Ethnic Studies Minor

This course takes a systematic and historic look at immigration as an American national mythos and examines how immigration intersects with race and racial difference, and has affected the development of Black, Asian, Latino and Indigenous cultures and communities within the United States. Topics include immigration histories and experiences, critical conceptions of race, ethnicity, and migration, assimilation and acculturation processes, and social, cultural, and policy responses to migration. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism

Full course description for Immigrant Communities and the Trajectories of Othering

There have been various efforts by individuals and communities of color as well as Native communities to challenge institutional racism, state oppression, and other intersectional forms of domination along with their devastating impact on the parameters of everyday life, the human psyche, families, and American society. These individual acts of protest and social resistance movements continue to play a central role in the construction of politicized racial/indigenous identities and they also inform our understanding of the histories of these communities as well as the structures of settler colonialism, enslavement, nation building, and white supremacy. This class will read personal acts of resistance alongside modern social movements, paying close attention to their relationships to and impacts on racial, ethnic, and indigenous identity; social consciousness; power and agency; and revolutionary freedom in the United States. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for The Politics of Racial Resistance and Protest in the United States

This class focuses on the history and background of the social and environmental issues confronting racial and ethnic communities in the United States. Students learn about the practice and politics of ecological inequality, community initiatives which have developed to combat such inequality, and how environmental justice has emerged as a viable and powerful political movement. This course is useful to students interested in environment and public policy as well as racial and ethnic studies.

Full course description for Environmental Justice and Public Policy

Will race matter in this millennium? This course explores major issues currently impacting race relations in the United States, such as affirmative action, immigrant education, employment, housing, health and welfare, and so on. This course takes historical and interdisciplinary approaches to help students understand the interrelationship between social structure, public policies, race and ethnicity. Videos and movies are shown as part of class discussion on these issues. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Major Issues in U.S. Race Relations

This course focuses on the phenomenon of mixed race descent in the United States. For comparative purposes, the course also explores the topic in relation to other nations. Included in the course are historical perspectives, and exploration of the psychology, sociology and literature associated with mixed race descent. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Politics of Mixed Racial Identity

This course uses one to several field trips as core learning experiences. Academic insights are integrated with direct experiences. All field trips are contextualized to be experiential learning rather than recreational cultural tourism. The course revolves around learning from community interactions. Topics will change from semester to semester. If more than one topics course is taken in fulfillment of the major, they must be different course titles. Some offerings of the class may require the student to pay for parking and additional fees or use one's own means of transportation.

Full course description for Learning From Communities:

This course will examine public policy and practice, and its impact on historically and politically disenfranchised communities of color in America by studying the development of public policy in relation to race, racial identities, and racial communities, and the impact of policy processes and procedures on the private and public realms of social and economic activity in the United States. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Race and Public Policy

This course examines historical experiences of at least three racial groups. Groups explored include African Americans, American Indians, Asian Americans, Chicanos/Latinos and European immigrants. The course considers the different experiences of these groups as impacted by gender, class and other factors. It aims to deepen and broaden students' understanding of racial and ethnic groups in the United States by studying the similarities and differences of their experiences. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Understanding Racial and Ethnic Groups in the United States

This course examines the U.S. prison population and system. Important questions to be explored are: Why are communities of color over represented in U.S. prisons? Is there an inherent racial bias of law enforcement agencies which result in greater arrest and incarceration of African Americans and other racial and ethnic groups? How does the criminalization of political acts effect various movements of social change?

Full course description for Color of Incarceration

This course explores the role and function of religion in the lives of American racial and ethnic groups. It also addresses how religious belief has helped different racial groups in sustaining their struggle for survival and inspiring their lives. Topics covered include the concepts of identity, selfhood, community, spirituality, social responsibility, salvation and freedom. Certain religious tradition, such as African American, American Indian and Asian American, are discussed in the light of histories of the groups. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism. (Also listed as RELS 333 Race and Religion)

Full course description for Race and Religion

This course examines multiple intergenerational impacts and legacies of trauma, focused on concepts of community trauma, perpetrator trauma, and historic and contemporary traumatic events and actions affecting communities of color, Indigenous peoples, and ethnic and ethnoreligious groups. The course examines different sites of trauma, representation of trauma in various media, narratives of loss, mourning, and coping, and the socio-cultural politics of trauma. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Trauma and Traumascapes: Identity, Legacy, and Memory

This course examines conceptions and constructions of race in relation to the Internet as a multidimensional socio-cultural, economic, and political phenomenon, with a specific focus on the United States. Topics may include varied cultural histories and social impacts of the Internet; notions of identity on the Internet; race, embodiment, and disembodiment; social media, race, and racial controversy; electronic activism around race and racial identities on the Internet, and different theoretical approaches to understanding the unique socio-cultural dimensions of race and the internet. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Race, Identity, and the Internet

