Critical Race & Ethnic Studies (CRES)

How does raceas cultural imaginaries and social practicesaffect people of African and Asian descent? How do racialized subjects challenge injustice and envision collective futures, not only for themselves but also for one another? We will explore these questions by delving into the historical and creative worlds of Afro-Asian encounters. We will examine media narratives of urban conflicts, attend to solidarity practices and visions of social change, trace shifting forms of identity and belonging across borders, and consider race and globalization in South-South contact zones. We will pay particular attention to different genres and mediums, such as documentary films, memoirs, theater, and travel writing. Through dialoguing with race-critical Afro-Asian traditions, students will develop the critical thinking, writing, and analytical skills necessary for engaging the problems and possibilities of our global present.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

This course provides an introduction to the foundational themes, debates, and methodologies in Native American and Indigenous Studies, examining how Indigenous peoples across the Americas challenge ongoing colonization, systemic racism, and structural inequalities. Through an interdisciplinary approach, students will explore Indigenous histories, cultures, languages, and contemporary issues while engaging with Indigenous perspectives, representations, and cultural expressions across various fields. The course critically examines Indigenous agency responding to cultural genocide, land dispossession, and environmental threats. It highlights the ways Native American and Indigenous communities assert sovereignty and protect their land, water, and territories amid colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal systems that impose displacement, extractivism, and oppression. Their advocacy for social change is expressed through political activism, literature, music, language revitalization, and digital media platforms. Through case studies from the United States, Central America, and South America, students will analyze the complex relationships between indigeneity, colonialism, and land. A key component of this course is a Community-Based Learning component, in which students will examine the Indigenous history of Worcester, with particular attention to Pakachoag Hill. Through readings, discussions, and critical analysis, the course fosters a deeper understanding of Indigenous agency, knowledge systems, and contributions to contemporary global movements for justice, self-determination, and cultural survival.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

This course focuses on Indigenous speculative fiction from North America. We will read novels by Native American writers to explore their perspectives on apocalypse, monstrosity, horror, myth, ceremony, and survival. What does apocalyptic fiction look like for a community that has been living in a post-apocalyptic world since the arrival of Europeans? How do distinct cultural figures impact horror and fantasy fiction written by Indigenous novelists? And how can a young adult novel teach its readers about Native American history and life? These are just some of the questions we will explore together this semester

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Literature

This intermediate, Frameworks course draws together modes of multimodal composition online and analysis of the role of race and the rhetorics of anti-racism in online media, social media, and digital storytelling (including podcast and video), among other forms. With a focus on corporate and citizen journalism, students write two short analysis papers on the role of race in online news coverage, produce a multimodal project that contributes to fairer more balanced coverage of an issue related to race in society, and create a plan of action for future online engagement.

GPA units: 1

Indigenous peoples and communities across Abiayala have demonstrated their agency through various media technologies during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In response to settler colonial oppression, they have used voices, images, and narratives to craft unique forms and aesthetics of broadcasting rooted in their communicative practices and knowledge systems.This course examines Indigenous voices and media practices across multiple territories, beginning with the Wallmapu (present-day Chile and Argentina), then moving to the Tawantinsuyu region (Peru and Bolivia), the Maya territories (Guatemala and Mexico), and finally Indigenous diasporic communities in Turtle Islanda term used by Native communities to describe what is now known as the United States. Students will critically engage with the agency of Indigenous peoples and their collaborative efforts with non-Indigenous allies in producing media content that contests ongoing colonization and systemic racism. Furthermore, students will analyze how Indigenous communities employ media technologies such as radio, film, and social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok to achieve media sovereignty. These practices not only establish contemporary media territorialities within and beyond ancestral lands but also generate communities of belonging. Through this exploration, students will understand how Indigenous media initiatives preserve languages and knowledge, create vocal and sonic territorialities, and challenge oppressive racial, gendered, class, and colonial structures. Additionally, these initiatives assert political and cultural self-determination, autonomy, and sovereignty within settler colonial contexts.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

By turns tragic and triumphant, racial passing in the African American tradition has a long history. Passing for white could offer social and financial stability, and even freedom, for those whose complexions allowed it. But did those who passed find safety, security, or comfort? This CRES Frameworks course will examine complex experiences and representations of racial passing in poetry, fiction, and film as we explore racial passing as tragedy, satire, comedy, and revenge fantasy in different works of African American cultural production. Authors may include James Wheldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Mat Johnson, and Britt Bennett; films may include Imitation of Life and Undercover Brother. As a CRES Frameworks course, we will also review foundational essays and critical vocabulary for the study of structures of race, ethnicity, and racism. Assignments will include a group presentation, literary analysis paper, midterm, and final project with a choice of format.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Literature

