CRES - Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Examines the concept of race, followed by an investigation of colorblindness, multiculturalism, and post-racialism. Race and ethnicity are examined as historically formulated in relationship to the concepts of gender, sexuality, class, nationalism, indigeneity, citizenship, immigration, and inequality.

Examines the history, politics, and cultural expressions of the Pilipinx community, in the Philippines and the diaspora, with an emphasis on Pilipinx and Pilipinx-American activism.

What are the contours of Black Europe? This course emphasizes a range of disciplinary approaches to the concepts of blackness and indigeneity, introducing and questioning Black Europe as a field, a culture, and a set of ideologies.

Provides a diasporic approach to the field of Black Studies in the modern era, with a focus on histories of dispossession and resistance.

Introduces the Sikh community, including origins, history, belief system, and contemporary issues. Other topics include: Sikh music, art, literature, and aspects of Sikh society. Attention paid to the Sikh diaspora in the United States and in California in particular, including comparative perspectives with other minority communities.

A lower-division group tutorial, led by a faculty member, that focuses on various problems within critical race and ethnic studies. Topics to be chosen by the instructor and undergraduate student participants. Enrollment is restricted to critical race and ethnic studies majors.

A program of independent study arranged between a group of students and a faculty instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment is restricted to critical race and ethnic studies majors.

Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.

Examines race and ethnicity as categories of lived identity intersecting with gender, sexuality, class, and culture; historical discourses of difference underwriting social inequalities and movements to redress those inequalities; and concepts critical to the understanding and reshaping of power and privilege.

Examines how scholars and activists produce knowledge in critical race and ethnic studies. Interrogates key terms to build a foundation and literacy in research methods. The course is project-based; and requires work on a team.

Explores relations between music and democratic politics. Is harmony the ideal condition of the nation-state? Is disharmony a necessary condition of democracy? Students read literary texts alongside political philosophy and listen to music as we explore how musical recordings and performances produce our understanding of the citizen-nation relationship.

Investigates how African-American, Asian-American, and Latin-American playwrights represent and criticize the concept of race and disability in their dramas on topics from freak shows to Jim Crow laws to the Virginia Tech massacre. Students cannot receive credit for this course and LIT 151K.

A lens on the U.S. and Japanese empires that moves beyond the limits of traditional area and ethnic studies by thinking comparatively about the racial logic of empire. Examines how the U.S. and Japanese empires as rival powers that from the early 20th century onward, have competed against and conspired with each other in Asia and the Pacific.

Grounded in local, national, and global prison abolition movements, this course explores through feminist political frameworks creative strategies that imagine and work to end all systems of domination and exploitation. Looks at California's prisoner organizing and abolition movements, along with other historic and contemporary social movements which deepen our understandings of the ways in which carceral systems are shaped by and through capitalist formations of race, gender, sexuality, and disability. Also examines strategies such as disability justice and transformative justice which demonstrate expansive and liberatory visions of abolition, extending far beyond the prison system itself.

Algorithms shape race and gender today, yet algorithms are older than digital media and can be understood as recipes or rituals. Course engages with the emerging field of trans of color poetics by studying readings in women of color feminism, transgender studies, and decolonial theory. Digital media art grounds the discussion, including works from queer and trans artists of color working in digital games, anti-surveillance fashion and performance art. Students create digital media projects in response to the ideas of the course, in the medium or platform of their choice, including video prototypes, web sites, Scalar books, Twine games, podcasts and/or video channels, the technical aspects of which will be covered in class.

Interdisciplinary course examining the history, politics, and aesthetics of lynching culture in the United States.

Examines how science as epistemology and its accompanying practices participate in, create, and are created by understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and nation.

Focuses on key learning outcomes of humanistic research and writing: developing a method for critical race feminist analysis, identifying objects and fields of study, formulating an appropriately narrow topic and thesis, identifying and critiquing sources, and completing well-structured written argumentation. Readings offer key theoretical models in critical race and ethnic studies, feminist studies, and queer theory.

Focuses on critically analyzing public representations of migration. Exploring key scholarship in migration and diaspora studies, including recent writings on "border crises," students develop an individual research project exploring a controversy, archive, cultural text, or historical debate in research on a specific migrant or diasporic group. The focus is on key learning outcomes of humanistic research and writing: developing a method for studying migration attentive to critical race analysis; identifying objects and fields of study, formulating research questions, organizing an appropriately narrow thesis, identifying and critiquing sources, and completing well-structured written argumentation.

Trans of color poetics are emerging in media art and performance, the voice of movements for liberation from colonial systems of racialized gender, and the structures which uphold them, including the prison-industrial complex. Trans people of color, and people who exist in resistance to colonial gender constructs are responding to the ways that both popular media and academic fields such as transgender studies have focused on white, wealthy, normative transgender subjects. Seminar considers the social movements and the embodied movement of trans people of color and gender non-conforming people in media, art and performance.

Over the past half-century, there has been a profound transformation in the way that goods are produced and moved about the world resulting in what has been referred to as the "logistics revolution". Course examines the ways in which this "revolution" in mass circulation of goods necessitates a radical thinking of race and racial politics in the context of contemporary capitalist globalization.

Senior seminar focusing on the theoretical underpinnings of U.S. imperialism from a global perspective, from the annexation of the Philippines in 1898 to the current War on Terror. Drawing on the history of U.S. settler-colonialism and liberal empire as racial projects, the course investigates contemporary forms of racialization surrounding the Muslim as figure for foreign enemy. Utilizing a diverse range of media, course considers various theoretical texts in critical race and ethnic studies, visual studies, gender and queer studies, history, and literature.

Teaching of a lower-division seminar by an upper-division student under faculty supervision. (See CRES 42.)

Group tutorial, led by a faculty member, that focuses on various problems within critical race and ethnic studies. Topics to be chosen by the instructor and undergraduate student participants. Enrollment restricted to critical race and ethnic studies majors.

Students submit a petition to the sponsoring agency.

Individual study in areas approved by sponsoring instructors. May not be counted toward upper-division major requirements. Student submits petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment is restricted to critical race and ethnic studies majors.

Independent study and research under faculty supervision. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.