Ethnic Studies Minor

This course takes a systematic and historic look at immigration as an American national mythos and examines how immigration intersects with race and racial difference, and has affected the development of Black, Asian, Latino and Indigenous cultures and communities within the United States. Topics include immigration histories and experiences, critical conceptions of race, ethnicity, and migration, assimilation and acculturation processes, and social, cultural, and policy responses to migration. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism

Full course description for Immigrant Communities and the Trajectories of Othering

There have been various efforts by individuals and communities of color as well as Native communities to challenge institutional racism, state oppression, and other intersectional forms of domination along with their devastating impact on the parameters of everyday life, the human psyche, families, and American society. These individual acts of protest and social resistance movements continue to play a central role in the construction of politicized racial/indigenous identities and they also inform our understanding of the histories of these communities as well as the structures of settler colonialism, enslavement, nation building, and white supremacy. This class will read personal acts of resistance alongside modern social movements, paying close attention to their relationships to and impacts on racial, ethnic, and indigenous identity; social consciousness; power and agency; and revolutionary freedom in the United States. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for The Politics of Racial Resistance and Protest in the United States

This class focuses on the history and background of the social and environmental issues confronting racial and ethnic communities in the United States. Students learn about the practice and politics of ecological inequality, community initiatives which have developed to combat such inequality, and how environmental justice has emerged as a viable and powerful political movement. This course is useful to students interested in environment and public policy as well as racial and ethnic studies.

Full course description for Environmental Justice and Public Policy

Will race matter in this millennium? This course explores major issues currently impacting race relations in the United States, such as affirmative action, immigrant education, employment, housing, health and welfare, and so on. This course takes historical and interdisciplinary approaches to help students understand the interrelationship between social structure, public policies, race and ethnicity. Videos and movies are shown as part of class discussion on these issues. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Major Issues in U.S. Race Relations

This course focuses on the phenomenon of mixed race descent in the United States. For comparative purposes, the course also explores the topic in relation to other nations. Included in the course are historical perspectives, and exploration of the psychology, sociology and literature associated with mixed race descent. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Politics of Mixed Racial Identity

This course will examine public policy and practice, and its impact on historically and politically disenfranchised communities of color in America by studying the development of public policy in relation to race, racial identities, and racial communities, and the impact of policy processes and procedures on the private and public realms of social and economic activity in the United States. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Race and Public Policy

This course examines historical experiences of at least three racial groups. Groups explored include African Americans, American Indians, Asian Americans, Chicanos/Latinos and European immigrants. The course considers the different experiences of these groups as impacted by gender, class and other factors. It aims to deepen and broaden students' understanding of racial and ethnic groups in the United States by studying the similarities and differences of their experiences. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Understanding Racial and Ethnic Groups in the United States

This course examines the U.S. prison population and system. Important questions to be explored are: Why are communities of color over represented in U.S. prisons? Is there an inherent racial bias of law enforcement agencies which result in greater arrest and incarceration of African Americans and other racial and ethnic groups? How does the criminalization of political acts effect various movements of social change?

Full course description for Color of Incarceration

This course explores the role and function of religion in the lives of American racial and ethnic groups. It also addresses how religious belief has helped different racial groups in sustaining their struggle for survival and inspiring their lives. Topics covered include the concepts of identity, selfhood, community, spirituality, social responsibility, salvation and freedom. Certain religious tradition, such as African American, American Indian and Asian American, are discussed in the light of histories of the groups. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism. (Also listed as RELS 333 Race and Religion)

Full course description for Race and Religion

This course examines multiple intergenerational impacts and legacies of trauma, focused on concepts of community trauma, perpetrator trauma, and historic and contemporary traumatic events and actions affecting communities of color, Indigenous peoples, and ethnic and ethnoreligious groups. The course examines different sites of trauma, representation of trauma in various media, narratives of loss, mourning, and coping, and the socio-cultural politics of trauma. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Trauma and Traumascapes: Identity, Legacy, and Memory

This course examines conceptions and constructions of race in relation to the Internet as a multidimensional socio-cultural, economic, and political phenomenon, with a specific focus on the United States. Topics may include varied cultural histories and social impacts of the Internet; notions of identity on the Internet; race, embodiment, and disembodiment; social media, race, and racial controversy; electronic activism around race and racial identities on the Internet, and different theoretical approaches to understanding the unique socio-cultural dimensions of race and the internet. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Race, Identity, and the Internet

This course examines the influence of race on ideas and ideals of work in American life. Specific topics include the development of models and types of work across American epochs; slavery and labor; work, worth, and racial citizenship; the "wages of whiteness"; opportunities v. outcomes; past and present social movements for racial workplace equity; affirmative action and public policy positions regarding race and work; Intersectional analyses of race, gender, and sexuality in the workplace, implicit bias and persistent patterns of racial discrimination in the workplace; and race as a social reality within the American workplace. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Race and Work in American Life

This course considers topics of current or relevant importance in either communities of color or in the field of ethnic studies and are offered for variable credit. Since the topics change from semester to semester consult the Class Schedule for specific topic listing. If more than one topics course is taken in fulfillment of the major, they must be different topics course titles.

