Gender, Sexuality, & Race Studies

Learning Outcomes for the Gender, Sexuality, and Race Studies Major:

  1. Understand the social construction of gender, sexuality, and race.
  2. Analyze systems of privilege and oppression.
  3. Analyzes how the interdisciplinary field of gender, sexuality and critical race studies questions and transforms the norms of disciplinary knowledge.
  4. Communicate and collaborate across differences.
  5. Practice community-engaged scholarship and coalition building.
  6. Engage in critical imagining to envision alternative futures.

Critical Race Studies Minor Learning Outcomes:

  1. Understand how the social construction of racial and ethnic identities is shaped by power and experienced relative to other intersecting identities, such as gender, sexuality, and class.
  2. Analyze how systemic racism works through social institutions and interpersonal dynamics that maintain white supremacy.
  3. Identify collective strategies to resist race-based injustice and to build personal and collective resilience.

Gender and Sexuality Minor Learning Outcomes:

  1. Analyze the social construction of gender and sexuality within an intersectional framework.
  2. Understand how heterosexism operates within systems of privilege and oppression on individual, interpersonal and social levels.
  3. Compare processes of social formation of gender identity and sexual orientation across history and geography.
  4. Identify collective strategies to resist gender and sexual injustice and to cultivate inclusive communities.
  5. Assess the role of feminist, queer and intersectional theories and pedagogies in transforming the norms of academic knowledge.

Holocaust and Genocide Studies

Students in the Holocaust and Genocide Studies program will:

  1. Locate the Holocaust and other genocides in their historical and cultural contexts.
  2. Identify and critically reflect on moral, spiritual, and ethical issues that are central to learning about, and from, the Holocaust and other genocides,  including dehumanization, complicity, and resistance.
  3. Through engaging with and analyzing written texts, images, monuments, and other cultural and artistic phenomena students will demonstrate an understanding of the diverse perspectives of those who experienced and drew meaning from the Holocaust and other genocides.
  4. Reflect deeply on the Holocaust and other genocides students will challenge and complicate their own assumptions about human behavior and decisions and enhance their own capacities for critical self-reflection and ethical decision-making.
  5. Throughout the program, practice and strengthen their intellectual and civic skills, including the ability to participate in thoughtful and challenging discussion, to write clearly, to build and explain complex arguments, to locate and use evidence ethically, and to advocate for the rights and dignity of others.

Native American and Indigenous Studies

Students earning a minor in Native American and Indigenous Studies will:

  1. Respectfully integrate Indigenous epistemologies and intellectual traditions into their analyses of larger systems, histories and communities;
  2. Explain the importance of community, relational responsibility and reciprocity in shaping their vocations;
  3. Achieve introductory fluency in Southern Lushootseed or another Indigenous language, and explain the relationship between language, culture and ways of knowing;
  4. Address their own relationship to place in ways informed by their understanding of Indigenous relationship to place;
  5. Articulate issues of Indigeneity, race, gender and social difference as issues of power and equity, and identify different Indigenous peoples’ strategies for addressing colonialism, racism, sexism and other systems of social oppression; and
  6. Draw connections between their academic work and personal vocation by reflecting on the importance of community, relational responsibility and reciprocity, what it means to live beautifully, harmoniously and ethically, to engage in work that is useful, and to conduct inquiry that holistically draws on the spiritual, intellectual, physical and social realms.