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.

Supplemented by invited guest speakers and field activities, this Center for Racial Justice-sponsored course is facilitated by an activist-in-residence. Through critical readings, discussions, and situated learning, students take part in an experiential learning project and contribute service hours to a community-based organization.

This service learning course offers students of all majors the opportunity to intern at UCSC Resource Centers. Students organize educational community-oriented programs and projects to address retention and equity issues in higher education. Through this course, students develop critical thinking, problem-solving, project planning, and writing skills by combining theoretical concepts and experiential learning experience. Students explore texts that highlight resiliency of minoritized communities through the study of trans, queer, Asian American/Pacific Islander, Black, American Indian, Chicanx/Latinx, undocumented, and feminist political thought.

Provides a long historical account of the accumulation of land through logics of dispossession within the system of racial capitalism. Students explore the historical methods of claiming private property as a racialised project. Questions of settler-colonialism, imperialism, indigeneity, place and placelessness as well as claims to land and sovereignty are key to our inquiry. Focus is on the legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, specifically through examples in England, the Caribbean and North America.

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.

Course emerges from a collaboration with the Black Student Union around Black student organizing and Black liberationist pedagogies. Students explore and archive histories of Black student organizing on the UC Santa Cruz campus and beyond (locally, nationally, and globally), as well as Black liberationist pedagogy (e.g., decolonial thought in the Third World, freedom schools in the U.S. South, Black Panther Party liberation schools, Black feminist pedagogies). Course is offered for pass/no pass grading only.

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

Deconstructs the common perception of immigration as strictly a Latinx issue in order to develop solidarity among different groups of students and to explore a range of narratives surrounding undocumented status and migration with the aim of empowering us as agents of transformative social change. Legal papers, as a violent affirmation of settler sovereignty, do not capture the complexities of who we are, much less all our relations—to each other, to place, to life worlds. By exploring those complexities, we strive to create a communal space where we courageously articulate self, community, and relationality in ways that state documents must disavow. Course is offered for Pass/No Pass grading only.

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.

Introduces students to tools, conceptual frameworks, keywords, and methods for research and writing in critical race and ethnic studies. Drawing from ethnic studies, Asian American studies, Arab American studies, Black studies, Indigenous studies, Latinx studies, feminist studies, and queer studies, students analyze how scholars do the work of studying the effects of and resistance to U.S. colonialism, capitalism, empire, war, globalization, and migration. Examines questions of settler colonial state practice, dispossession, diaspora, incarceration, and the ethics of research methods. Students practice the craft of writing about race, colonialism, state violence, and the manifold movements that imagine alternative, decolonized futures.

Explores the concept of environmental racism in a transnational framework, focusing on the shaping of Asian American and Pacific Islander communities in the United States and in the current and former territories of U.S. empire in the Pacific. Students explore environmental racism within the historical contexts of U.S. militarism and imperial warfare, empire and settler colonialism, disasters and disaster aid, and climate change refugeehood.

Considers issues of race, place, gender, power, and identities through the converging fields of Black studies and performance studies. Emphasizes global diasporic histories of broad music production and performance from the 14th century onward with an emphasis on the making and performance of global Black social life. Primarily creative in nature, the course allows students to practice creative processes and allows opportunities to produce music and generate performance art.

Students immerse themselves in the intellectual, political, and critical thought of 20th-century Martiniquan psychoanalyst, writer, and revolutionary Frantz Fanon. Students closely read several of Fanon’s most noted works, including Black Skin, White Masks, A Dying Colonialism, and The Wretched of the Earth, as well as thinkers Fanon studied and engaged in these works. Class also engages contemporary interpretations of Fanon’s transnational, emancipatory thought and practice from scholarly, aesthetic, and political organizing perspectives.

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.

Places the thought and praxis developed and pursued by Third Worldist women, queer, and gender nonconforming peoples at the center of a conversation on the conditions of coloniality and pursuits of liberation from the entwined tyrannies of imperial, racial, and gendered oppressions. Course asks how African, Asian, Caribbean, and other Third Worldist women activists, artists, and scholars imagined and defined what liberation might have looked like in the 20th century, and what it might mean today.

Critical analysis of the movement for K-12 ethnic studies in historical and contemporary time periods with a particular focus on the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum. Students read, discuss, and analyze past and present K-12 ethnic studies research, policy, and practice to deepen their knowledge and strengthen their ability to critique issues in K-12 ethnic studies education while reflecting on how the concepts and questions that arise relate to their own educational experiences and lives.

Explores the emergence of Native American and Indigenous Studies as well as the theories, methods, and contemporary issues that inform the field. Centers key concepts and central themes from over the last half century of academic scholarship, and activist organizing, for Indigenous peoples and the decolonization of settler occupied lands.

Examines Indigenous environmentalist struggles and contemporary movements to protect land and water in California and in Oceania. Course examines three Indigenous women-led movements to protect land and water: Run4Salmon, Sogorea Te Land Trust, and Protect Mauna Kea. Also examines their transnational collaborations with Aotearoa/New Zealand and West Papua.