Full course description for Special Topics in Ethnic Studies

What exactly is a race? How have conceptions of race changed over time? What does it mean to say that race is socially constructed? What is the relation between the idea of race, racial prejudice and racial oppression? What exactly is racism? What is the precise nature of the harm of racism? What can and should we do about racism -- its historical legacy and its contemporary manifestations? This course uses the tools and methods of philosophy to examine a variety of conceptual and ethical questions about race and racism.

Full course description for Race and Racism: Philosophical Problems

This course explores Black (such as Afrofuturism), Indigenous, Latina/o, and Asian American imaginative worlds and futurisms (visions of the world that often blend timelines and events) through interdisciplinary methods and concepts from Ethnic Studies. The concept of ¿imagination¿ is highlighted, to both develop our own imaginative powers and attend to visions of the world that resist racism and oppression, including juxtaposing many forms of popular culture and academic thought. These expressions of presence, power, and speculative futurisms will be explored for how they depict the experiences of communities of color and Indigenous Peoples using Ethnic Studies concepts and theories.

Full course description for Racial and Ethnic Futurisms: Presence, Empowerment, and Imagination

This course provides a context and a baseline for knowledge about Minnesota African American communities. This course includes an overview of the past and present experiences, struggles, and issues and the intersections of the past and the present in Minnesota African American communities. Students will have an opportunity to complete a community-based project as part of the requirements for this course.

Full course description for African Americans in Minnesota

This global, cross-cultural survey course introduces students to a range of texts produced by and about black subjects that link transnational black communities. Students will learn about the legacy of European expansion and empire-building, the impact of the transatlantic slave trade in the New World, and the contemporary diversity of black cultural identities, politics, and expressions born from these conditions. Students will also analyze the lived experiences of immigrants as they negotiate citizenship, belonging, conflict, and representation as new blacks in societies where systems of domination and oppression exist as part of everyday life.

Full course description for Global Blackness

Using contemporary research, first person narratives, and data, students will examine the state of Black America while addressing complex economic, social, political, and environmental issues that Black communities and Black people across the United States continue to face. Students can expect to engage with a range of interdisciplinary texts and sources in order to contextualize Black achievement and progress alongside ongoing resistance movements and demands for social justice. Materials focused on the legacy of enslavement, the impact of centuries of anti-black policies and practices, and the depth of state violence will be covered in order to illuminate contemporary issues related to housing, education, policing, health, work, and everyday life and their impact on Black communities. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Contemporary Issues in Black America

This course will explore the cultural, intellectual, and political knowledge produced by Black people in the United States and within the African Diaspora and how this knowledge continues to define, expand, and challenge the textured experiences of Black life in America and the world. Students will be exposed to a genealogy of Black thinkers, artists, activists, and critics who view the production, analysis, and dissemination of knowledge as necessary responses to structures of social, political, and economic domination and oppression. Students will also consider the extent to which knowledge has shifted meanings of blackness across time and space as well as in response to specific structures and events (slavery, colonialism, liberation, neoliberalism). Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Black Thought

This course will introduce students to the lived realities of social class through the lens of black Americans whose social and economic ties to wealth and ownership have been obstructed via enslavement, job and housing discrimination, and other forms of institutional racism. Fraught with contention, students will analyze material related to racial authenticity and the expectation of communal obligation in instances when wealth and related privileges have been amassed as well as examine reasons why individuals in positions of economic privilege have distanced themselves from the black underclass. Through engaging with autobiographies, novels, music, documentaries, and cultural criticism, students will come to understand the relationship between the historic legacy of European and American wealth building and the shaping of contemporary black America: from objects of ownership to a community stratified in large numbers in the lower and middle classes to a strong social resistance…

Full course description for Black Life in Wealth and Poverty

This course examines the history of African Americans and race relations in the United States from slavery to freedom. Emphasis is on putting the experiences of African Americans in the context of U.S. social, cultural and political history. The course encourages examination of primary sources (such as slave narratives, newspapers and speeches) to illuminate an African-American cultural and intellectual tradition in U.S. arts and letters. Assignments include library and/or other research.

