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.
General Education Code
ER
Quarter offered
Fall, Summer
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.
General Education Code
PR-S
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
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.
General Education Code
ER
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.
Instructor
Samantha The Staff
General Education Code
ER
Provides a diasporic approach to the field of Black Studies in the modern era, with a focus on histories of dispossession and resistance.
Instructor
Xavier Livermon
General Education Code
ER
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.
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. In this class, 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.
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.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
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.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
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.
General Education Code
ER
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.
General Education Code
ER
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.
Instructor
Danielle Crawford
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
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.
General Education Code
IM
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.
General Education Code
CC
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.
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.
Instructor
Xavier Livermon
General Education Code
ER
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer
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.
Instructor
Micha Cardenas
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer
Interdisciplinary course examining the history, politics, and aesthetics of lynching culture in the United States.
General Education Code
ER
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 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.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer
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.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring, Summer
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.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
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.
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 194S
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.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
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.
Instructor
Camilla Hawthorne
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
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.
Instructor
Micha Cardenas
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.)
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
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.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
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.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
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.
Instructor
Xavier Livermon
Independent study and research under faculty supervision. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency. Enrollment is restricted to graduate students.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
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
Instructor
Savannah Shange-Binion
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
Instructor
Savannah Shange-Binion
General Education Code
CC
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
Instructor
Savannah Shange-Binion
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
Instructor
Caitlin Keliiaa
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
Instructor
Vivian Underhill
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
Instructor
Neda Atanasoski
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
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
Instructor
Xavier Livermon
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
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
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