Ethnic Studies

How do social divisions and differences shape our identities, actions, and life-chances? This course provides an introduction to key debates in contemporary sociology, examining the forces that drive social stratification and the construction of social identity. In this course, students gain a critical understanding of current research and analysis in the study of social inequalities around class, race, and gender, exploring how sociology helps us to address topical real-world issues. The course centers on the ways in which power relations, patterns of social stratification and inequality, and diverse identities are shaped in contemporary societies – focusing on structural divisions, social movements, and everyday experiences and identities in different international contexts.

This course examines Australia’s rich and complex Aboriginal linguistic heritage in contemporary and traditional contexts. It covers language and the land, kinship and social organization, narrative and conversation, language acquisition, language contact, language and education, language maintenance and revival. There will be a focus on how new ways of speaking are created, how languages are lost, and the ways in which Aboriginal speakers are teaching and reviving their traditional languages today. 

This course focuses on how race and ethnicity have been conceptualized over time, putting them into historical and contemporary context. It explores how race and ethnicity intersect with other social structures such as gender, class, and religion that affect advantages and disadvantages, inclusions and exclusions, and the ways individuals and groups challenge racialized and ethnicized inequalities. 

This course aims for students to understand the articulation between capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy based on the processes of women's struggles and resistance against racism in Chile. This approach implies challenging the European thinking on the categories of work and woman with the goal of decentering the Western idea of "humanity". The previous task requires having an epistemological vigilance at the time of researching women, particularly those belonging to stigmatized groups, such as sexual diversity, migrants, and the Mapuche people.

In this course students trace the socio-political, cultural, and anthropological constructions of race, racialization and ethnicity in the host location from the country's history until the present day. Reflecting the increasingly charged articulations of race, racism, and race-based grievances in the host location, students study a wide range of issues, from the lingering legacy of colonialism and decolonization (and the attendant construction of racialized thinking), to reading race and ethnicity in host location, the role of race and ethnicity in the politics of immigration and the rise of ethno-nationalism, and the state of socio-political and cultural social policies that redress racialized and ethnic inequities – from affirmative action and (postcolonial) reparations, to social justice and police reform, and the decolonization of cultural institutions and the media landscape. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach to these issues, students learn how the history and contemporary lived reality of race (relations) and ethnicity in the host location can only be understood by accessing and closely examining -- from a variety of disciplinary vantage points -- the deep cultural archive of the host location and its people. At the same time, students analyze how discourses of race that originated in the United States circulate globally, are refracted through processes of mediation, and inflect local articulations of race, ethnicity and identity.