Beginning this fall, students at UC Santa Cruz can now declare a major in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), leading to a new bachelor of arts degree.
Administered by the Humanities Division, the curriculum for the major will draw from the campus’s Anthropology, Education, Feminist Studies, History, Film and Digital Media, Literature, History of Art and Visual Culture, Latin American and Latino Studies, Psychology, and Sociology Departments.
“The program will build on long traditions of faculty work and student engagement with a critical and inclusive approach to studies of race and ethnicity,” noted William Ladusaw, UCSC Dean of the Humanities. “The new major will bring a distinctive transnational, comparative perspective to interdisciplinary work in these areas.”
The CRES major is designed to help students develop a deep understanding of how race and other modalities of power have structured human life, both in the past and the present.
The major in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies will offer students the opportunity to study the dynamic power relations resulting from the cultural and institutional productions of the idea of “race” on a local, national, and global scale.
As participants in an interdisciplinary course of study, CRES majors will critically examine methods and concepts from different academic disciplines as a means of better understanding historical and contemporary social phenomena and problems.
In the process, they will learn to recognize both the limits and the value of established educational practices as they develop their own, innovative approaches to studying race and ethnicity.
“Establishment of the CRES major and a graduate emphasis will provide a focal point for research and teaching in these areas,” Ladusaw added. “I congratulate the faculty and students on an effective collaboration that has brought the program into reality.”
For more information about the new degree program in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, contact the UCSC Humanities Division at (831) 459-2696 or humanities@ucsc.edu.
