'Race and Resistance Studies' major trains future 'racial social justice' activists with 'Radicalism and Revolution' course
San Francisco State University stresses that the curriculum is not theoretical because it focuses on practical means of resistance.
Curriculum focuses on 'histories of resistance, gender issues, transnational issues, and cultural production,' according to the department website.
San Francisco State University (SFSU) is offering an undergraduate major in “Race and Resistance Studies” to train students in the “multiple forms of resistance and struggle aimed at achieving racial social justice.”
“Race and Resistance Studies utilizes an approach that is comparative/relational, interdisciplinary, intersectional, and centered in a praxis of resistance,” the department’s mission statement reads.
The major will cover “histories of resistance, gender issues, transnational issues, and cultural production.” The department also offers a minor program.
[Related: University displays ‘Guiding Principles for Social Justice’ poster across campus]
SFSU stresses that the curriculum is not theoretical because it focuses on practical means of resistance.
“Our degree will produce cohorts of highly motivated, critical thinkers and socially engaged students who will use their analytic frameworks to build upon existing service and organizing work among disenfranchised communities of color in the U.S. and abroad,” the department website states.
The explanation continues, “We seek to build a praxis that unites both theory/study and practice/organizing. As such, our students have and will continue to be engaged with social movement building efforts that allow them to demonstrate their development as leaders and engage a life committed to both understanding and transforming the world on the basis of social justice.”
One course in the program, RRS 694 Community Service Learning: Praxis in Race and Resistance Studies, provides students with “experiential learning” in “struggles for social justice, community empowerment, and equity within and across communities of color.”
Another course, RRS 520 Race, Radicalism and Revolution, “[s]urveys diverse revolutionary movements and moments” to give students an understanding of the “relationship of ‘the revolution’ to state” and an idea of “liberated visions of society/world.”
RRS 410 Grassroots Organizing for Change in Communities of Color is an “advanced examination of grassroots social change movements” which studies “[h]ow they are organized and why they succeed and fail” and “[c]ombines social change theory, history, and practical contemporary approaches to grassroots social justice work.”
The major also includes a study of how to “analyze youth culture and its relationship to social change” in RRS 480 Youth Culture, Race and Resistance.
Campus Reform contacted SFSU for comment. This story will be updated accordingly.
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