Standing Committee on Ethnic Studies

Faculty members from across the disciplines and schools whose work focuses on ethnicity, migration, indigeneity, and human rights cooperate in this interdisciplinary committee to provide course enrichment for Harvard College students, particularly in Asian American/Transpacific, Native American/Indigenous, and US Latino/American hemispheric topics, with an American focus as well as a transnational one. Ethnic Studies courses address race critique in the social sciences and in the humanities, consider the role of mobility, diasporas and migration as well as of indigeneity in the configuration of group identities and power formations. An overarching concern is the study of the historical, political and cultural forms through which individuals inhabit the political space of the nation and of the transnational sphere, frequently in the wake of colonialism and displacements that have created stateless people.  Bringing to bear the discourse of human rights, Ethnic Studies courses consider the ethics of responsibility that the university must try to foster as it trains citizens and leaders to deal with the construction of political communities as well as the situation of those who are deprived of their legal status. 

Ethnic studies are inherently comparative. Those who wish to understand the uniqueness of a particular people can do so most effectively by comparisons with other. Scholars and students seek to understand why the boundaries of particular ethnic groups change and why this process of ethnic group formation is so fluid. The study of ethnicity at Harvard is focused on the broad canvas of the human experience. While it includes the United States at its center, it is enriched by being situated in a broadly comparative and transnational context. Moreover, the focus of many courses is explicitly historical, making for a better understanding of the changing ways in which individuals choose to affiliate or have been coerced into categories by others.