Critical Race & Ethnic Studies
Drawing on scholarly expertise about race and ethnicity across several disciplines, CRES offers a uniquely interdisciplinary plan of study that allows students to approach these topics from multiple perspectives. CRES courses provide a space for students to discuss, reflect upon, and analyze how different populations have been racialized, how structural racism operates, and why race continues to be a relevant yet controversial topic of study.
CRES aspires to prepare students for careers and lives intervening in structural racism by focusing on how agents for racial equality have navigated these systemic challenges in the past and in our contemporary times. In doing so, we combine the structural focus of Critical Race Theory, the agentive and communal perspective of Ethnic Studies, and the resistance against subjugation (including subjugated knowledge) of Decolonial Studies, in order to expand beyond these three disciplines as we face the challenges posed by the 21st century. Majors and minors will be able to customize their own curricular plan by choosing a track of courses focused on race and ethnicity from a wide variety of disciplines, including literature, history, sociology, anthropology, classics, religious studies, the arts and other departments at the college. Students will gain racial literacy and intercultural sensitivity on a wide variety of topics and will be encouraged to ask their own pressing questions on racial inequality, and research topics they are passionate about. CRES encourages students to seek classroom and co-curricular opportunities that provide relevant knowledge and experience for their future careers. Everyone is welcome to major or minor in CRES, no matter their background, because racial justice is a collective struggle that involves every member of society and calls us to be people for and with others.