Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity

The Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity (RDI) is dedicated to investigating, interrupting, and challenging the historical and social processes, the cultural and political practices, and the formations of identity and community that are integral to these three concepts. Our project is committed to knowledge-making founded in the dynamism of social life and resistance to bondage, exploitation, and dispossession. The ambition of the department is to foster a breadth of vision, new aesthetic imaginaries, conceptual rigor, innovative pedagogical approaches, and deep engagement within and beyond the university that will enable communities to tackle some of the most challenging issues of the current historical moment in ways that defy intellectual, disciplinary, and geographic orders.

graduate study

undergraduate study

The Department of RDI unites three concepts that have shaped the modern world and continue to reverberate in contemporary thought, action, culture, and policy. Race, diaspora, and indigeneity emerge from distinctive yet overlapping structures of power. At the same time, these categories have become the sites of collective meaning making politically, socially, and aesthetically. With a particular focus on their intersections and interactions, this department studies the constitution and transformations of race, diaspora, and indigeneity.

Committed to boundary-crossing scholarship, RDI facilitates and encourages cross-fertilization of thought in relation to key research topics that are too often analyzed in isolation from each other. As engaged in teaching as in research, we offer all students the opportunity to deepen their knowledge, sharpen their analytic tools, expand their means of expression, and participate in collaborative knowledge production on race, diaspora, and indigeneity both within the University and beyond.