronto” as a space that transcends its physical geographic boundaries and is continually reproduced in and through the flows of people, capital, objects, ideas, - and the many forces that reproduce and reconfigure these flows.
Toronto is a city increasingly configured through transnational connections and practices. It is a city defined by the scale at which its residents live their lives; a scale that is no longer (if it ever was) parochial, but extends across time and space to connect people and practice across a multitude of locales. Contemporary understandings of Toronto can only be reached through adopting a transnational lens. This course will examine the processes that have produced Toronto as a transnational city over time, including the dynamics of immigration and mobility, experiences of alienation, the global extension of capitalism, and the (re)formation of communities grounded in the complex dynamics of identities produced in a space that is both ‘home’ and away’. We will also explore the specific practices, and connections that produce “Toronto” as a space that transcends its physical geographic boundaries and is continually reproduced in and through the flows of people, capital, objects, ideas, - and the many forces that reproduce and reconfigure these flows.
