Equity Studies

In the Equity Studies focus area, students will be introduced to a broad range of scholarship grounded in lineages of insurgent and resurgent knowledges. Building from long histories, these knowledge practices are currently emerging from political mobilization around climate justice activism, Indigenous and Afro futurisms, migrant justice movements, queer/trans and gender non-conforming mobilizations, abolitionist politics, food security, and others.

The Equity Studies focus area takes a critical orientation to equity, introducing students to scholarship, faculty and a research ethic that support them in:

• articulating generative and critical practices of coalition, just social relations, and liberatory futures;
• challenging and reorienting away from dominant forms of knowledge production;
• understanding and tracing power, dominance and complicity across multiple contexts; and,
• mapping and analyzing forms of inequity, oppression and marginalization.

The foundational course, currently titled Equality in Context (MAIS 635), will focus on introducing students to the grounding lexicon or key concepts in this area of study, research, and praxis. Together, students will apply these key concepts to the study of a particular institutional context. Through the foundations course, students will be situated to take a deeper dive in courses focused on critical race theory, critical disability studies, gender and sexuality, cultural studies, global education and community change, Indigenous research methodologies, and further study into our relationality with the more than human world. Courses in the Equity Studies focus area range in their attention to the local, regional, national, and global, hence will offer students an opportunity to reflect on, research, and apply their knowledge in places and spaces that matter to them.

In being supported in their reading of insurgent and resurgent scholarship, Equity Studies students should emerge with a solid understanding of intersecting, interacting, and relational structures of domination (for example, racism and white supremacy; settler colonialism, colonialism, and imperialism; heteropatriarchy; capitalism; ableism; casteism). Most critically, students will be encouraged to turn their attention toward the ways in which rich legacies of mobilization for just and liberatory futures transcend the imaginaries of our institutions.

Foundational courses

Grouped study

Electives

Grouped study

Individualized study