Once a marginalized and discredited artform, comics and graphic novels has enjoyed a cultural resurgence and aesthetic renaissance in the 21st century. Concomitantly, questions of social justice and equity have resurfaced in both U.S. and global culture and have begun to be addressed in long overdue ways. Perhaps unsurprisingly, contemporary comics and graphic novels have become a favorite medium (among others) for intervening in conversations on racial justice, sexual justice and economic justice. Therefore, this class will balance a literary perspective on the artistic contents of this exciting body of literature while simultaneously embracing a social science approach to its contexts. We will explore a growing canon of key authors and texts growing increasingly visible on college syllabi and popular best-seller lists. At the core of this class, we will ask what the graphic narrative form offers seekers of social justice and how can social science enrichen our understanding of the relationship between art and equity.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Literature

This course focuses on the rhetoric and practice of abolition. First, we will look at tactics in speech, writing, and direct action taken up by nineteenth-century abolitionists John Brown, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Tubman. Then, we will explore contemporary activists use of abolitionist frameworks to advance the cause of racial justice in work by Michelle Alexander, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Adrienne Marie Brown, Angela Davis, and Alex Vitale. It fulfills Group B and Group D requirements for the English major. Also counts toward Africana Studies. It does NOT fulfill the literature common area requirement.

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Annually

This semester, we will consider how Indigenous nations in the Americas create, share, and preserve their stories. We will approach Native American texts through a rhetorical lens, considering the media through which Native American peoples make meaning, and how expressive forms sustain indigenous cultures, relations, and histories despite the ongoing colonization of the American continent. This course takes a hemispheric approach, meaning we will learn about Indigenous texts from North, Central, and South America. By the time you leave CRES 311, you will have engaged with a broad spectrum of indigenous media, from the Cherokee syllabary to Incan Khipus. You will also learn key terms in Native American/Indigenous Studies that will deepen your understanding of your own relations with settler colonialism and Indigenous worldviews and cosmologies.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

This course explores canonical works of Asian American literature as well as contemporary writings. We will investigate what it means to be Asian American by analyzing texts produced by writers with roots all over the globe and across multiple genres, including short stories, novels, memoirs, poetry, and plays. We will examine the distinctive contributions Asian Americans are making to these literary forms and consider how Asian American writers use a wide array of creative strategies to narrate history, respond to stereotypes, and tell new stories. Our reading will be informed by relevant scholarship, historical sources, and multimedia materials.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Literature

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

This course will introduce you to African American fiction, drama, poetry, essays, and film that range from the excitement and uncertainty of the post-Civil Rights era to the challenges of what some like to call our current postracial era. With a particular focus on family/marital tensions, the bonds of Black communities, responses to violence, and social class aspirations, the assigned texts highlight contemporary African American literature of recent decades beyond the popularity of Toni Morrisons works. We will examine how African American authors are challenging and innovating literary traditions as they depict different African American experiences of the past, present, and even the near future. Along the way, we will ask questions such as for whomand to whomdo these authors presume to speak? How does this literature define and situate African American identities? What is the relationship between African American communities in the texts and America as a whole? Authors may include August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, Claudia Rankine, Tayari Jones, and Colson Whitehead. Exams and assignments: Two papers, a group presentation, midterm, and a final research-based project.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Literature

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

This course examines the trajectories of Toni Morrison's literary career, including books from her early, middle and late stages, as well as some of her own literary and cultural criticism. This course is an opportunity to engage in depth with a single author and to gain a deeper understanding of Morrison's style, form, and representations of American communities and histories.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Literature

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

Histories of Race and Education in the United States will model active and critical pedagogies that future educators can consider and implement in their profession. It will also transform the ways that students think about their educational experiences and the myth of education as social advancement that permeates our society. Ultimately, this course will give students an interdisciplinary lens through which to ask questions and find answers about the interlocking developments of education and race relations in the United States. This course focuses on Indian education movements (both colonial and decolonial), the common school movement, educational models developed by and for immigrants, and the fugitive pedagogies of Black teachers during segregation in the Jim Crow South.

GPA units: 1

Once considered a nerdy niche game accused of encouraging demonism, the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons is undergoing a cultural renaissance. With increased visibility comes increased scrutiny, and D&D has responded to its own potentially problematic racial past by updating its game rules and narrative lore to be more culturally literate and inclusive. This course will explore the cultural history of the game while studying Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel, a game module inspired by diverse real world cultures. Additionally, we will be reading classic fantasy texts that influenced the game, while watching films and reading graphic novels the game has inspired. The course culminates with students playing as a character from an ethnicity other than their own and writing reflective essays on what it is like to imagine yourself as a member of another culture, followed by a research project that builds a Radiant Citadel contribution focused on a world culture not already represented in the collection.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies