Graduate Programs & Resources

Andrew Jones on Berkeley's Inclusion

“If you look at the landscape of Asian Studies or East Asian studies across the U.S. and in Europe, it's not a field with a great deal of diversity of representation of non-Asian or non-white people. I want Berkeley to become a flagship for serving those populations as well as welcoming more people from California State Universities and different levels of the tertiary educational system here in California.

We get a lot of applications from people who grew up in the rich cultural matrix of Los Angeles, you know, where Koreatown is right next to East LA and people are absorbing each other’s foods and each other's cultures. If we can serve that kind of constituency — that's emerging out of who we are as Californians — that makes a lot of sense for the University of California.”

Poulomi Saha on the Interdisciplinarity of Critical Theory

“Students often come to my classes with a hunger for ‘big ideas’-- they want to tackle the major philosophical and ethical questions that confront us and yet, they also want to know how to change the world.” They said, “For many, no single field of study– whether in the humanities or social sciences– seems adequate to the task. This is where Critical Theory comes in and is often revolutionary for their thinking. Because it is fundamentally interdisciplinary and is invested in the question of how what we do in a university produces, and therefore can change, the conditions of life in society.”