Examines the development of Black freedom movements ranging from resistance to slavery to contemporary movements for Black power in Jackson, Mississippi. Interdisciplinary in scope, course examines a variety of materials ranging from novels, to autobiographies, to political manifestos in order to understand fully the broad scope of Black freedom movements.

Traces the heterogenous historic, material, and ephemeral manifestations of Blackness and the Black radical imaginary in science fiction, fantasy, horror, and visionary literary, sonic, and visual cultural forms. Identifies how Black speculative aesthetic, cultural, and political practices reorients understanding of the past, recalibrates elation to the present, remaps assumptive notions of space and time, and allows us to reimagine our futures. Class collectively identifies, interprets, and puts into conversation the meaning-making speculative practices of Black diasporic writers, musicians, artists, filmmakers, abolitionists, even in genres and traditions seldom thought of as speculative. Class pays particular attention to Black diasporic/international contributions to these genres.

Explores questions like: Who is Latinx? What communities does this include/exclude? How extensive of a geography does Latinidad cover? What is the political usefulness of Latinidad in the face of overwhelming heterogeneity? How does Latinx Geographies reckon with or overcome the anti-Black and de-Indigenizing nationalist projects of Latinidad in Latin America and in the U.S.? Students learn how to define Latinx geographies and evaluate its disciplinary boundaries and assess the work of Latinx geographers and their ability to negotiate historic tensions within academia and Latinx studies.

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.

As Sylvia Wynter and many of the other authors to be read this quarter point out, the definition of the human has historically excluded racialized peoples, gender non-conforming people, indigenous people, disabled people, and even at times cisgender women. This class examines the intersection of science and justice to understand how the border of the human is used to reinforce anti-blackness, xenophobia, transphobia and many other forms of social oppression.

Against dominant framings of the Korean War, which left 4 million Koreans dead, as the freeing of the Korean people by the United States from the forces of global communism, this course reconsiders the war, which has never formally ended, from below and to the left, namely, through the lenses of multigenerational people's struggles against fascism and imperialism. Through collaborative, participatory research, students materialize from the ashbin of history what might be called a people's archive of the Korean War.

Explores questions like: Who is Latinx? What communities does this include/exclude? How extensive of a geography does Latinidad cover? What is the political usefulness of Latinidad in the face of overwhelming heterogeneity? How does Latinx Geographies reckon with or overcome the anti-Black and de-Indigenizing nationalist projects of Latinidad in Latin America and in the U.S.? Students learn how to define Latinx geographies and evaluate its disciplinary boundaries and assess the work of Latinx geographers and their ability to negotiate historic tensions within academia and Latinx studies.

Explores the political and libidinal economic dimensions of the housing market and their relation as analytics to explain the development of the housing market over the 20th and 21st centuries. Explores the interdependence of political and libidinal factors in influencing the operation and management of housing markets from public and private entities. Course pays special attention to the role of race (in addition to other determinants of difference: gender, class, etc.) in structuring housing’s libidinal and political economies. Students cannot receive credit for this course and CRES 261.

Situates Arab American studies and the study of Arab and Muslim diasporic communities originating from the region within a broader global racial order and through an intersectional approach. This course can be used to satisfy the CRES Transnational or Social Movement requirement if completed with a C/P or better.

Examines how global and historical factors contribute to the manufacturing of gender as a social construction of power in the Arab World. Draws on lived experiences of Arab/Muslim women and illuminates the ways in which they articulate gender and feminism, providing a community-centered alternative narrative on such questions. This course can be used to satisfy the CRES Transnational requirement if completed with a C/P or better.

Situates the historical and present conditions, through a multiplicity of local, regional, and global configurations of power, that work to repress and mobilize the Arab masses. Course centers 20th- and 21st-century movements and revolutions with the aim of understanding these uprisings in their given contexts and analyzing what we can learn about praxis through them. This course can be used to satisfy the CRES Transnational or Social Movement Requirement if completed with a C/P or better. 

Offers a chronological trajectory of more than 100 years of Palestinian history from the diverse perspectives of Palestinians as knowledge producers in transnational community.

Writing workshop exploring the aesthetic and critical engagements of Filipina/o/x poets. Students analyze authors’ prosody and craft, and explore thematization of migration, family, violence, culture, history, and agency. How do Filipinx poets address racialization, gendering, sexuality, class, and citizenship? What are their commitments to place, the divine, multilingualism, and the natural world? Students also write and workshop poems. Assignments: portfolio of three poems, in-class writing exercises, revised poem drafts, peer review comments, and performance of poems in class and at one public reading.

Examines how science as epistemology and its accompanying practices participate in, create, and are created by understandings of race, gender, sexuality, and nation. (Formerly CRES 185A.)

