CCIS Minors and Concentrations

The purpose of the Interdisciplinary Concentration on Race and Ethnicity (ICORE) and Minor on Race and Ethnicity (MORE) is to make available to Barnard students the interdisciplinary and critical study of race and ethnicity in their mutual constitution with gender, class, and nation. ICORE and MORE provide an intersectional and international framework for thinking through issues of ethnicity and race in both local and global contexts and in relation to other forms of social difference. Advanced seminars allow students to use this framework for the in-depth study of a particular topic. For those students who desire to pursue graduate education in the field of Ethnic Studies, ICORE and MORE will provide background preparation.

To sign up, contact Janet Jakobsen, ICORE/MORE Director.

Learning Outcomes

Students who complete either the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor on Race and Ethnicity will learn how to:

1. Gain exposure to the theories and methods of Ethnic Studies;
2. Interpret arguments in light of the expanding literature in Ethnic Studies;
3. Understand processes of racialization in historical and geographical context;
4. Understand the mutual constitution and relative autonomy of axes of social differentiation;
5. Comprehend how national boundaries, as well as local, national and transnational cultures and politics affect the constitution of racial and ethnic categories;
6. Compare representations of borderlands, hybridity, migration and diaspora from different cultures; and
7. Identify and communicate the importance of ethnic and racial diversity to an increasingly global and interconnected world.

The central convictions of the Environmental Humanities are, first, that the natural world always raises questions that are simultaneously scientific and social and, second, that any meaningful effort to address environmental challenges must emerge from both humanistic and scientific considerations. How might the climate crisis necessitate a change in our conception of what it means to be human? What new ethics are required to extend political rights to non-human beings? How must environmental activism address structural racism and the long history of Western imperialism? What can be learned from Indigenous and feminist conceptualizations of the environment and of environmental action? Is capitalism inherently hostile toward the natural world? How have aesthetics shifted in an age of heightened climate change? How has the new figure of the Anthropocene entered the public imagination through film, literature, art, music, and dance? These are just a few of the questions that scholarship in the Environmental Humanities takes up.

To sign up, contact Jayne Hildebrand EHMC Director.

Learning Outcomes

Students who successfully complete this minor or concentration will be able to demonstrate critical understandings of:

1. the science of climate change.
2. the environment as both naturally and culturally constituted.
3. how social difference and social power are negotiated at the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, and class, with complicated environmental outcomes.
4. how diverse forms of environmentalist work—whether analytical, artistic, or activist—are embedded within histories and dynamics of race, ethnicity, gender, and class.
5. how environmental harms and remediation attempts are embedded within social, political, and economic power dynamics and hierarchies.
6. the contributions of humanistic scholarship and expressive arts to environmental studies and environmental justice more broadly.

Science and Technology Studies (STS, also sometimes referring to “Science, Technology, and Society”) is a capacious and inherently interdisciplinary academic field that investigates the intimate entanglements between the technical and social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. Understanding this interplay is central to addressing many of the most pressing problems of our times, such as struggles around vaccination, climate justice and environmental racism, health disparities, digital surveillance, and the growing mistrust in “science” as a domain of authority. F/ISTS is a focused approach to Science and Technology Studies (STS) that homes in on the reciprocal relations between techno-scientific knowledge and practices, on the one hand, and gender, race, class, and other intersecting axes of power, on the other.

To sign up, contact Rebecca Jordan-Young, F/ISTS Director.

Learning Outcomes

Students who successfully complete this minor or concentration will be able to demonstrate critical understandings of:

1. Examine the role of cultural, ethical, social, political and economic factors in determining the norms, values and meanings of scientific, technological and medical practices.
2. Understand the ways in which the production and applications of science, technology and medicine shape and are shaped by knowledge  and beliefs about gender, race, class, and sexuality.
3. Situate technoscientific and biomedical discourses within local, national, and transnational contexts.
4. Situate their own relations to science, medicine, and technology within structures of power and cultural-historical forces.
5. Contribute to feminist, historical, and decolonial accounts of contemporary biomedicine and technoscience.
6. Craft and evaluate efforts to create more socially just, equitable and inclusive science, technology, and medicine in a diverse and globalized world.

Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) engages Indigenous knowledges and methodologies to study the world, potentially touching all areas of intellectual work across the college. The NAIS minor can contribute to building an intellectual community among students, staff, and faculty across the Barnard community who are dedicated to the critical analysis of colonialism. Given its location in a feminist institution of higher education, NAIS at Barnard raises particular questions about gender, sexuality, and feminist struggle in relationship to colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty. Moreover, NAIS addresses New York City as an Indigenous space, home to the largest urban population of Native Americans and Indigenous people in the US, and a major location for Native American and Indigenous histories in the arts, politics, and activism. NAIS is intended to facilitate the development of new generations of thinkers, whose work will contribute to the well-being of Indigenous nations and communities.

To sign up, contact Manu Karuka, NAIS Director.

Asian American Studies emerged as a result of student organizing against racism and war in the late 1960s, most famously at San Francisco State College, where a campus-wide strike led to the founding of the first College of Ethnic Studies in the U.S. More than simply advocating a multicultural politics of visibility and inclusion, Asian American Studies opened up space for critical scholarship on the relationship between US foreign policy in Asia and waves of Asian migration, as well as on processes of racial formation, unequal citizenship, labor stratification, diasporic belonging/unbelonging, and the aesthetic practices of representation and self-representation. Asian Diaspora and Asian American Studies at Barnard offers an approach to this interdisciplinary field informed by transnational and intersectional feminism, Black, Indigenous, and critical ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, and queer diasporic critique. Students are encouraged to explore histories and experiences of Asian populations in the U.S. and also to de-center the U.S. by investigating the transregional and translocal interconnections within Asia and beyond. ADAAS at Barnard encompasses Asian diasporas from West Asia (usually known by the colonial term “Middle East”) to the Pacific Islands in the context of global capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.


To sign up, contact Manijeh Moradian, ADAAS Director at mmoradia@barnard.edu

Learning Outcomes
Students who successfully complete this minor or concentration will be able to demonstrate critical understandings of:
1. the genealogies and critical questions shaping the field of Asian Diaspora and Asian American Studies 
2. the historical processes of colonial modernity and racialization and how these have shaped Asian migration and diasporic and minority experiences
3. how social difference and social power are negotiated at the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, and class, with complicated political and cultural outcomes.
4. how local, regional, and global histories and contemporary conditions interact to shape disparate experiences of migration and diaspora for heterogeneous Asian populations
5. how theories of diaspora offer new frameworks of investigation and understanding, problematizing normative notions of national culture, authenticity, citizenship, and belonging
6. the complex and shifting politics of self-representation and expressive cultural work for different Asian diasporic populations
7. how to place Asian diasporic histories of racialization, inclusion, and exclusion in relation to histories of anti-Blackness, the dispossession of indigenous populations, and the experiences of other diasporic communities.