Curriculum & Courses

ICORE/MORE: the Interdisciplinary Concentration on Race and Ethnicity (ICORE) and the Minor on Race and Ethnicity (MORE) allow Barnard students to study race and ethnicity in their mutual constitution with gender, class, and nation. ICORE and MORE provide interdisciplinary, intersectional and international frameworks for thinking through issues of ethnicity and race in both local and global contexts and in relation to other forms of social difference.  

REAL TIME/REAL TALK BC1111
This course takes as its foundation the words of bell hooks: “When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice.” Over the course of this term, students will learn to embrace their responsibility as intellectuals in the largest sense. By recognizing current issues as sites of intersectional analysis, they will learn to merge their scholarly activities with public discussion and organizational activism. Working collaboratively, they will research topics of current import and, on that basis, organize two speaker events, thereby learning how public intellectual organizing engages both theory and practice.

WMST BC2140 Critical Approaches
This course examines the conceptual foundations that support feminist and queer analyses of racial capitalism, security and incarceration, the politics of life and health, and colonial and postcolonial studies, among others. Open to all students; required for the major in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE). 

WMST BC2150 Practicing Intersectionality
This introductory course for the major in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE) is open to all students. We focus on the critical study of social difference as an interdisciplinary practice, using texts with diverse modes of argumentation and evidence to analyze social differences as fundamentally entangled and co-produced. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this course, the professor will frequently be joined by other faculty from the Consortium for Critical Interdisciplinary Studies (CCIS), who bring distinct disciplinary and subject matter expertise. Some keywords for this course include hybridity, diaspora, borderlands, migration, and intersectionality.