Concentration in Ethnic, Gender and Labor Studies

Students Admitted Prior to Autumn 2006
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Students Admitted Autumn 2006 and Later
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Overview

Concentration Coordinator: Deirdre Raynor

This concentration focuses on class, ethnicity, and gender to explore how communities form and are transformed. Students also explore similar categories, such as nationality, religion, and citizenship. These areas are explored in the context of important questions such as: What are the sources of wealth and poverty, of racial and ethnic conflict, of gender differences? Students also explore historical roots of various communities and analyze movements for social change and group empowerment.

Career Options

Students of this concentration pursue careers in a range of public and private service organizations, the corporate world, unions and community organizations. It is preparation for graduate study in law, social work, education, public administration and urban policy, history, sociology, political science, and anthropology.

Student Learning Outcomes

Students in Ethnic, Gender, and Labor Studies will develop the following skills:

• Students learn to assess social identities in a variety of cultural and critical contexts.
• Students develop skills in comparative research in regards to the range of lived experiences that represent local and global communities.
• Students may approach this research from the perspective of history, literature, folklore, economics, and political science, among other traditional disciplines.
• The research approaches may emphasize semiotics, subaltern studies, and post colonialism for instance. Some examples of topics students explore in multiple contexts include: transnational migration, borderlands, gendered identities, racial construction, labor movements, polylingual societies, post and neocolonial societies among others.
• Students adopt theoretical approaches that require working knowledge of deconstructive models for identifying social and cultural phenomenon.
• Students develop analytical writing and speaking skills that allow them to explain how individuals and communities interact with each other and create historical and contemporary legacies in local and global contexts.
• Students in this concentration are encouraged to use the knowledge they have gathered about intersections of race/ethnicity, gender, and class as citizens in the larger society in internships while completing the coursework and in their future careers.

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