The University of Arizona's PhD in American Indian Studies – the first such degree in the U.S. – is an interdisciplinary program designed to:
- Prepare graduate students for careers both within the academy and/or in Native American governance, the nonprofit sector, philantropy, and/or government service;
- Conduct advanced and applied scholarly research from an Indigenous and cross-cultural perspective;
- Develop theoretical and innovative theories, methodologies, and research tools appropriate for and useful to sovereign tribes; and
- Educate students to assume leadership and policy-making roles in higher education, tribal communities, the state and nation.
The Ph.D. program is designed to be completed in 3-4 years (after completing the Master's degree).
The PhD program is based in a commitment to three interrelated concepts:
- Centering Native peoples – The American Indian Studies Graduate Interdisciplinary Program (AIS GIDP) at UA centers Native peoples – their knowledges, worldviews, perspectives, values, histories, experiences, lifeways, and futures – within research, education, and service. The AIS GIDP seeks understanding from an Indigenous perspective, placing Native ontologies, epistemologies, axiologies, methodologies, and pedagogies at the center of the intellectual effort to understand, teach about, and serve Indigenous communities. AIS GIDP seeks to examine the world through an Indigenous perspective, utilizing Peoplehood as a primary disciplinary lens.
- Peoplehood – Conceptions of Peoplehood serve as a primary lens for understanding the commonalities and diversity of American Indian and Indigenous communities. Originally proposed by faculty and students in the UA Department of American Indian Studies in 2003, the concept of Peoplehood has become a critical lens for “rearticulating indigenous identity,†one that “offers the most promise in terms of its non-Western approach to identity, its flexibility, comprehensiveness, and allowance for cultural continuity and change†(Corntassel, 2003). The “Peoplehood†model represents their understanding of the interrelated components of indigeneity broadly, as well as the specificity and diversity of Indigenous communities in the U.S. and beyond.
- Community engagement and services – "Relational accountability†sits at the heart of Indigenous research and scholarship. This places an obligation on AIS as a discipline – and the AIS GIDP – to not just center Indigenous knowledges in our research and teaching, but to build relationships with Indigenous communities, to be accountable to those relationships and communities, and to contribute in tangible ways to the continued thriving of Native peoples. What this engagement, accountability, and service will look like will vary greatly as each member of the faculty and each graduate student has a different area of focus and specialization. The diversity of engagement and service only serves to underscore our collective commitment to supporting the many elements of Indigenous Peoplehood.
Taken together, these commitments distinguish PhD studies in American Indian Studies at UA as a discipline, and provide a theoretical model for the intellectual, pedagogical, and service work of the GIDP's faculty and students.