Exploration of interdisciplinary research methodology—a broader set of scientific beliefs, approaches, inquiries, theories, and analytics—relevant to the study of Black communities. Students read, explore, and engage in particular methods—approaches to data collection and analyses—emphasizing various forms of ethnographic research. Course also examines other approaches to the study of Blackness, such as historical/archival, cultural studies and discursive analyses, and mixed methods.
Explores "subaltern" narratives of diaspora exile in order to interrogate the condition of exile and its interwoven, often contradictory relations to many diasporic formations that endure in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students explore the various origins of diaspora and forms of exile emergent from chattel slavery, colonialism, war, racism, xenophobia, political dissidence, and dispossession, informing an understanding of these broader global machinations, and the experiences of those exiled and in diaspora themselves.
Considers theories of race, place, gender, and climate through the overlapping burgeoning fields of ecopoetics and ecoaesthetics. Reflects on how the environment, climate crises, and various ecologies inform contemporary experimental poetry, film, music, dance, visual art, performance, and community activism of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Exploration of interdisciplinary research and theoretical frameworks relevant to the study of the global black communities. Examines multiple theoretical approaches to the study of Blackness, drawing from a wide array of ethnographic, historical/archival, cultural studies and discursive analyses. Designed to help students develop a research tool kit, one that is rigorous, flexible, practical, ethical, grounded, and self-reflexive.
Independent study and research under faculty supervision. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.
Cross-listed Courses
From South Central to La Misión, this course explores the role of race and culture in creating the California Dream. Draws on films, music, and activism as lenses into the complex flows of power that shape our communities.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 110G
General Education Code
IM
From Janet Mock to Young M.A., queerness has become hypervisible in Black popular culture--but at what cost? Using music, television, and social media as central texts, students investigate the intersections of sexuality, gender, and race in public life.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 110Q, FMST 110Q
General Education Code
IM
What connects Black communities in the Caribbean, the U.S., Latin America, and Canada, and what sets them apart? Examines theories of diaspora, gender and sexuality, slavery, colorism, music, U.S. hegemonies, social movements, and comparative racialization and global anti-blackness (Formerly African Diasporas in the Americas.)
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 130
General Education Code
CC
An examination of anthropological studies of tribal, rural, and urban cultures of India and a look at changes taking place in India.
General Education Code
ER
Explores medical and environmental anthropologies, including how bodies-human and other-are implicated in processes often figured as environmental. Explores how the body and the environment combine and interact to form nexus of political, cultural, and material forces.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 140
General Education Code
PE-E
How do we read, write, and recognize the queer body? How is it marked in politics, in intimate spaces, and in the ethnographic text? Drawing on ethnic studies and black queer studies, this seminar engages contemporary anthropological approaches to sexuality.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 190G
How do we conceptualize a Black Aesthetic in the realm of digital art and media? How do we re/define Black virtuality when, historically, computer graphics has failed to accurately render Blackness? This course looks at the field of digital media from a technological and cultural perspective, understanding the ways in which anti-Blackness has been embedded in our technology, from photography to video games. Concurrently, course examines the history of the Black Aesthetic as an interventionist art movement, and find ways to intervene in the contemporary digital media landscape.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 142
General Education Code
PE-T
Introduction to Filipino language and culture. Four skills (reading, writing, speaking, listening) in basic Filipino (Tagalog), with readings and discussion of critical contemporary thought (decolonization, gender, social movements) in English. For heritage speakers and second-language learners.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 82
Explores issues central to Indigenous women's life experiences and Native feminist thought. Students consider the concerns and methodologies of Native feminisms—theories and actions that highlight how settler colonialism is a fundamentally gendered process. Engages in foundational discussions of Native feminisms, settler colonial theory, and feminist methodologies. Course content focuses on communities in settler states currently known as the U.S. and Canada. Covers topics such as reproductive justice, gendered violence, cultural reclamation, and rematriation.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 119
General Education Code
ER
California encompasses the nation's largest Native population and the state's policies create a complex political and legal structure. This course provides a history of early California in the 18th and 19th centuries and a review of the urban Indian experience in the 20th century. The first part sets the historical foundation and traces early California Indian history. The second part shifts to 20th-century urban Indian issues and the contemporary moment for California Indian peoples. Covers topics such as Indian labor exploitation, genocide, termination, relocation, and federal recognition.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 13
General Education Code
ER
Investigates, imagines, and practices movement toward water justice in California using feminist, Indigenous, and critical race theory. The course includes collaborative projects with environmental justice organizers in the Central Valley, and offers new ways of thinking about water inequity and access through racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and critical theories of place.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 136, ENVS 136
General Education Code
PR-E
Seminar focuses on the historical and subjective processes that produce the concept of an African or Black Diaspora. In narrative, film, and cultural studies, themes of slavery, exile, home, identity, alienation, colonialism, politics, and reinvention are explored.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 190K
Discusses the characteristics of settler colonialism and the politics of comparison in the study of global settler colonialism. Looks at settler colonial state practice across multiple different sites, including Santa Cruz, as students craft their own research projects. (Formerly offered as Decoloniality, Feminism, and Science Studies.)
