BA in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies in Santa Cruz United States | University of California, Santa Cruz

As the most rapidly expanding major in the Humanities, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) delivers profound insights into how racial constructs and power dynamics have shaped human existence while inspiring visions of social change and equity across history. CRES examines evolving power structures emerging from cultural and systemic formations of racial concepts at local, national, and international levels. This discipline approaches race as a fundamental ideological lens that has both facilitated systems of oppression and fueled movements for freedom and autonomy throughout modern history and current times.

Academic Approach
Examining racial constructs represents a demanding scholarly pursuit that generates vital understanding of the social, political, cultural, and economic forces that have molded the modern world—including colonialism and enslavement, territorial expansion and forced migration, mass violence and conflict, population movements and cultural blending, systemic criminalization, incarceration, and voter suppression, along with globalization and post-9/11 security measures like racial profiling. These critical issues connect CRES to numerous academic disciplines, including postcolonial research, indigenous scholarship, human rights investigations, migration and border studies, multiracial identity research, legal analysis, environmental justice, and scientific inquiry.

CRES represents a deeply interdisciplinary field of study, serving as an academic hub for distinguished faculty who have made groundbreaking contributions to critical race and ethnic scholarship across multiple disciplines for generations, spanning anthropology, community research, education, gender studies, media arts, historical analysis, visual culture studies, Latinx studies, literary criticism, political science, psychological research, sociological investigation, and scientific exploration.