Full course description for African American History

The Civil Rights revolution of the 1960s represents the culmination of decades of effort, a change in civil rights legislation and a touchstone for subsequent "revolutions." It changed the then current laws and it relied upon law to demand those changes. Many of the debates started then, and continue today. Through reading, discussion, lectures and videos, students study the people, the events (as well as their antecedents and their progeny), and the ideas of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for The Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s

This course will study the Harlem Renaissance, a period of incredible productivity and creativity among black artists and intellectuals between 1920-1940, centered in Harlem, New York. The course considers how concepts -- such as race; the New Negro movement; Jim Crow, segregation, and racism; so-called racial uplift and the Talented Tenth; the Great Migration; the Roaring Twenties, and Modernism were manifested in the works of art, literature, philosophy, film, and music of Harlem's artists and thinkers. In addition to learning the specialized vocabulary and skills involved in the analysis of works from a variety of artistic genres, students will learn how Harlem's leading black intellectuals tied aesthetic theories to social and racialized principles of artistic production, inspiring some artists while prompting others to openly rebel. Given that the Harlem Renaissance is not characterized by any one style, technique, or manifesto, well pay special attention to connections among…

Full course description for The Harlem Renaissance

Through films, poetry, autobiography, novels, lyrics, and short essays, this intermediate-level survey course explores African-American literature from a historical perspective ranging from the works of enslaved authors to contemporary spoken-word poetry. The course celebrates the historical and aesthetic development of African-American literary arts in the face of (often legalized) racial oppression. Students learn techniques and theories for critical reading to explore literary issues related to culture, race, and social history. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism in this literature course.

Full course description for African-American Literature

This course explores the literature by African-American women writers from the 18th century to the present, analyzing their depictions of racism, sexism, and classism as artistic, moral, and civic responses to inequality. Students learn techniques for critical reading and literary analysis at the upper-division humanities level to understand how these creative works explore issues related to the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow laws, and the influence these writers had on cultural events, such as anti-lynching journalism, the Harlem Renaissance, the Civil Rights Era, and the Women's Liberation Movement.

Full course description for Black Women Writers

This course examines works produced by, and heavily influenced by, black philosophers, including historical and contemporary works by thinkers from Africa, the wider African Diaspora, the United States, and Europe. These works will draw our attention to the social construction of race and blackness, and we will dig into how and why black voices have been excluded, and continue to be excluded, from the traditional "western" philosophical and academic canon. Themes may include: philosophies of race and racism, identity, power and knowledge, colonialism, freedom and liberation, intersectionality, the disposability of black bodies, testimonial injustice, afro-pessimism, afro-futurism, and non-violence/whether or not violence can be justified.

Full course description for Philosophy and Blackness

This course investigates the African-American experience from a social psychological perspective. The course gives students insights on one of the largest racial cultural groups in the United States, and the impact of African Americans on the American social system.

Full course description for Psychology of African Americans

This course traces the transatlantic enslavement of Africans and people of African descent, as well as the ways in which those who had been enslaved resisted slavery, in North America as well as Caribbean societies such as Haiti, Jamaica, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. People from Europe and Africa, as well as members of new societies in the Caribbean and in North America, took part in struggles over this new structure of oppression from the first Portuguese extraction of enslaved persons from the West African coast in the 15th century through the abolition struggles and emancipations of the 19th century. Europeans and white Americans turned the pervasive and age-old practice of slavery into something new in its profits, its cruelties, and its capacity to generate new identities and forms of inequality. Resistance to slavery is an essential part of this history and receives great attention in this course, including materials on uprisings in Caribbean societies such as Haiti. This course gives…

Full course description for Slavery and Resistance in North America and the Caribbean

This course will study the Harlem Renaissance, a period of incredible productivity and creativity among black artists and intellectuals between 1920-1940, centered in Harlem, New York. The course considers how concepts -- such as race; the New Negro movement; Jim Crow, segregation, and racism; so-called racial uplift and the Talented Tenth; the Great Migration; the Roaring Twenties, and Modernism were manifested in the works of art, literature, philosophy, film, and music of Harlem's artists and thinkers. In addition to learning the specialized vocabulary and skills involved in the analysis of works from a variety of artistic genres, students will learn how Harlem's leading black intellectuals tied aesthetic theories to social and racialized principles of artistic production, inspiring some artists while prompting others to openly rebel. Given that the Harlem Renaissance is not characterized by any one style, technique, or manifesto, well pay special attention to connections among…

