The Critical Race and Ethnic Studies program (CRES) is an interdisciplinary academic home for the study of race and ethnicity.
Critical Ethnic Studies is the critical interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with a focus on the experiences and perspectives of people of color within and beyond the United States. It is driven by social justice and advocacy. Critical Ethnic Studies explores how ideological constructions of race have material consequences in the lived experiences of people of color. Taking an intersectional perspective, it examines how race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and nationality intersect to shape our experiences within what Patricia Hill Collins terms the matrix of domination. As a discipline it unpacks how domination, (settler) colonialism, racism, and slavery have sustained white supremacist capitalist patriarchy historically and in the present. Critical Ethnic Studies examines not only histories of domination and oppression, but also ways that historically marginalized groups have resisted, disidentified with, and re-imagined possibilities for agency in the past, present, and future.