About the Department

Vision

To advance transformative, transborder conversations and cultivate the next generation of leaders and changemakers to foster justice, peace, and freedom.

Mission

LALS is a transdisciplinary department and intellectual community committed to transformative research, teaching, advising, and mentoring in the Social Sciences and Humanities. We center the diverse, interconnected experiences and perspectives of Latin American and Latinx communities as our foundation for intellectual analysis and research. We create spaces for dialogues that engage and interrogate the histories, epistemologies, cultures, social movements, and experiences of Latinx and Latin American peoples in California, the United States, hemispherically, and globally.

Creating and providing our students with analytical tools to envision otherwise futures is at the heart of our commitment to actively stewarding an intellectual tradition that challenges hegemonic borders and imperial projects. This stewardship hinges on our responsiveness to community needs, questions, and concerns, and is made possible by our tradition of situating academic research alongside community knowledges and lived experiences. LALS originated as, and continues to be, an intellectual project that is deeply engaged with and responsive to questions of culture, community, justice, and power.

Values

These core values are the principles that guide our commitment to research, teaching, and public service.

• Rootedness: Our transformative vision for the future is necessarily rooted in the entangled pasts that shape present environments, societies, and lived experiences.
• Transdisciplinary, Intercultural, and Hemispheric Dialogues: We value the diverse perspectives, knowledges, and cultures that cultivate and nurture transformative and transborder conversations.
• Humility: We espouse an intellectual approach based in epistemological humility, underscoring that knowledge production is not one-directional and exclusively stemming from the academy and institutions.
• Student-Centered Pedagogy: We believe in fostering the intellectual curiosity of our students through an adaptable and tender pedagogical approach that enriches their learning experiences and empowers them to grapple with the key questions of our time.
• Public Impact and Scholarly Rigor: We are committed to advancing excellence in research that promotes progressive social change, justice, and in response to community needs in California, the Americas, and beyond.