Roots and Routes: Navigating Race and Ethnic Identity

Catalog description

This course approaches race and ethnicity as historically, culturally, and socially constructed categories through the lens of migration. It is precisely in the encounters between different people migrating from one place of the globe to another, often in the context of European colonialism, that modern categories of race and ethnicity have come into being. More than a survey of the critical study of race and ethnicity, this course is therefore designed for us to collaboratively learn how to unlearn and re-envision our inherited ideas about human difference beyond modern-colonial ethno-racial categories. To this end, the course is organized around individual reflexive exercises, where you think critically about your own experience with a particular ethnoracial category, and the collaborative production of a hypothetical high school curriculum through which you may teach truth- and justice-oriented approaches to race and ethnicity to marginalized communities.