This course examines the influence of race on ideas and ideals of work in American life. Specific topics include the development of models and types of work across American epochs; slavery and labor; work, worth, and racial citizenship; the "wages of whiteness"; opportunities v. outcomes; past and present social movements for racial workplace equity; affirmative action and public policy positions regarding race and work; Intersectional analyses of race, gender, and sexuality in the workplace, implicit bias and persistent patterns of racial discrimination in the workplace; and race as a social reality within the American workplace. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Race and Work in American Life

This course explores Black (such as Afrofuturism), Indigenous, Latina/o, and Asian American imaginative worlds and futurisms (visions of the world that often blend timelines and events) through interdisciplinary methods and concepts from Ethnic Studies. The concept of ¿imagination¿ is highlighted, to both develop our own imaginative powers and attend to visions of the world that resist racism and oppression, including juxtaposing many forms of popular culture and academic thought. These expressions of presence, power, and speculative futurisms will be explored for how they depict the experiences of communities of color and Indigenous Peoples using Ethnic Studies concepts and theories.

Full course description for Racial and Ethnic Futurisms: Presence, Empowerment, and Imagination

This course considers topics of current or relevant importance in either communities of color or in the field of ethnic studies and are offered for variable credit. Since the topics change from semester to semester consult the Class Schedule for specific topic listing. If more than one topics course is taken in fulfillment of the major, they must be different topics course titles.

Full course description for Special Topics in Ethnic Studies

What exactly is a race? How have conceptions of race changed over time? What does it mean to say that race is socially constructed? What is the relation between the idea of race, racial prejudice and racial oppression? What exactly is racism? What is the precise nature of the harm of racism? What can and should we do about racism -- its historical legacy and its contemporary manifestations? This course uses the tools and methods of philosophy to examine a variety of conceptual and ethical questions about race and racism.

Full course description for Race and Racism: Philosophical Problems

This course provides a context and a baseline for knowledge about Minnesota African American communities. This course includes an overview of the past and present experiences, struggles, and issues and the intersections of the past and the present in Minnesota African American communities. Students will have an opportunity to complete a community-based project as part of the requirements for this course.

Full course description for African Americans in Minnesota

This global, cross-cultural survey course introduces students to a range of texts produced by and about black subjects that link transnational black communities. Students will learn about the legacy of European expansion and empire-building, the impact of the transatlantic slave trade in the New World, and the contemporary diversity of black cultural identities, politics, and expressions born from these conditions. Students will also analyze the lived experiences of immigrants as they negotiate citizenship, belonging, conflict, and representation as new blacks in societies where systems of domination and oppression exist as part of everyday life.

Full course description for Global Blackness

Using contemporary research, first person narratives, and data, students will examine the state of Black America while addressing complex economic, social, political, and environmental issues that Black communities and Black people across the United States continue to face. Students can expect to engage with a range of interdisciplinary texts and sources in order to contextualize Black achievement and progress alongside ongoing resistance movements and demands for social justice. Materials focused on the legacy of enslavement, the impact of centuries of anti-black policies and practices, and the depth of state violence will be covered in order to illuminate contemporary issues related to housing, education, policing, health, work, and everyday life and their impact on Black communities. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Contemporary Issues in Black America

This course will explore the cultural, intellectual, and political knowledge produced by Black people in the United States and within the African Diaspora and how this knowledge continues to define, expand, and challenge the textured experiences of Black life in America and the world. Students will be exposed to a genealogy of Black thinkers, artists, activists, and critics who view the production, analysis, and dissemination of knowledge as necessary responses to structures of social, political, and economic domination and oppression. Students will also consider the extent to which knowledge has shifted meanings of blackness across time and space as well as in response to specific structures and events (slavery, colonialism, liberation, neoliberalism). Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Black Thought

This course will introduce students to the lived realities of social class through the lens of black Americans whose social and economic ties to wealth and ownership have been obstructed via enslavement, job and housing discrimination, and other forms of institutional racism. Fraught with contention, students will analyze material related to racial authenticity and the expectation of communal obligation in instances when wealth and related privileges have been amassed as well as examine reasons why individuals in positions of economic privilege have distanced themselves from the black underclass. Through engaging with autobiographies, novels, music, documentaries, and cultural criticism, students will come to understand the relationship between the historic legacy of European and American wealth building and the shaping of contemporary black America: from objects of ownership to a community stratified in large numbers in the lower and middle classes to a strong social resistance…

