Welcome

The Department of Equity Studies (DES) offers a learning environment that values cultural diversity and supports social equality. We provide students with an understanding of the social environments that shape their interests, opportunities and identities. Students gain a solid and critical grounding in research methods and theories in ways that allow them to link their education with various types of degrees and certificates.

Faculty teaching in DES are actively engaged in socially relevant research that contributes both to academic scholarship and to communities beyond the University. The Department reflects the teaching and research strengths of a core group of faculty members, as well as the degree programs that have emerged from those strengths.

We offer undergraduate degree programs in Race, Ethnicity and Indigeneity (REI), Human Rights and Equity Studies (HREQ), and interdisciplinary Social Science (jointly offered with the Department of Social Science), as well as General Education courses. Through an Indigenous Studies focus, we offer undergraduate degree programming in Indigenous Studies (through REI), and a Certificate in Indigenous Studies. Additional offerings include a cross-disciplinary certificate in Anti-Racist Research & Practice (CARRP) and a general certificate in Refugee and Migration Studies (in conjunction with the Centre for Refugee Studies). A graduate degree, MA/PhD, in Indigenous Thought is currently in development.

The Department is also home to the Chair in Multiculturalism. The Chair originated with an agreement between the Universidade de Sao Paulo (Brazil), Universidade Federal de Sao Carlos (Brazil), the University of Pittsburgh (USA), and the Department of Equity Studies at York University (Canada), to promote academic cooperation, by means of the exchange of professors/researchers of each institution in the fields of cultural studies, multiculturalism and public policy.

The Chair in Multiculturalism also has as its objectives the establishment of regular cooperation in the form of links among centres or groups of research in Brazil and in foreign institutions; the joint identification of new trends in bilateral and multilateral relations by means of workshops and projects for research; and supporting governmental agencies by giving them information useful to the implementation and evaluation of new public policies.

January 29-30, 2010, the Chair hosted an academic conference Rethinking Multiculturalism: Brazil, Canada, and the United States. The conference focused in a comparative and interdisciplinary manner on multiculturalism. It was organized in partnership with the The Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean, the The Harriet Tubman Institutefor Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples and The Michael Baptista Lecture.

Graduates of the Department of Equity Studies will be well positioned to work in a wide range of areas with organizations, government, industry and communities that have programs, policies and procedures around the equitable treatment and experiences of Indigenous peoples, racialized peoples, immigrants and refugees, as well as in the area of human rights advocacy and redress.