Full course description for The Harlem Renaissance

This course examines the plural voices of black women writing for the theater, from inventive and innovative plays by African women to established and more familiar American playwrights with unique and powerful perspectives that ¿call to action¿ social inequities with significant focus given to issues of race and racism. Students will learn and apply techniques of theatrical and performance arts concepts and elements of writing for movement, sound, and character development with a particular focus on gender and race-based inequities in society

Full course description for Black Women Playwrights: Staging Empowerment

This course serves as an introduction to higher level offerings focusing on Native perspectives and experiences. Self-expression, self-definition, and self-determination, including and beyond the Native North American context, provide the basis of comparison in order to make visible Native experiences around the world. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Global Native and Indigenous Studies

This course provides a context and a baseline for knowledge about Minnesota American Indian urban, rural and reservation communities. The course includes an overview of both the past and present experiences, struggles, and issues and the intersections of the past and the present in Minnesota American Indian communities. Students will have an opportunity to complete a community-based project as part of the requirements for this course. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for American Indians in Minnesota

This course examines significant and current issues in Native America. Drawing across disciplines and tribal communities, the course interweaves the following topics: tribal self-determination; federal, tribal, and state relationships; economic development; language preservation; education; health disparities and health promotion; ethnic identity; urban experiences, and Native American media and art. This class presents Indigenous peoples as modern peoples, not as images from the past. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Topics in Contemporary Native North America

American Indians have a wonderfully rich tradition of wisdom and spirituality. This course looks at the spirituality of at least two nations of American Indians from a variety of perspectives including historical, sociological, anthropological and political. Students have the option to explore other American Indian nations if desired. Some community research is expected. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for American Indian Spirituality

This course focuses on tribal communities as nations set within unique political, linguistic, geographic, social, and cultural contexts. This course will cover a diversity of American Indian Nations' past and present governance and social systems. The course emphasizes the importance of land, treaties, and sovereignty. The background of Federal Indian policy (set through the executive, judicial, and congressional branches) and state influences on Native nations also serves as a component throughout the course.

Full course description for American Indian Nations: Law, Power, and Persistence

This course applies an immersion approach to learning Dakota, the Indigenous language of the Dakota people. The language offers key insights into the formation and transmission of Dakota cultural identities and worldviews. The course is part of larger community efforts to retain and use Dakota and contribute to world-wide efforts to preserve Indigenous languages. Students in the course will learn Dakota grammatical structures and build a working vocabulary sufficient for beginning-level conversations.

Full course description for Dakota Language and Culture

History 310 is a general survey of the history of Native North American nations from pre-contact to the contemporary era. The course makes use of readings, lectures, films, group projects, community investigation, and class discussion to introduce students to the rich diversity of Native North American societies and cultures. American Indian tribes are sovereign nations. Students will explore how Euro-Americans used the construct of race as a tool during the process of settler colonialism to diminish and erase tribal sovereignty and avoid recognizing tribes' inherit power as politically sovereign entities. Throughout this relationship the legalistic erosion of tribal sovereignty was paired with genocidal policies including wars of removal, forced assimilation through the use of boarding schools, and other acts of ethnocide that continue to contribute to contemporary issues in Native Americans communities. Despite these settler colonial actions, tribal governments and Native American…

Full course description for American Indian History

The course surveys a variety of Indigenous oral and written narrative expressions (for example, bilingual texts and pictographic texts) from different regions, including Dakota, Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, and Potawatomi communities, as well as a possible inclusion of First Nations and Métis narratives. Students will explore themes and concepts central to Indigenous individuals, groups, and communities with a culturally-,historically-, and futuristically-informed analytical approach to literary study. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Native American Oral and Written Narratives

This course applies an immersion approach to learning ojibwemowin, the Ojibwe language. The language offers key insights into the formation and transmission of Ojibwe cultural identities and worldviews. The course is part of larger community efforts to retain and use ojibwemowin and contribute to world-wide efforts to preserve Indigenous languages. Students in the course will learn ojibwemowin grammatical structures and build a working vocabulary sufficient for beginning-level conversations.

