M. Nicole Horsley
Associate Professor and Coordinator
What is African Diaspora Studies?
African Diaspora Studies is a transdisciplinary practice that examines the movement, dispersal, and relational life of people of African descent across the globe. While it draws on interdisciplinary approaches and methods--including history, literature, visual culture, performance, and social theory--it is not confined to any single discipline. Instead, it moves across and beyond them to generate new ways of understanding Black life.
The field traces how Blackness is shaped through histories of slavery, colonialism, migration, and racial capitalism, while also attending to the ongoing creation of culture knowledge, and forms of existence across Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, and beyond. It asks how Black life is lived, imagined, and contested across different contexts, and how these experiences are connected through both relation and rupture.
At its core, African Diaspora Studies interrogates systems of power while centering Black intellectual and cultural traditions as sites of theory and knowledge production, equipping students to think diasporically across space, time, and difference.
About the Minor
The African Diaspora Studies Minor examines the experiences, cultural formations, and freedom struggles of people of African descent across the globe—including sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. This minor is grounded in a diasporic understanding of Blackness as both a lived history and a relational framework of community, creativity, and resistance.
Students completing the minor will be able to:
- Demonstrate knowledge of major historical and sociopolitical developments in the African diaspora.
- Interpret the relationships among race, power, and resistance across time and place.
- Critically analyze cultural texts and social issues using theories, frameworks, and methods from Black Studies.
- Examine how Blackness intersects with other social categories such as gender, class, sexuality, religion, and nation.
- Articulate an understanding of diasporic identity, creativity, and the pursuit of liberation and social justice.
Why Minor in African Diaspora Studies?
We are living through the intensification of racial violence, ecological crisis, and global inequality—and yet, we are also witnessing vibrant movements for Black liberation, pleasure, and planetary justice.
A minor in African Diaspora Studies offers:
- Historical depth and contemporary relevance
- Critical frameworks to navigate race, power, and identity in global contexts
- Creative and interdisciplinary approaches to protest, pleasure, and world-building
Whether you’re planning a career in public health, law, education, politics, business, the arts, or technology , this minor enhances your ability to think with complexity, communicate with empathy, and act with purpose.
What You’ll Study (Program Requirements)
Total credits required: 20
Foundational Courses (8 credits):
- CSCR 10600: Introduction to African Diaspora Studies
- CSCR 12300: Introduction to Culture, Race & Ethnicity Concepts
Electives (12 credits):
- 12 credits of electives with the African-Diaspora Studies Elective attribute (ADSE)
- At least 4 of these credits must be CSCR-designated
- At least 4 credits must be at the 300-level or above
Note: For students majoring in Race, Power, and Resistance , CSCR 10600 and CSCR 12300 may count for both the major and the minor. However, the remaining 12 elective credits cannot overlap with courses counted toward the major.
Sample Pathways Through the Minor
You can shape your African Diaspora Studies minor around themes that resonate with your academic interests and career goals. Sample clusters include:
- Film, Media & Storytelling
- Health, Embodiment & Social Justice
- Black Performance & Creative Practice
- Race, Gender, Womanism, Feminism, & Sexuality
- Technology, Imagination & Futures
- Education, Youth & Resistance
- Race, Ecologies & Planetary Justice
- Afro-Asian, Latinx & Indigenous Intimacies
- Diaspora, Business & International Markets
- Art, Archives & Collective Memory
This minor is a space to pose urgent questions and engage complex problems. What histories haunt the present? What practices sustain joy and survival? What futures are possible? We encourage students to think expansively and critically across time, play, and experience. What questions move you? What futures are you imagining?
Here, questioning is not the end point--it is a method for interpreting, challenging, and reshaping the worlds we inhabit.