Focuses on a particular topic in Asian American and Pacific Islander studies. Topics vary with each offering but might include approaching racial and ethnic formations through a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, with a focus on a transnational critique of intellectual histories, political movements, cultural expressions, lived experiences and critical theories of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

Focuses on a particular topic in black studies. Topics vary with each offering but might include approaching racial and ethnic formations through a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, with a focus on the intellectual histories, political movements, cultural expressions, lived experiences, and critical theories of peoples throughout the Black diaspora and Africa.

Focuses on a particular topic in migrant and migration studies. Topics vary with each offering but might include examining the intersections of race, gender, and citizenship through a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, intellectual histories, and political movements as they relate to labor and capital, imperialism and neoliberalism, the racialized criminalization of movement, detention and deportation, and violence against migrant workers.

Focuses on a particular topic in settler and colonial studies. Topics vary with each offering but might include examining the intersections of race and racism through a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, intellectual histories, and political movements as they relate to empire, racial capitalization, colonial occupation and dispossession, mass incarceration and concepts of property and accumulation.

Focuses on a particular topic in race and science/technology. Topics vary, but focus on the history and politics of scientific inquiry and technological development within legacies and realities of racism and colonialism, including in the areas of public health, migration, labor, and reproductive rights.

Focuses on a particular topic in critical race and ethnic studies. Topics vary with each offering but might include approaching racial and ethnic formations through a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives, including indigenous studies, Black studies, Latinx studies, Asian American studies, queer critique, gender studies, transgender studies, performance studies, human rights studies, mixed race studies, legal studies, critical area studies, war and empire studies, environmental studies, science studies, and critical university studies.

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.

Senior seminar focusing on the transnational circulation of Black political and cultural thought and practice in the 20th century. Explores the dynamics of Black transnational circulations beyond (and often in spite of) imposed national and international borders that have historically and continue presently to dictate, criminalize, or otherwise obstruct or limit the free movement of Black peoples. Aims to permit students to trace the multidirectional, radical imaginary of such Black diasporic circulations, cataloguing the possibilities that Black transnational political and cultural thought and practice engendered alongside the differences and contestations these formations might reveal.

Far from a recent development, abolitionist demands to defund the police are actually central to a 400-year legacy of Black struggle. In the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings that erupted in response to several high-profile police murders, this senior seminar takes an interdisciplinary look at the burgeoning field of Black geographies to help us understand the renewed urgency of these calls in our current moment by engaging with works of activism, speculative fiction, and multimedia, including videos, podcasts, music, websites, and graphics.

Students critically examine public representations of Black queer and trans communities. Work is grounded in analysis of Black feminist, Black queer, and Black trans thought in relation to critical media studies.

Where are the limits of our imaginations around science and technology? How does existing science fiction reimagine the same old kinds of science, technology, and social and political relations between people? How do they wildly reimagine all these categories? This senior seminar analyzes and creates short pieces of speculative fiction that imagine new political configurations capable of giving rise to different forms of science and technology than those currently on offer. Class collates these into an anthology, and culminate the course with a public reading of our work.

Trans of color poetics is a decolonial method of study and creation that decenters Western conceptions of gender, race, and identity. Students study trans of color performance and media art, and create performance art in response. Trans of color poetics is an emerging field that is in dialog with queer of color theory and women of color feminism. Students also read trans of color theory and learn about these genealogies, and read performance studies and watch performance artworks to understand the genres of performance and media art as artistic movements where artists make art with bodies in time and space. Assignments include performances on video and photo, as well as writing assignments.

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.

Overview of the history and conceptualization of racial capitalism. Students study recent works in critical race and ethnic studies that analyze capitalism as a specifically racial phenomenon, and evaluate their contribution in a historical lens.

Considers different moments in movement work—for example, solidarity with Palestine, #NODAPL, Mauna Kea, Black freedom struggles, ACT UP, trans liberation, and beyond—and explores the failures and liberatory potential of solidarity. Students read theoretical meditations on solidarity, thinking through what it means to study solidarity, and also consider how solidarity can require risk, danger, and loss. Most importantly, course studies what it means to craft horizontal networks of care in the face of the ceaseless demands to (re)produce hierarchical ones.

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.

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.

Critical examination of anti-colonial social movements, Indigenous thought and praxis, and the possibilities and limits of the concept of decolonization.

Examines a variety of theories and methods relevant to Indigenous studies through a sustained critical engagement with key concepts and salient themes and by tending to questions of power and resistance in the context of anti-colonial struggle and Indigenous resilience as exercised among communities across Turtle Island and Oceania, but also beyond.

Examines Indigenous environmentalist struggles and contemporary movements to protect land and water here in California and in Oceania. We look at three Indigenous-women-led movements to protect land and water: Run4Salmon, Sogorea Te Land Trust, and Protect Mauna Kea.

Explores the political and libidinal economic dimensions of the housing market and their relation as analytics to explain the development of the housing market over the 20th and 21st centuries. Explores the interdependence of political and libidinal factors in influencing the operation and management of housing markets from public and private entities. Course pays special attention to the role of race (in addition to other determinants of difference: gender, class, etc.) in structuring housing’s libidinal and political economies. Students cannot receive credit for this course and CRES 161.

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