Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity

专业详情

Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity (RDI) is a revision to the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) program. Students in the Classes of 2024 and 2025 have the option to pursue either RDI or CRES. The CRES program of study and course requirements can be found on the archived catalog page.

Coursework in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity enables students to rigorously study race, diaspora, and indigeneity—categories that constitute human identity through claims of particularity, origins and continuity, and mobility and dispersal, in order to enact power within the modern world. These meanings can be seen in how unequal status, exploited and extracted condition, and disproportionate violence and harm inform the histories of peoples comprising these categories. Yet they are also evident in the ingenious, intersecting identities and affinities enacted by those same peoples—ones that imbue art, cultures, politics, and collectives with transformational and emancipating power. Through teaching, mentorship, and collaborations of various kinds, we explore with students how to think through these multifaceted and contradictory experiences, equitably and empathically.

This study and practice provide our students with a rigorous critical lens that serves them well in diverse fields. Whether our graduates are interested in media or policy, medicine or social work, organizing or entrepreneurship, or graduate study in a variety of disciplines, they benefit from their ability to understand the social formations that shape our world and navigate complex and sometimes contradictory concepts that others may find challenging or uncomfortable, through historic and analytic lenses.

Ours is a broad curriculum generated within a thoroughly multidisciplinary department. Students work with acclaimed experts in literature, creative writing, anthropology, political science, sociology, social work, linguistics, visual arts, history, urban studies, and cinema and media studies, among other fields. Several core approaches tie together the range of interests across our community. These sustain rigorous inquiry that incorporates knowledge created beyond the boundaries of academia, while also cautioning that those who claim to advance knowledge must account for the benefits and costs that result from ideas’ impact upon the world. Among our core approaches are intersectionality and critical theory, and the recognition of both identities and power structures originating through complex co-creation; dedication to utilizing multiple methodologies within the humanities and social sciences; and a willingness to take seriously and value ideas beyond the classroom and campus.