The Ph.D. program in Culture and Theory provides a strong theoretical and critical approach to race, gender, and sexuality studies. It is the Ph.D. graduate program that is constituted by several interdisciplinary units including African American Studies and Asian American Studies, and works integrally with the Critical Theory Emphasis. Interdisciplinary in nature and buttressed by the established strengths in critical theory at UCI, the program uses a problem-oriented approach to issues of race, gender, and sexuality in diasporic, transnational, and postcolonial contexts, as they are engaged broadly in the humanities, social sciences, and arts.
In the past few decades, new approaches to the production and critique of knowledge have transformed the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. These approaches have developed all the more energetically through cross-fertilizations and reciprocal challenges within cultural studies, critical theory, area studies, and race, gender, and sexuality studies. The development of these overlapping fields has also drawn vigor from the tensions emerging within each of these fields. Cultural studies, reemerging in the 1980's from a British Marxist scholarly tradition has moved beyond studies of popular culture to incorporate insights from feminism, critical race theory, ethnic studies, post-colonial theory, queer studies, and media studies. Issues of globalization, colonialisms, diaspora and immigration studies, as well as the study of new social movements have created new interdisciplinary knowledges and theories. Critical theory, originally conceived at UCI to include European philosophy, Frankfurt School critique, post-structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, semiotics, and Foucaldian theories of history and discourse, has been transformed by interactions with post-colonial studies and the changing nature of ethnic and gender studies. Area studies, pushed beyond its former framework restricted to the nation-state, has become transformed through the study of diasporas, globalization, and transnationalism. Race, gender, and sexuality studies, emerging through distinct and related social movements have fruitfully pushed each other to consideration of their heterogeneity and interconnectedness.
