Vision: The Department aspires to expand ways of critical knowing, learning/unlearning, and relating to peoples and places in loving, kind, and equitable ways while building harmonious, joyful lives with generosity and abundance.
Mission: The Department’s mission is to co-create knowledge rooted in place-based and Borderlands histories to generate practices of justice, love, relationality, and liberation.
BEST programs engage students with pedagogies and knowledge that heighten their awareness of local and global histories and systems of power. In BEST, students are guided to see their value, deepen their sense of belonging while on campus, and carry forward knowledge into their areas of study. These pedagogies and knowledges facilitate students’ capacity and will to envision and build dignifying, equitable, vibrant, and pluralistic rather than individualistic futures.
