Johns Hopkins University announced it would dive deeper into critical race theory by rebranding the focus of its “critical studies” center from “citizenship” to “colonialism.”
The elite school known for its medical programs announced late last week it would change the focus of its previous “Program in Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship” to launch a brand new endeavor called the “Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism.”
“The shift in the center’s title from ‘citizenship’ to ‘colonialism’ will allow it to explore some topics it doesn’t currently cover, such as Indigenous studies, while continuing to research how people enact belonging and challenge power structures both individually and collectively,” the school stated in a press release Thursday.
The newly rebranded center brings with it a new major offered to students in Hopkins’s Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences called Critical Diaspora Studies, which is an “activism-oriented academic program that enables students to study the connections, solidarities, and dissonances between geographical and cultural areas of study — from Asian American Studies and the African diaspora to Indigenous and Latinx Studies,” according to an October event.
The major, which has been approved by the school but still requires approval from the Maryland Higher Education Commission, was created as a response to a “student movement” in 2021 demanding such a program. It is also “bi-directional,” meaning students shape their course of learning.
The center is oriented around critical studies, which is the academic approach from which many of the most controversial social theories have sprouted in academia, such as critical race theory, feminism, and queer theory.
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The center is meant to be “an interdisciplinary forum focusing on the intersections of empire, migration, and racial hierarchy,” meaning it can seep its way into many different tracks of study, and it has hosted events such as “Theorizing Racial Capitalism.”
Johns Hopkins did not return a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
