About Africana Studies

The Africana Studies Program is committed to academic excellence and social responsibility. We offer two undergraduate minors and an M.S./Ph.D. concentratin the Sociology graduate program.  There is also an opportunity to earn an Africana Studies Certificate for graduate students in other fields of study.

Africana Studies at Virginia Tech is an interdisciplinary program that takes the experiences of people of African descent around the world as its academic focus.  Our central mission is to study the life experiences of African descended people from a centered, critical, and empowering focus.

Scholarship in the field of Africana Studies is transformative and empowering.  By using interdisciplinary methods to probe interlocking forms of social inequality, power relations and identity, Africana Studies contributes greater scope, depth, and accuracy to our knowledge about human experiences. To this end, the Africana Studies curriculum offers fresh examinations of race, gender, and class--intersecting markers of identity that profoundly shape people's experiences with social structure, history, culture, economics, and technology. 

Throughout the University, Africana Studies faculty members advocate for, and fully participate in, Virginia Tech's efforts to achieve a diverse faculty and student population.  In our classes, student internships, special events, and service projects, we emphasize teaching methods that are innovative and student-centered, consistent with an activist commitment to social justice for all people.

In addition to developing broad reasoning and writing capacities comparable to those gained via study in the sciences, social sciences, and the humanities, those undergraduates who pursue an Interdisciplinary Studies degree or minor in Africana Studies acquire cogent and personally relevant knowledge of Africana people's diverse experience, including:

• Conceptual and creative tools to perceive, analyze, and respond to pervasive forms of inequality: racism, sexism, and class bias in social structures and systems of power;
• Personal knowledge about how these intersecting markers of identity affect one's life experience and understanding of others; 
• Essential knowledge about multiple theoretical perspectives that arise from Black experiences throughout the world;
• Experience in linking interdisciplinary scholarship in Africana Studies with processes leading to social change;
• Mature self-motivation to live an informed and examined life in the multi-cultural and globally interdependent world of the 21st century.