Critical Race and Political Economy

The Department of Critical Race and Political Economy’s (CRPE) curriculum cultivates an understanding of how race, colonialism, and other systems of power have structured human lives and their environments on local, national, and global scales. CRPE students explore how race has informed the imagination of social transformation, justice, and liberation in the past and present. CRPE approaches “race” as a shifting relation through which power and domination are rationalized, but also a foundation on which struggles for liberation and self-determination are waged.

CRPE is an interdisciplinary department that sustains a collaborative curriculum that builds upon the integrity of Africana Studies, Latinx Studies, and critical social thought. At a time of tremendous social and political upheaval in the US and around the world, CRPE is grounded in critical race theory and the interdisciplinary traditions of Black feminism, ethnic studies, queer and trans* critique, migration and border studies, disability justice, abolitionism, and decolonial praxis. Our curriculum approaches political economy as a basis for critical engagement with liberal conceptions of property, individualism, and rights. This critical standpoint informs interdisciplinary, intersectional analyses of the role that borders, prisons, military bases, urban infrastructures, and rural extraction zones play in the structural management of populations deemed surplus to the global economy. Also central to the curriculum are critical and creative engagements with art and expressive cultures, which reimagine dominant histories, record structures of feeling, and envision radical futures.

CRPE is guided by the principle that interdisciplinary research and thinking are at the core of cutting-edge liberal arts scholarship. Bridging the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, the curriculum interrogates the constitution of knowledge and the construction of social categories outside of the confines of traditional disciplinary boundaries. The department incorporates a problem-solving methodology, which will allow for student-driven inquiry and research that combines social, cultural, and political critique with a concern for addressing pressing global and local issues. Given the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of our student body, our curriculum will also enable students to connect their identities with critical frameworks that address social positioning in diverse historical and geographical contexts.