Race, Indigeneity, Disability, Gender, and Sexuality Minor

The RIDGS graduate minor is the critical and comparative study of significant social categories of power and inequality, namely race, ethnicity, indigeneity, disability, gender, sexuality, class, sovereignty, and diaspora. This interdisciplinary minor foregrounds a transnational and comparative framework to analyze these multiple forms of social difference and their interactions in relation to one another. While the focus is on the United States, given the minor's attention to the making of social categories and borders, the analytical lens and purview of the minor will be transnational in scale and scope.

Seminars in the minor are grounded by a strong commitment to the analysis and understanding of power relations, structural inequality, and social justice through a relational and multidisciplinary approach. The RIDGS graduate minor focuses on the processes that constitute the categories and groups in the first place, rather than juxtaposing discrete groups, and offers tools for theorizing their mutual constitution. Accordingly, this graduate minor privileges intersectionality, interdisciplinary, transnationalism, comparison, and relationality. What distinguishes this graduate minor is its conceptual and theoretical approach, which not only makes this program complementary to existing graduate courses of study at UMN, but also engages multiscalar justice and equity discourses, in historical and contemporary perspectives.

The RIDGS graduate minor strengthens student work in their major field of study as students learn how best to integrate critical and comparative race, ethnicity, indigeneity, disability, gender and sexuality theories and methodologies into their existing work.