The PhD program in critical ethnic studies offers an innovative path to provide students with broad training to enable them to research and analyze the intersectional and relational workings of race, ethnicity, culture, indigeneity, gender, class, sexuality, religion, dis/ability and legal status in local, regional and global contexts. It provides flexibility for students to pursue their individual research interests, while ensuring that they are grounded in both the foundational and cutting-edge theories in ethnic studies.<br><br>The department is dedicated to interrogating the relational nature of race and its attendant categories, particularly gender and sexuality, using frameworks that account for the increasingly global ways that these categories are constructed, resisted and inhabited. However, we believe that rigorous critical as well as relational analyses can only grow out of deep groundings in the particular areas of Africana, Asian American, Chicanx/Latinx, and Native American/Indigenous studies. Methodologically and theoretically, our faculty members possess training and expertise in interdisciplinary fields, including ethnic studies, women, gender and sexuality studies, environmental studies, critical sports studies, critical and intersectional criminology, cultural studies, literary and film studies, border studies, and American studies, as well as traditional disciplines, including anthropology, history, education, religious studies and sociology.