Full course description for Ojibwe Culture and Language

This course introduces students to place-based knowledge accrued by Indigenous intellectuals over time. Students will learn the way language is vital to Indigenous knowledge and how knowledge of landscapes and caring for places are embedded in Indigenous languages. Art, maps, dance, music, and material culture are part of these knowledge systems bridging land, identity, and place. This course also covers how knowledge has been suppressed and marginalized by White Eurocentric knowledge systems. Note: This course may include being outside on self-guided and group field trips in many different types of weather. This course may also include hands-on activities. The course gives significant focus to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Land, Knowledge, and Identity Through Indigenous Languages

This course provides the historical and contemporary perspectives of Asian Americans in Minnesota from the late 1800s to the present. The historical overview includes immigration and refugee experiences. The contemporary component includes demographics, struggles, conflicts and opportunities of Asian Americans in the state. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Asian Americans in Minnesota

A majority of U.S. immigrants today come from Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. This immigration pattern represents a significant departure from the past, when immigrants came from very different regions of the world. This course traces the unique story of Asian Americans following them from their early days to modern times and analyzing issues with which the group is faced. Short videos and movies are shown followed by discussion. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for History of Asian Americans

This course examines myths and ideological teachings concerning Asian American women, and how these shape their experiences in the United States. Analyses of myths about Asian American women as obedient, submissive, and as sexual objects will be explored. Scholarly writings that present knowledge and critical understanding of these women's experiences and their issues will be part of course readings and discussions.

Full course description for Asian American Women: Myths and Realities

This course will explore the ways Asian American novels, short stories, poetry and film represent, elaborate and challenge how we understand Asian American experience as is it informed by race, gender, sexuality and age. Focusing on major texts of Asian American literature from the early 20th century to the present, we will discuss how and why the study of Asian American literature emerged from its historical exclusion from the U.S literary canon, and how this exclusion is tied to structural racism in the academy, a major institution in U.S. cultural gatekeeping. We will also discuss how the study of Asian American literature benefits from understanding broader historical and political issues relevant to the Asian American experience. To this end, we will read and discuss relevant primary texts and secondary criticism on topics such as (but not limited to), law, citizenship, labor, imperialism, war, anti-Asian racism, comparative racialization, queer identities and activism to deepen…

Full course description for Asian American Literature

This course examines Hmong religion and spirituality practices, traditions, and concepts. Course focuses include animist traditions in Hmong spirituality, the role of the shaman (Txiv Neeb), Hmong cosmology, and Hmong teachings, music, ceremonies, and oral traditions to allow for a deeper understanding of Hmong spiritualities. The study of these various spiritual traditions will be grounded in a transnational social and cultural perspective. Students of all religious, racial, and ethnic backgrounds will be welcome in this course and will benefit by gaining a greater appreciation and understanding of Hmong culture and society, which form an important part of the multicultural mosaic of contemporary Minnesota.

Full course description for Hmong Spirituality

This class introduces students to the primary social, historical, cultural, and political dimensions, issues and debates of Latinos/Hispanics in the United States, including race, ethnicity, immigration, assimilation, language politics, education, varied aspects of public policy, and popular culture. This introductory concepts course is relevant to students thinking of careers in the helping professions, law enforcement, business, finance, marketing, and the humanities and social sciences, in developing Latino/Hispanic cultural competency. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Latino/Hispanic Cultural Competency: Introductory Concepts

This course studies the history and experience of Chicanos and Latinos in Minnesota, including the origins of the Chicano/Latino community, social and political histories, and contemporary issues affecting Chicanos and Latinos in Minnesota. Focuses include immigration to the state; agricultural and urban labor history and settlement patterns; contemporary immigrations streams; race, racism, and xenophobia; and the development of community organizations focused on Latino issues. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Latinas/os in Minnesota

This course studies the cultural politics of US Latino identity formation through an examination of the English-language literary, filmic, and artistic production of Latinos in the United States, with variable topical focuses on coming of age narratives, migration, education, gender, sexuality, the family, cultural identities, and assimilation. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Latina/o Cultural Politics

This course studies and compares concepts of gender and sexuality in US Latinx communities and Latin America. Particular foci of the course are concepts of gender, the family, feminist critical analyses, and historic and contemporary Latin American and Latinx LGBTQ expressions of identity. This course has a significant focus on race and racism.

Full course description for Comparative Latinx and Latin American Gender and Sexuality

This course examines significant works of Latinx literature written in the U.S., focusing on the diversity of the Latinx literary expression. Students will explore relevant sociopolitical contexts and how literature provides insight into the commonalities and differences of the experiences of Latin American diasporas in the US. Topics that may be studied in relation to literary production, include but are not limited to identity (e.g. mestizaje, Afro-Latino/a/x), race, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, as well as borderlands, citizenship, migration, and multilingualism. Emphasis will be on U.S. based literature, but may include some comparative analysis with literary texts across the Americas and the Caribbean. Significant emphasis on race and racism.

Full course description for Latinx Literature of the U.S.