SUMMARY

Augsburg University maintains a “Department of Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies,” created as a “result of the collaborative effort by faculty and student advocates in response to the ongoing movements around racial equity and social justice.” 

• The department aims to help students become “responsible leaders in pressing issues such as reproductive health, antiracism, decolonization, immigrant and refugee advocacy, contributing to social justice-oriented cultural production, public policies, and other innovative strategies for transformative social action.”

COURSES

The Department of Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies offers courses such as:

CRS 101 – Introduction to Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies

The course “provides students with complex vocabularies and frameworks to understand how race intersects with gender, sexuality, class, (non)citizenship, and nation in producing systems of power and inequality” and “examines large historical structures around the management of land, labor, and bodies (settler colonialism [sic], chattel slavery, immigration labor, refugee flows, globalization), and how our everyday lives are informed by larger social and economic structures.”

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CRS 141 – History Untold: Southeast Asian American Refugee Experiences

The course “focuses on shared and unique experiences of Southeast Asian diaspora in the United States –– among Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, and Hmong American refugees” and examines “these experiences as enabled by U.S. imperialism and closely tied to domestic racial/gendered management.”

It also “utilizes critical refugee studies, queer/feminist thoughts, using scholarly texts, creative materials, and cultural productions.”