What is exceptional?  That which falls outside, but also defines, the norm.  This research seminar explores the relationship between norm and exception in the state system through an examination of spatial practices at the limits (i.e. borders, margins) of sovereignty.  We will look empirically at two cases of territorial reconfiguration: special economic zones and refugee camps.  Both are spaces where sovereignty, citizenship, and urban life are renegotiated, where government practices are reconfigured, and where governable spaces and bodies are delineated and institutionalized.  Both are legal anomalies of sorts, where the informal and the formal intersect.  The zones are more explicitly linked to neo-liberal economic practices, while the camps operate in a political orbit.  Both, however, are test cases for emergent modes of governance, governmentality, and governability in the current era.  This is an advanced research seminar that functions as a collaborative project combining theoretical and empirical approaches, not a lecture class.  Students will undertake substantial research into specific aspects of two case studies: the Pearl River Delta of China (especially Hong Kong and the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone) and refugee camps primarily in Kenya and Tanzania. Students will collectively examine ethnographic accounts of everyday life, legal frameworks, history, and policy within each case.