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.
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
Instructor
Savannah Shange
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
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
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
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