About the Program

For more information please visit our university page: www.pugetsound.edu/afam

African American Studies (AFAM) is an interdisciplinary program. The program focuses on African American experiences, while recognizing that other academic subjects bear importantly on the understanding of these experiences and should have a place in the African American Studies curriculum.

Within the interrogative, interdisciplinary, reflexive, and justice oriented mode that guides African American Studies, students in the program acquire sophisticated knowledge of African American and other African diasporic experiences; become conversant with the role of race, power, difference, and intersectionality in the personal, institutional, and structural relations of our daily lives including their relevance for local, regional, national, and international affairs; cultivate rigorous transdisciplinary skills in analytic, reflexive, and community-based research methodologies, and written, oral, and multi-media communication, to formulate, articulate, and interrogate ideas in private and public spheres; develop critical, intellectual, and ethical perspectives that can guide and advance personal, educational, civic, political, and professional actions; and engage and interact with differential sites of community development and leadership in the Puget Sound and beyond so as to deepen and apply their understanding of African American Studies and to learn to contribute collaboratively to the ongoing work of equity.