Assuming the role of Director of Graduate Studies at a time of global public health crisis and large-scale upheavals against racial injustice in the U.S. and beyond is a reminder of the urgent task of training future generations of public intellectuals and scholar activists in Ethnic Studies. As a field, Ethnic Studies was forged in the fires of resistance against imperialism, settler colonialism, racial violence, hetero-patriarchy, homophobia and all forms of oppression, discrimination, displacement, dispossession and exploitation. Now more than ever, our graduate program is committed to the formation of future generations of Ethnic Studies organic intellectuals in our interdisciplinary field and in our diverse communities.

The Master’s and Ph.D. programs in Ethnic Studies provide graduate students with training in a variety of fields and traditions including: Native studies; Black feminisms; Asian American and refugee studies; Chicanx/Latinx studies and politics. Running across our graduate programs is a commitment to approach Ethnic Studies in a critical, comparative, cross-border and community-based pedagogy and praxis. Graduate students benefit from faculty expertise in indigenous epistemologies, art and language reclamation; critical carcerality, environmental and social movement theories; diasporic cultural production and performance; and subaltern struggles around cultural politics, education and migrant rights, among other specializations. In terms of research methods and approaches, graduate students in Ethnic Studies are trained in everything from humanities, cultural studies, historical, archival, ethnographic, social scientific and political analyses, depending on their intellectual interests and projects. Additionally, the Ethnic Studies graduate program is fortunate to count on the support of collaborating faculty in other departments who enrich our training in areas such as queer studies and cultural production. In this manner, our graduate program seeks to continue to train critical public intellectuals who will make an impact in academia, in their communities and beyond.

I look forward to working with past, current and future cohorts of Ethnic Studies graduate students in my capacity as Director of Graduate Studies.

In solidarity,

Adrián Félix
adrian.felix@ucr.edu
Director of Graduate Studies
Department of Ethnic Studies
University of California, Riverside

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