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 190L
Explores the production of sexualities, sexual identification, and gender differentiation within multiple contexts of colonialism, decolonization, and emerging neo-colonial global formations.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 190M
Instructor
Anjali Arondekar
Examines human rights projects and discourses with a focus on the politics of gender, sexuality, race, and rights in the international sphere. Reading important human rights documents and theoretical writings, and addressing particular case studies, emphasizes the tensions between the ideals of the universal and the particular inherent in human rights law, activism, and humanitarianism.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 190O
Queer diaspora emerged from Third World/queer-of-color critique of queer theory and provides a framework for analyzing racializations, genders, and sexualities in colonial, developmental, and modernizing contexts. Readings from anthropology, history, literature, and feminist and cultural studies.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 190Q
Surveys how over the course of the 20th century and into the present, the U.S. prison system has metastasized with more than 2 million people locked in cages and many millions more under forms of correctional supervision such as parole, probation, or deportation order, as well as the expansion of a policing apparatus that surveils, stops and frisks, asks for "papers, please," and shoots first. Recently, historians have produced works exploring the origins of this era of racialized police terror, criminalization, mass incarceration, and deportation. Course surveys key works in carceral studies while guiding students through the process of crafting their own original research projects.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 190R
Instructor
Marisol LeBron
Senior seminar focusing on tourism, colonialism, and militarism. Considers case studies on tourism in colonial contexts and sites of U.S. empire across multiple geographies as students craft their projects, participate in writing workshops, and present research.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 190U
Explores critically the intersections and crisis points between feminism and Marxism as bodies of thought, theoretical formations, and forms of historical inquiry.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 190V
Examines a number of classic and new critical texts in the field of African(a) Feminism and Sexuality. Focuses on how African(a) scholars have had to theorize genders and sexualities through an intersectional lens that takes into account questions of decoloniality and freedom. How might we rethink issues of oppression and domination in relationship to race, nation, sex, gender, and sexuality in the global Black world using the tools provided by Africa(a) scholars?
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 208
The expansion of the state's carceral capacity over the course of the 20th century and into the present has been intimately connected to ideas about sex, gender. This course examines the ways that sex has been a target of the carceral state at the same time that policing and incarceration have shaped our understanding of sexuality and gender. Rather than focusing solely on repression, course also examines how feminists and queer activists have challenged carceral logics and practices and imagined expansive forms of freedom, justice, and safety.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 210
Instructor
Marisol LeBron
Course asks students to consider surveillance technologies beyond the history of modernity and the rise of bureaucratic governance as well as the framework of liberal understandings of the right to privacy. Instead, students examine the ways colonialism and racial capitalism are structured within surveillance technologies, or violent modes of "seeing" that contribute to the brutal genocide, dehumanization, containment, extraction, and enslavement of bodies and land.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 213
Instructor
Felicity Schaeffer
Positioning tourism and militarism as central sites of inquiry for feminist and ethnic studies, course draws from literature on colonialism and empire to illuminate how tourism functions and how tourists move, in sites of past and present warfare.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 218
Instructor
Jennifer Lynn Kelly
Explores practices of reproductive labor, care and justice, centering global south and transnational perspectives. Readings draw from ethnography alongside critical race, feminist, and queer theory to trouble the concepts of the body, agency, and freedom that have shaped dominant discourses of reproductive politics such as, the "right to choose," along with secular liberal frameworks of justice more broadly. Aims to expand vision of what is possible and necessary in our contemporary moment of heightened contestation over reproductive life and rights.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 224
Course takes as its central topic the institutional politics of feminist and critical race knowledges in the post-1960s United States university. Considers these fields' complex and contradictory relation to disciplinarity, the university's primary or default mode of arranging and legitimizing knowledge formations.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 243
Instructor
Nicholas Mitchell
Examines the material, discursive, and racialized conditions that have produced refugees in the last century. Also examines the social claims made by refugees, institutional responses to them, and political alternatives to state belonging
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 117
General Education Code
CC
Introduces the histories of exploration, museum collection, and photography that shape historical and contemporary ideas about race, culture, and place in Africa.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 140A
General Education Code
CC
Many of us are probably aware that people of different ethnic or racial backgrounds may speak differently, but most of us probably do not know that all varieties of English are equally "grammatical." And while some of us are probably aware of the fact that racial and ethnic categories are "constructed," most of us have probably not considered the ways in which language use figures in the construction of ethnic and/or racial identity. Course introduces a number of racialized linguistic varieties and their intersections with other identity categories (gender, sexuality, socio-economic class), as well as emergent new scholarship on language and racialization.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 135
General Education Code
ER
Introduction to and analysis of the social psychology of stereotyping, prejudice, and racism in the United States. Examines how individuals both perpetuate and experience these phenomena, through the lens of race as a system of privilege and disadvantage.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 148
Instructor
Courtney Bonam