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Question Description: Critical incident responders come from a variety of fields. Rescue workers (e.g., police, firefighters, emergency medical professionals) are often the first-line responders. However, the helping professionals and volunteers from emergency response organizations are often just behind the first-line responders, allocating resources, assessing situations, and addressing mental health needs of survivors.

This seminar considers race from a transnational perspective, with a focus on the Americas. We examine broader historical developments, including the emergence of global empire and colonialism, that gave rise both to concepts of race, racial difference, and hierarchy and to concepts of nation and nationality. As slavery, labor migrations, and the establishment of settler colonies brought peoples from different regions of the world together, racial difference justified unequal exceptions to otherwise equal rights of national citizens. This semester we will explore, in particular, how disease – both its medical and social understanding – shaped racial ideas and affected racialized groups.