The Consortium for Critical Interdisciplinary Studies (CCIS)

The central convictions of the Environmental Humanities are, first, that the natural world always raises questions that are simultaneously scientific and social and, second, that any meaningful effort to address environmental challenges must emerge from both humanistic and scientific considerations. How might the climate crisis necessitate a change in our conception of what it means to be human? What new ethics are required to extend political rights to non-human beings? How must environmental activism address structural racism and the long history of Western imperialism? What can be learned from Indigenous and feminist conceptualizations of the environment and of environmental action? Is capitalism inherently hostile toward the natural world? How have aesthetics shifted in an age of heightened climate change? How has the new figure of the Anthropocene entered the public imagination through film, literature, art, music, and dance? These are just a few of the questions that scholarship in the Environmental Humanities takes up.

To sign up, contact Jayne Hildebrand, EHMC Director.

Learning Outcomes

Students who successfully complete this minor or concentration will be able to demonstrate critical understandings of:

1. the science of climate change.
2. the environment as both naturally and culturally constituted.
3. how social difference and social power are negotiated at the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, and class, with complicated environmental outcomes.
4. how diverse forms of environmentalist work—whether analytical, artistic, or activist—are embedded within histories and dynamics of race, ethnicity, gender, and class.
5. how environmental harms and remediation attempts are embedded within social, political, and economic power dynamics and hierarchies.
6. the contributions of humanistic scholarship and expressive arts to environmental studies and environmental justice more broadly.

Science and Technology Studies (STS) is a capacious and inherently interdisciplinary academic field that investigates the intimate entanglements between the technical and social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. Understanding this interplay is central to addressing many of the most pressing problems of our times, such as struggles around vaccination, climate justice and environmental racism, health disparities, digital surveillance, and the growing mistrust in “science” as a domain of authority. F/ISTS is a focused approach to Science and Technology Studies (STS) that homes in on the reciprocal relations between techno-scientific knowledge and practices, on the one hand, and gender, race, class, and other intersecting axes of power, on the other.

To sign up, contact Rebecca Jordan-Young, F/ISTS Director.

Learning Outcomes

Students who successfully complete this minor or concentration will be able to demonstrate critical understandings of:

1. Examine the role of cultural, ethical, social, political and economic factors in determining the norms, values and meanings of scientific, technological and medical practices.
2. Understand the ways in which the production and applications of science, technology and medicine shape and are shaped by knowledge  and beliefs about gender, race, class, and sexuality.
3. Situate technoscientific and biomedical discourses within local, national, and transnational contexts.
4. Situate their own relations to science, medicine, and technology within structures of power and cultural-historical forces.
5. Contribute to feminist, historical, and decolonial accounts of contemporary biomedicine and technoscience.
6. Craft and evaluate efforts to create more socially just, equitable and inclusive science, technology, and medicine in a diverse and globalized world.

The purpose of the Interdisciplinary Concentration on Race and Ethnicity (ICORE) and Minor on Race and Ethnicity (MORE) is to make available to Barnard students the interdisciplinary and critical study of race and ethnicity in their mutual constitution with gender, class, and nation. ICORE and MORE provide an intersectional and international framework for thinking through issues of ethnicity and race in both local and global contexts and in relation to other forms of social difference. Advanced seminars allow students to use this framework for the in-depth study of a particular topic. For those students who desire to pursue graduate education in the field of Ethnic Studies, ICORE and MORE will provide background preparation.

To sign up, contact Marisa Solomon (msolomon@barnard.edu), ICORE/MORE Advisor.

Learning Outcomes

Students who complete either the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor on Race and Ethnicity will learn how to:

1. Gain exposure to the theories and methods of Ethnic Studies;
2. Interpret arguments in light of the expanding literature in Ethnic Studies;
3. Understand processes of racialization in historical and geographical context;
4. Understand the mutual constitution and relative autonomy of axes of social differentiation;
5. Comprehend how national boundaries, as well as local, national and transnational cultures and politics affect the constitution of racial and ethnic categories;
6. Compare representations of borderlands, hybridity, migration and diaspora from different cultures; and
7. Identify and communicate the importance of ethnic and racial diversity to an increasingly global and interconnected world.

Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) engages Indigenous knowledges and methodologies to study the world, potentially touching all areas of intellectual work across the college. The NAIS minor can contribute to building an intellectual community among students, staff, and faculty across the Barnard community who are dedicated to the critical analysis of colonialism. Given its location in a feminist institution of higher education, NAIS at Barnard raises particular questions about gender, sexuality, and feminist struggle in relationship to colonialism and Indigenous sovereignty. Moreover, NAIS addresses New York City as an Indigenous space, home to the largest urban population of Native Americans and Indigenous people in the US, and a major location for Native American and Indigenous histories in the arts, politics, and activism. NAIS is intended to facilitate the development of new generations of thinkers, whose work will contribute to the well-being of Indigenous nations and communities.

To sign up, contact Manu Karuka, NAIS Director.

Learning Outcomes: 

1. Engage the concept of Indigenous sovereignty as a philosophical, political, and moral system that frames how and why we study

2. Develop an interdisciplinary understanding of Native American and Indigenous histories and philosophies, as manifested in diverse and distinct Indigenous nations

3. Develop an understanding and critical awareness of the colonial situation that shapes the past and present of Native American and Indigenous nations

4. Engage and participate in projects of renewal, resurgence, and flourishing for Indigenous nations in the present and the future

5. Develop and enact responsibility as scholars intervening in the face of colonialism, through written and oral communications