The Critical Ethnic Studies minor prepares artists, designers, and changemakers to identify, frame, and analyze societal issues related to power and privilege, restorative justice, and radical social transformation. Students utilize interdisciplinary methods to examine how social problems fueled by modernity intersect with cultural and artistic productions of resistance and radical knowledge production. Students are expected to draw upon what they know and understand to generate new questions, new knowledge, new understandings and pose art and design-based solutions to those problems that center advocacy, engagement, and action.

Situated within Humanities and Sciences, the minor is designed to complement all degree programs in architecture, design, fine arts, and humanities and sciences. Through project-based learning, students who have a passion for ideas and culture can complete this minor to broaden the discourse of their major.

Is the CES minor right for you?

The CES minor is designed for students who are interested in signaling capabilities in socially engaged art and design practices alongside their BA/BFA/BArch degrees. Drawing on the broad and multifaceted discipline of Critical Ethnic Studies, students will have the benefit of interdisciplinary coursework informed by local and global sustainable community development, creative leadership, and grassroot activist practices in art and design. Firmly aligned with the college-wide undergraduate learning outcomes, Collaboration, Critical Thinking, Diversity, Professional Practice and Social Responsibility, the minor additionally asks students to employ a code of ethics based in shared humanity and collective humanness in conjunction with their major of choice.

With transnational, decolonial, and intersectional approaches, the minor opens pathways of connection between the H&S, Design, Fine Arts and Architecture divisions. It serves as a gateway for college-wide courses in global art and design pedagogy, entrepreneurship, designing sustainable communities and products, cooperative economics, alternative currencies, and sustainable urban agriculture, to name a few. Students who want to work in activist art practices, radical social praxis, socially and politically targeted interventionist art and design practices, or concentrate on traditional socially engaged art and design and related social justice-based initiatives have a home here.

The minor develops an open, exploratory, creative inquiry that focuses on changing students’ thinking through constant engagement with or reflection on their own complicity with the difficult intersections of colonialism. This includes its knowledges, and privileges according to their discipline and when working in collaborative environments. As we all adjust to ongoing collective radical change, our approach engages the politics and practices of knowledge production and builds the critical skills, language and tools for analyzing and describing what students engage with and how.

Students who complete the requirements of the minor will have multiple career opportunities in the private and or public sector and some will choose to continue with graduate studies to deepen their overall ethnic studies and/or art and design practices, and to further increase their skills for professional environments.

Finding Courses

To browse eligible classes for the CES minor...

1. Login to Workday.
2. Open the Find CCA Course Sections report.
3. Look in the "Course Tag" section of the left column.
4. Find the type of course you need based on these course tags:

• MINOR :: CES - Seminar
• MINOR :: CES - Studio
• MINOR :: CES - Portfolio

Click here to see the courses required to complete the CES minor.

Advising

To learn how the Critical Ethnic Studies Minor can fit into your academic plans, please contact:

• Shylah Hamilton, Critical Ethnic Studies Chair and Lead Faculty for the minor
• A program advisor (for your major)

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