Core Program United States Diversity (CPUD)

CPUD courses represent the full range of lived identities and experiences in U.S. culture, revealing the structures and processes that have led to historical, social, cultural, artistic, political, legal, scientific, and scholarly patterns of privilege, exclusion and marginalization.

Designation Criteria

Courses satisfying this requirement use frameworks from different academic fields (such as but not limited to history, ethnic studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and religious studies) to explore how U.S. identity and experience have been shaped by a diverse array of intellectual and cultural influences and traditions.

In courses meeting this requirement, at least two-thirds of the course topics and materials must examine the forces that create, contest, or maintain power, identity and difference in the United States, with a focus on race, religion, ethnicity, class, disability, immigration status, language, gender, and/or sexuality.

No course can be designated as more than one of CPUD, CPRF, or CPGC.

Outcomes

Courses satisfying this requirement develop in students two or more of the following outcomes:

1. A critical awareness of and ability to examine race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, disability, immigration status, language, ability, and/or religion in the U.S. through: historical inquiry; the study of artistic, cultural, social, political, legal, and economic expressions; and/or the analysis of social and/or scientific data.

2. A critical understanding of and ability to analyze the contingent and unstable nature of cultural identities and relationships, as well as the specific ways individual, collective, and institutional systems of power and oppression in the U.S. have worked to normalize and naturalize those contingent identities.

3. An ability to apply methodological and/or experience-based approaches to investigate issues of diversity, equity, and structural inequalities in the U.S.