Search

While considerable attention has been given to the ways that parents contribute to undergraduates' success, far less attention has been given to what these students do for their families, variation in students' provision of help, or the consequences of giving. Drawing on 61 interviews with Asian American college students from diverse ethnic and class backgrounds, this paper extends conventional understanding of families and college by analyzing the financial assistance and translation support Asian American undergraduates give their parents. Using a trichotomous model of class—comparing disadvantaged, advantaged, and ambiguous students—I show that class disadvantage motivated students' helping, advantage deterred it, while the ambiguous fell in between. Culture (i.e., filial piety) and a broad view of family (i.e., siblings' contributions) also influenced students' help. Finally, based on interview data combined with partial support from analysis of participants' grade point averages data, I demonstrate that helping had positive and negative implications for students' college experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the construct of parental home or maher in my native language Marathi—as a social, emotional, cultural, spiritual, physical, and lived construct. Maher informs my struggle to comprehend the construct of home and its relationship to displacement, loss of familiarity, nostalgia, and the liminal. I juxtapose my experiences of being a newly married woman of Indian origin in the United States, with my experiences of being a new graduate student in a reputed North American university—both simultaneous life events. This article is an autoethnographical reflection on my negotiation of my marital and academic landscapes where I found my identity and ontological orientations challenged. The borderlands that resulted from geo-familial displacement and ontological displacement in academia intersected to create vantage points and liminal spaces that allowed me to explore, re-orient, and assert my ontological roots that are informed by Indian philosophy—specifically, the Advaita Vedanta approach. This article explores the power of art as research and the process of art-making as a process synchronous to researching to explore identity in the making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through Our Eyes, Hear Our Voices is a virtual photovoice project that documents the impact of COVID-19 on Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities. Quantitative studies on the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 are still emerging, but they do not reveal qualitative experiences of a racialized pandemic exacerbated by political leaders labeling it "China virus." As a qualitative participatory action research approach, photovoice is an ideal archival and pedagogical tool to capture the lived experience of AAPI communities. However, we had to adapt photovoice to a virtual research environment. We did so by adopting a variety of digital learning and information sharing platforms. In addition, we enlisted community-based organizations who are providing essential services for underrepresented communities to serve as research mentors for university student researchers. Finally, given the historic nature of the pandemic and the underrepresentation of AAPI experiences in mainstream archives, we emphasized the importance of students as co-producers of archival knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I address how walking as a curatorial practice of storying a neighborhood facilitates an irreducible politics of place occurring as affective intensities at various registers, where everyday movements entangle with spatial enactments of racism. Working with theories of assemblage and immanent movement, I examine walking narratives in San Jose Japantown, California (U.S.), a historic, ethnic neighborhood historically subjected to U.S. government and banking practices of "redlining" and Japanese American incarceration and dislocation to prison camps. As an analytical method, assemblage requires attention to movement: material elements of arrangement, the relations they require, new arranging and arrangements they might enable, and how these arrangements are legitimated. I examine spatial racism as an assemblage, analyzing its affective qualities wherein attentiveness to immanent movement might breach the assemblage and, in doing so, reach toward radical reformation through memorialization, community activism and development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our speculative ethnography of Chinese student experience in the United States during COVID-19 weds the tradition of speculative fiction (exemplified by the likes of Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler) and digital autoethnography. The study is two-pronged: First, we articulate/map the methodological merits of speculative and digital autoethnography as particularly conducive to the crisis context of COVID-19 and its accompanying social isolation; second, we deploy said methodology within a population of nine Chinese students "trapped" in the United States during the COVID-19 period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes how an Asian/American woman leader-scholar (and others un/like her) have processed the Atlanta Massacre of 2021 and other types of racialized violence in and out of the academy by drawing on the analytic frameworks of Orientalism and racialized sexualization. This critical autoethnography involved synthesizing traumatic reflections into concept maps by drawing from the content of author-generated poems, e-mails, institutional statements, and journal entries based on a series of critical incidents that occurred between March 15, 2021 to March 22, 2021, as well as over the past several decades. She describes how many leaders at White-dominated institutions of higher education have perpetually dishonored Asian/Americans and other BIPOC faculty, staff, and students through their in/actions, mis/behaviors, and mis/deeds before, during, and after the Atlanta Massacre March 16, 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2021, Illinois became the first state in the United States to require that K-12 students learn about Asian American history. Illinois achieved this when lawmakers passed House Bill 376 (H.B. 376), colloquially known as the Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History (TEAACH) Act. H.B. 376 received praise for being the first legislation of its kind, and its passage inspired similar bills in New Jersey, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Given the bill’s influence, it is imperative to consider its language and utility. This critical policy analysis specifically investigates lawmakers’ employment of the term “Asian American.” The analysis ultimately argues that H.B. 376 is a necessary first step in breaking centuries of silence and dislocation for Asian Americans; however, the bill advances a social definition—or sociopolitical understanding—of “Asian American” that is potentially harmful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]