SUMMARY

Florida Atlantic University offers a certificate program in ethnic studies, where students “examine different theories of ethnicity and race as well as other issues about the creation and legitimization of ethnicity emerging from its social and historical construction.” 

The program “stresses that scholarly examination of racial and ethnic communities helps illuminate the parallels, contradictions and strengths evident in every community.”

Students are required to take one of the following courses: “History of American Immigration and Ethnicity,” “Class, Gender, and Race in the American Community Since 1900,” “Race and Ethnic Relations, Minorities and the Media,” “American Multicultural Discourse,” or “Ethnicity and Communication,” along with several upper division “distribution courses.”

COURSES

AMH 3530 – History of American Immigration and Ethnicity

The course provides an overview of “the immigrant and ethnic experience in American society.”

AMH 4318 – Class, Gender, and Race in the American Community Since 1900

The course “examines the roles played by race, class, gender and sexuality in identity and group formation as well as societal differentiation.”

• The course “shows how inequalities along those lines shape and are shaped by social institutions including the media, education, the economy and family.”

SYD 4700 – Race and Ethnic Relations

The course “examines the evolution of race, the construction of racial and ethnic distinctions and the roles and experiences of racial and ethnic groups in the United States from a historical perspective.”

MMC 3601 – Minorities and the Media

The course provides an analysis of “images of minorities in television programming and in motion pictures” and studies the origin of social stereotypes, their relationship to societal development and an examination of other alternatives.”

SPC 3014 – American Multicultural Discourse

The course includes an “exploration of the rhetorical practices of multicultural Americans utilizing rhetorical criticism as a tool to study the persuasive efforts of multicultural discourse in the United States.”

SPC 4718 – Ethnicity and Communication

The course provides “a comparative analysis focusing on communication patterns among different cultural groups living within the United States.”

Distribution Courses

Students must choose from a variety of far-left distribution courses, such as:

• “African-American Vernacular”
• “Women of Color in U.S. Society”
• “Self and Society”
• “Social Change”
• “Women’s History in the Developing World”