Full course description for Black Life in Wealth and Poverty

This course serves as an introduction to higher level offerings focusing on Native perspectives and experiences. Self-expression, self-definition, and self-determination, including and beyond the Native North American context, provide the basis of comparison in order to make visible Native experiences around the world. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Global Native and Indigenous Studies

This course provides a context and a baseline for knowledge about Minnesota American Indian urban, rural and reservation communities. The course includes an overview of both the past and present experiences, struggles, and issues and the intersections of the past and the present in Minnesota American Indian communities. Students will have an opportunity to complete a community-based project as part of the requirements for this course. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for American Indians in Minnesota

This course examines significant and current issues in Native America. Drawing across disciplines and tribal communities, the course interweaves the following topics: tribal self-determination; federal, tribal, and state relationships; economic development; language preservation; education; health disparities and health promotion; ethnic identity; urban experiences, and Native American media and art. This class presents Indigenous peoples as modern peoples, not as images from the past. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Topics in Contemporary Native North America

American Indians have a wonderfully rich tradition of wisdom and spirituality. This course looks at the spirituality of at least two nations of American Indians from a variety of perspectives including historical, sociological, anthropological and political. Students have the option to explore other American Indian nations if desired. Some community research is expected. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for American Indian Spirituality

This course focuses on tribal communities as nations set within unique political, linguistic, geographic, social, and cultural contexts. This course will cover a diversity of American Indian Nations' past and present governance and social systems. The course emphasizes the importance of land, treaties, and sovereignty. The background of Federal Indian policy (set through the executive, judicial, and congressional branches) and state influences on Native nations also serves as a component throughout the course.

Full course description for American Indian Nations: Law, Power, and Persistence

This course applies an immersion approach to learning Dakota, the Indigenous language of the Dakota people. The language offers key insights into the formation and transmission of Dakota cultural identities and worldviews. The course is part of larger community efforts to retain and use Dakota and contribute to world-wide efforts to preserve Indigenous languages. Students in the course will learn Dakota grammatical structures and build a working vocabulary sufficient for beginning-level conversations.

Full course description for Dakota Language and Culture

History 310 is a general survey of the history of Native North American nations from pre-contact to the contemporary era. The course makes use of readings, lectures, films, group projects, community investigation, and class discussion to introduce students to the rich diversity of Native North American societies and cultures. American Indian tribes are sovereign nations. Students will explore how Euro-Americans used the construct of race as a tool during the process of settler colonialism to diminish and erase tribal sovereignty and avoid recognizing tribes' inherit power as politically sovereign entities. Throughout this relationship the legalistic erosion of tribal sovereignty was paired with genocidal policies including wars of removal, forced assimilation through the use of boarding schools, and other acts of ethnocide that continue to contribute to contemporary issues in Native Americans communities. Despite these settler colonial actions, tribal governments and Native American…

Full course description for American Indian History

This course introduces students to place-based knowledge accrued by Indigenous intellectuals over time. Students will learn the way language is vital to Indigenous knowledge and how knowledge of landscapes and caring for places are embedded in Indigenous languages. Art, maps, dance, music, and material culture are part of these knowledge systems bridging land, identity, and place. This course also covers how knowledge has been suppressed and marginalized by White Eurocentric knowledge systems. Note: This course may include being outside on self-guided and group field trips in many different types of weather. This course may also include hands-on activities. The course gives significant focus to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Land, Knowledge, and Identity Through Indigenous Languages

The course surveys a variety of Indigenous oral and written narrative expressions (for example, bilingual texts and pictographic texts) from different regions, including Dakota, Anishinaabe, Ho-Chunk, and Potawatomi communities, as well as a possible inclusion of First Nations and Métis narratives. Students will explore themes and concepts central to Indigenous individuals, groups, and communities with a culturally-,historically-, and futuristically-informed analytical approach to literary study. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Native American Oral and Written Narratives

This course applies an immersion approach to learning ojibwemowin, the Ojibwe language. The language offers key insights into the formation and transmission of Ojibwe cultural identities and worldviews. The course is part of larger community efforts to retain and use ojibwemowin and contribute to world-wide efforts to preserve Indigenous languages. Students in the course will learn ojibwemowin grammatical structures and build a working vocabulary sufficient for beginning-level conversations.

