This open issue of CES offers a breadth of critical approaches that explore the production of race across varied scales, geographies, and institutional sites. Through timely analyses of empire, militarism, humanitarianism, policing, labor exploitation, and education, these essays offer a vital defense of our field at a time of increased assaults on knowledge production and activism from below. The issue includes a section of dispatches on the dissolution of USAID in Afghanistan, Columbia, and India, as well as a political education section on 450 Years of Chicano History in Pictures. Essays in this issue also reflect on the politics of archival memory in Arab American studies, the critical potential of “brownness” in Palestinian-American Mo Amer’s comedy, regimes of racialized and gendered disablement in the construction of the Panama Canal, and the mobilization of ethno-nationalist and racist diasporas to curtail academic freedom on the subject of Palestine. The issue concludes with a section on the post-DEI university, considering the complex intersectional challenges that emerge in the institutionalization of ethnic study across fields.

UPCOMING ISSUE

Volume 10.1 (Spring 2026) Open Issue, (forthcoming)

Cover Photograph by Maria Ximena Abello Hurtado, author of “Adiós USAID” in this issue.