What is the Ethnic Studies Thesis Library?

We are looking for more submissions! If you have completed a thesis at Harvard College that critically examines race, ethnicity, migration, indigeneity, or related topics and frameworks, no matter your department, please submit your thesis here. We hope this serves as both a valuable resource and a celebration of your phenomenal work.

About:

The Task Force for Asian American Progressive Advocacy and Studies (TAPAS) has compiled this virtual library of senior theses completed at Harvard College related to ethnic studies. We hope that this collection will inspire and inform future students who pursue work on ethnic studies, especially while we continue to fight for an ethnic studies department, concentration, and faculty.

We find the UC Berkeley definition of ethnic studies useful for framing our project: "Ethnic Studies is the critical and interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity, and indigeneity with a focus on the experiences and perspectives of people of color within and beyond the United States. Since the emergence of ethnic studies as an academic field in the late 1960s, scholars have analyzed the ways in which race and racism have been, and continue to be, powerful social, cultural, and political forces and their connections to other axes of stratification, including gender, class, sexuality, and legal status."

We also find Gary Okihiro's writing illuminating: “Today ethnic studies looks in a much more disciplined way at power and how it articulates around the axes of race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and nation. That insight was the contribution of the Combahee River Collective, a black feminist-activist group, which, in 1977, saw that "the major systems of oppression are interlocking."”

To learn more about the Harvard Ethnic Studies Coalition (HESC) and their advocacy for ethnic studies at Harvard, check them out on Facebook and Twitter.

To learn more about TAPAS, check us out on Facebook.