Full course description for Ojibwe Culture and Language

Ojibwe is an indigenous language of Minnesota, and students who take this class will begin to learn to speak and use the Ojibwe language at a basic conversational level. The purpose of this class is not merely to gain an appreciation or knowledge of the Ojibwe language, but to gain a rudimentary ability to use and speak Ojibwe in everyday situations. Thus, some instructors may require students to have a tape or digital recorder for homework assignments. The overall goal is to help students gain a strong grammatical and speaking foundation on which to continue their path towards fluency in the Ojibwe language. Students in this class will also begin to read and write in the Ojibwe language

Full course description for Beginning Ojibwe I

This course provides the historical and contemporary perspectives of Asian Americans in Minnesota from the late 1800s to the present. The historical overview includes immigration and refugee experiences. The contemporary component includes demographics, struggles, conflicts and opportunities of Asian Americans in the state. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Asian Americans in Minnesota

A majority of U.S. immigrants today come from Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. This immigration pattern represents a significant departure from the past, when immigrants came from very different regions of the world. This course traces the unique story of Asian Americans following them from their early days to modern times and analyzing issues with which the group is faced. Short videos and movies are shown followed by discussion. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for History of Asian Americans

This course examines myths and ideological teachings concerning Asian American women, and how these shape their experiences in the United States. Analyses of myths about Asian American women as obedient, submissive, and as sexual objects will be explored. Scholarly writings that present knowledge and critical understanding of these women's experiences and their issues will be part of course readings and discussions.

Full course description for Asian American Women: Myths and Realities

This course examines Hmong religion and spirituality practices, traditions, and concepts. Course focuses include animist traditions in Hmong spirituality, the role of the shaman (Txiv Neeb), Hmong cosmology, and Hmong teachings, music, ceremonies, and oral traditions to allow for a deeper understanding of Hmong spiritualities. The study of these various spiritual traditions will be grounded in a transnational social and cultural perspective. Students of all religious, racial, and ethnic backgrounds will be welcome in this course and will benefit by gaining a greater appreciation and understanding of Hmong culture and society, which form an important part of the multicultural mosaic of contemporary Minnesota.

Full course description for Hmong Spirituality

This class introduces students to the primary social, historical, cultural, and political dimensions, issues and debates of Latinos/Hispanics in the United States, including race, ethnicity, immigration, assimilation, language politics, education, varied aspects of public policy, and popular culture. This introductory concepts course is relevant to students thinking of careers in the helping professions, law enforcement, business, finance, marketing, and the humanities and social sciences, in developing Latino/Hispanic cultural competency. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Latino/Hispanic Cultural Competency: Introductory Concepts

This course studies the history and experience of Chicanos and Latinos in Minnesota, including the origins of the Chicano/Latino community, social and political histories, and contemporary issues affecting Chicanos and Latinos in Minnesota. Focuses include immigration to the state; agricultural and urban labor history and settlement patterns; contemporary immigrations streams; race, racism, and xenophobia; and the development of community organizations focused on Latino issues. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Latinas/os in Minnesota

This course studies the cultural politics of US Latino identity formation through an examination of the English-language literary, filmic, and artistic production of Latinos in the United States, with variable topical focuses on coming of age narratives, migration, education, gender, sexuality, the family, cultural identities, and assimilation. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Latina/o Cultural Politics

This course studies and compares concepts of gender and sexuality in US Latinx communities and Latin America. Particular foci of the course are concepts of gender, the family, feminist critical analyses, and historic and contemporary Latin American and Latinx LGBTQ expressions of identity. This course has a significant focus on race and racism.

Full course description for Comparative Latinx and Latin American Gender and Sexuality

This course examines significant and current issues in Native America. Drawing across disciplines and tribal communities, the course interweaves the following topics: tribal self-determination; federal, tribal, and state relationships; economic development; language preservation; education; health disparities and health promotion; ethnic identity; urban experiences, and Native American media and art. This class presents Indigenous peoples as modern peoples, not as images from the past. Significant focus is given to issues of race and racism.

Full course description for Topics in Contemporary Native North America

Internships offer students opportunities to gain deeper knowledge and skills in their chosen field. Students are responsible for locating their own internship. Metro faculty members serve as liaisons to the internship sites¿ supervisors and as evaluators to monitor student work and give academic credit for learning. Students are eligible to earn 1 credit for every 40 hours of work completed at their internship site.

Full course description for ETHS Internship

Student-designed independent studies give Metropolitan State students the opportunity to plan their own study. This type of independent learning strategy can be useful because it allows students: to study a subject in more depth, at a more advanced level; to pursue a unique project that requires specialized study; to draw together several knowledge areas or interests into a specialized study; to test independent learning capabilities and skills; or to use special learning resources in the community, taking advantage of community education opportunities which, in themselves, would not yield a full college competence. Students should contact their academic advisor for more information.

Full course description for Ethnic Studies Student Designed Independent Studies

Credit for Prior Learning is the method by which students may receive college credit for prior learning obtained through nontraditional means, such as military training/experience, the workplace, or independent study. The course for which credit is being sought must correspond in its content to a course that is currently offered at Metropolitan State University. Competence is demonstrated by passing the final examination of the corresponding course. Students should contact their academic advisor for more information.

Full course description for Ethnic Studies Prior Learning