2025-26 Course Offerings
Below is a tentative list of courses offered in CRES for the 2025-2026 academic year. As always, please check the Schedule of Classes as the official source for the quarter, instructor, and meeting times. Courses may be added as they become available.
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CRES 10 - Intro to CRES
Examines the concept of race, followed by an investigation of colorblindness, multiculturalism, and post-racialism. Race and ethnicity are examined as historically formulated in relationship to the concepts of gender, sexuality, class, nationalism, indigeneity, citizenship, immigration, and inequality.
Marisol LeBron
GE: ER
CRES-EDUC 121: The Struggle for K-12 Ethnic Studies
Critical analysis of the movement for K-12 ethnic studies in historical and contemporary time periods with a particular focus on the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum.
Tricia Gallagher-Geurtsen
*new* CRES 122: Decolonial Intersectionality
This course applies the concept of intersectionality within feminist thinking to an exploration of the limits and possibilities of decolonization and the ways in which gender, race, and indigeneity inform both colonial domination and resistance.
Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar
GE: CC | Social Movements
*new* CRES 129: Black Marxism
Marxism has been a foundational framework for the Black radical tradition. This course offers a theoretical framework to key texts in Marxism, and an overview to the problems, insights, contexts, and interventions that Black intellectuals have deployed in conversation with it.
Nick Mitchell
GE: ER | Black Studies minor | Transnational
CRES 170: Arab Diasporic Communities
Situates Arab American studies and the study of Arab and Muslim diasporic communities originating from the region within a broader global racial order and through an intersectional approach.
Jennifer Mogannam
GE: ER | Transnational | Social Movements
*new* CRES 179C: Artivist Creative Nonfiction Workshop
Students create compelling nonfiction essays combining personal experience, research, and narrative craft. How do we address settler occupation, colonial extraction, carceral violence, migrant dehumanization, climate crisis, misogynist assaults, and anti-trans and anti-queer hatred, while also celebrating solidarity, culture, and connection? Course examines creative nonfiction forms such as the flash essay, memoir, braided essay, reported essay, and hybrid essay. Assignments include in-class writing exercises, a text presentation, annotated bibliography, initial and revised essay drafts, and peer feedback.
Melisa Casumbal-Salazar
GE: PR-C
CRES 185: Race, Gender, Science
In this course, we will think critically and creatively together about the ways in which science as a practice and a way of knowing gives rise to particular and perhaps peculiar ways of experiencing bodies as individual, raced, gendered, and even 'specied'. We will explore a variety of issues in contemporary science and technology, with an emphasis on body and embodiment – that is, ways of knowing and experiencing the body within and beyond science, and within and beyond race and gender.
Kriti Sharma
*new* CRES 188X: Reggaeton (Special Topics)
Marisol LeBron
From making songs in makeshift studios in public housing to the mainstage at Coachella, reggaeton has gone from a criminalized subculture to one of the most dominant musical genres in the world. Artists like Bad Bunny, Rauw Alejando, and Daddy Yankee are among the most listened to artists on the planet boasting billions of streams despite singing almost exclusively in Spanish. How did we get here? This course traces the history of reggaeton music and culture between Puerto Rico and the United States in order to explore questions of race, gender, sexuality, capitalism and empire. What does it mean for a Black musical genre rooted in spaces of diaspora that have been touched by colonial violence to “crossover” and become pop music? What can we learn about politics and pleasure from queer and femme artists and fans that are challenging the misogyny and cisheteronormativity that have long marked the genre? Can party music be a vital site of resistance? Ultimately, this course will help students understand the complex history and politics embedded in the music we often take for granted as it plays in our earbuds, spills out of widows, and booms from passing cars.
*new* CRES 190E: Palestine as Analytic
This senior seminar centers concepts, theories, and frameworks central to the field of ethnic studies that are advanced by examining the Palestinian context. While these concepts exist within ethnic studies on their own, situating them within Palestinian experiential knowledge advances and broadens the scope in which we come to understand these central frameworks. These central frameworks include: settler colonial and indigenous studies, carcerality, critical refugee studies, third world feminisms, social movements and resistance studies, and transnationalism studies and third world solidarities. We will study these frameworks through the Palestinian condition and ways of knowing and being. Palestine’s expansion of key concepts in ethnic studies will reflect new ways of analyzing power and of taking up critical inquiry. Thus, we will learn Palestinian history, experience, AND analytics.
Jennifer Mogannam
Prerequisite(s): CRES 10, CRES 100, and CRES 101; and satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements. Enrollment is restricted to senior critical race and ethnic studies majors.
Transnational | Social Movements
CRES 190N: Science/Fiction and the Possible
Where are the limits of our imaginations around science and technology? How does existing science fiction reimagine the same old kinds of science, technology, and social and political relations between people? How do they wildly reimagine all these categories? This senior seminar analyzes and creates short pieces of speculative fiction that imagine new political configurations capable of giving rise to different forms of science and technology than those currently on offer. Class collates these into an anthology, and culminate the course with a public reading of our work.
Kriti Sharma
Prerequisite(s): CRES 10, CRES 100, and CRES 101; and satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements. Enrollment is restricted to senior critical race and ethnic studies majors.
GE: PE-T
CRES-FMST 190V: Marxism and Feminism
Explores critically the intersections and crisis points between feminism and Marxism as bodies of thought, theoretical formations, and forms of historical inquiry.
Nick Mitchell
Prerequisite(s): CRES 10, CRES 100 and CRES 101; satisfaction of the Entry Level Writing and Composition requirements. Enrollment is restricted to senior CRES majors.
Fall 2025
