Graduate Study

The Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity (RDI) will be offering graduate-level courses through its core and affiliated faculty to masters, doctoral, and professional school students.

RDI plans to establish a multi-level graduate degree program in stages, beginning with forming a Ph.D. certificate program for students participating in doctoral programs elsewhere on campus, admitting and enrolling Masters students in the Social Sciences and Humanities for MA degree studies, and eventually admitting and enrolling students into RDI’s own Ph.D. program.

Those taking classes or seeking advising at all levels of graduate studies in RDI can expect to be trained rigorously in approaches to situated knowledge and experience in modern and contemporary contexts. This involves attending to particular categories of race, diaspora, and indigeneity, as well as connecting these categories in comparative and intersectional ways.  Utilizing our uniquely interdisciplinary core and affiliated faculty, graduate students can expect to learn how to apply multiple academic methodologies, including data gathering and analysis, feminist and queer theory, material cultural studies, global thought, creative archiving, media making and analysis, poetics, ethnography and historicist approaches to diverse fields of social sciences and the humanities.

Crucially, graduate students in RDI will find multiple opportunities to apply their work beyond the classroom and campus. This is intended not only to encourage intellectual sharing across a more public conception of audience, but also to acknowledge that appealing to broader social wisdom is as vital to the advancement of knowledge as professional peer engagement and review.  In keeping with both the Department and University’s expectations of rigorous inquiry and learning, our departmental faculty will collaborate intentionally with one another, and with entities within and outside of the University, to curate environments in which novel and creative inquiry, conversation, debate and vetting of ideas can be achieved and sustained.