The Race, Ethnicity, and Migration Studies Program of Colorado College
The program in Race and Ethnic Studies (RES) is an interdisciplinary program that offers students an opportunity to engage in the examination of ethnicity and race and their systematic relationship with class, gender and sexuality as they appear in all facets of American culture and society. Political, social, and economic relationships as well as cultural and artistic expressions are all important to Race and Ethnic Studies as students examine the nature of power, social inequality, and social change. It serves as a focal point for the study of race and ethnicity through a comparative, transnational, and interdisciplinary lens.
The Race and Ethnic Studies Program at Colorado College promotes the study of race, ethnicity, and migrations as central to a liberal arts education in the 21st century. We believe that the breadth of knowledge generation and scholarship that furthers the liberation of peoples and justice in a variety of nations, cultures, and societies is vast, complex and crucial.
While recognizing the historicity of centers and margins, metropoles and peripheries, our curriculum supports a vision of the world that does not assume a center/margins or dominant/subordinate structure but lateral movements across distances and differences and across time periods. The experiences, perspectives, and scholarship of people of color are the foundation of our curriculum and activities beyond the classroom. While the primary focus of our curriculum is on the presence and resonance of migrations that flow through the United States, we acknowledge the dynamic and permeable nature of borders and look at the US as one example of race and ethnic formations in a global context. We promote the comparative study of the processes and effects of racialization in the past and present. We also look at historical linkages that thread together processes of colonization, migration, diaspora and displacement.
We believe that W.E.B. DuBois’s words penned at the beginning of the last century: “[t]he problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line—in America and the islands of the sea" are even more significant and demanding of urgent attention in the 21st century, which is being shaped by large-scale migrations that are creating deep and perplexing transformations of economics, culture, and policy in our nation and abroad. RES classes give our students the interdisciplinary theories, methodologies, and perspectives to understand this phenomenon and its repercussions. In addition to classes that encourage students to confront and understand the history and theorization of racial formations both nationally and transnationally, we also teach students to recognize and understand racial representations and self-representation in the age of digital and new media. We also address inequities generated by global capital and the geopolitics of economic and political power structures. Race and Ethnic Studies in the United States grew out of a commitment to bridging conventional gaps: between academia and communities in the larger society; theory and policy; and ideas and actions. RES teaching, scholarship, and activism epitomizes Colorado College’s traditional commitment to offering our students experiential, relevant liberal arts classes that prepare them to understand and be successful in a rapidly changing world.
