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In this dissertation, I investigate the complex relationships between Asian American identity (pan-ethnic, ethnic, gender) and political participation (electoral and non-electoral). I utilize a multi-method approach with both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to understand these relationships. In chapter 1, using the National Asian American Survey in 2008, I analyzed the effects of socioeconomic status, political efficacy, social connectedness, immigrant generation, pan-ethnic identity, and ethnic identity on both electoral and non-electoral political participation. Results were supportive of previous research and hypotheses with a key highlight of pan-ethnic and ethnic identity. Pan-ethnic identity was positively related to electoral political participation and ethnic identity was positively related to non-electoral political participation. To further investigate this relationship between identity and political participation, in chapters 2 and 3 I conducted a study interviewing 13 Asian American women leaders in political non-profit organizations across the United States. In chapter 2, I found that respondents utilized their ethnic and pan-ethnic identities to motivate and justify their careers in politics and leadership. Specifically, their understanding and connection to their family’s immigration stories were critical to why they decided to study race or politics and eventually become leaders in the political arena. In chapter 3, I investigated themes of gender and race (intersectional) identity of Asian American women in how they navigated their current positions and work. I found that Asian American women, although explicitly in leadership positions, still felt constraints of gendered expectations and stereotypes both from within and outside their community. However, respondents felt a need to push on for future generations of Asian American women and to persevere despite any backlash. This dissertation will contribute to the gap in both political participation and Asian American identity literature and provide richness to understanding of how to mobilize an important and quickly growing racial group in the United States.

This project combines insights from intersectionality theory, racial formation theory, and masculinity studies to explore how young Asian American men negotiate identities within a complicated cultural climate that both exalts and denigrates them. My research is based on an analysis of 33 in-depth interviews with Chinese and Chinese- Vietnamese American men between the ages of 18-25. I find that young Asian American men encounter both positive and negative racial-ethnic and gendered ideas that are specific to their demographic. This contributes to distinct identity-formation experiences during emerging adulthood, a critical period for identity construction. My findings suggest that Asian American men draw on four central reference points which I call the “White Frat Boy,” “Trashy Kevin,” “Nerdy Kevin,” and “Simu Liu.” By “reference point,” I refer to a shared set of ideas that reflect a model of an identity that can contain both positive and negative attributes. I also find that my participants engaged with these reference points in two ways: they distanced themselves from the negative elements of reference points to not be limited by them but also embraced the positive elements of reference points to exercise their agency. Finally, I coin the term “happy medium” to describe the comfortable balance that participants aimed to strike among reference points. By engaging in distancing and embracing strategies among various reference points, my participants constructed happy mediums that fall into two main categories. Some participants constructed an “average happy medium,” aiming to blend in with other Asian American men. Other participants constructed a “well-rounded happy medium,” aiming to be viewed as multifaceted and unique. This project contributes to our understanding of the life stage of emerging adulthood, highlighting how men of one racial-ethnic minority group encounter unique pressures that lead them to embark on a distinct path for their identity construction. Additionally, this project offers the concept of reference points, which broadens our understanding of how other groups draw on various models of identity to construct and negotiate their intersectional identities.

Historic preservation is a significant issue for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) seeking to safeguard important historic places, preserve unique cultural practices, and receive official recognition of civic contributions. However, few sites associated with AAPI history and cultures have been recognized as landmarks. There has been substantial movement forward by federal agencies and national organizations in developing a more inclusive and diverse approach to traditional standards and policies in order to reflect the growing numbers of underrepresented sociocultural groups, including AAPIs. To addresses these issues, federal leadership in the Department of the Interior and National Park Service launched the Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Initiative and Theme Study. The theme study, “Finding a Path Forward: Asian American/Pacific Islander National Historic Landmarks Theme Study,” is intended to help in the identification of buildings, structures, sites, objects, and districts associated with Asian and Pacific Islander history in the United States, and facilitate their designation as NHLs and their listing in the National Register of Historic Places. As part of the theme study, the Asian American/Pacific Islander Theme Study Experts Panel was established under the auspices of the National Park Service Advisory Board. The Experts Panel was created to provide advice on the structure of AAPI Theme Study, and identify potential essay authors and major sources of information.This dissertation explores the challenges and opportunities that arise when engaging citizen participation from diverse and traditionally underrepresented groups in federal historic preservation programs. The goal is to understand the political climate that lead to the initiative, the types of citizen participation that lead to the development of federal historic preservation efforts, and ultimately, support better efforts in documenting and recognizing historical and cultural contributions of AAPIs in the US through the NHL and National Register programs. The rationale is if scholars and practitioners can better understand how to document, identify, and preserve historic sites, we can significantly impact historic preservation outcomes by increasing the number of national/federal designations associated with underrepresented groups and improving historic preservation approaches to be more inclusive of and relevant to these groups.

This essay charts the professional and personal reflections of Professor Jennifer Ho, president of the Association for Asian American studies and critical race scholar about the rise of anti-Asian ...

Asian American students attend increasingly diverse schools, yet scholarship on their experiences typically considers them in isolation, leading to a group-level emphasis rather than a focus on the relational processes that give ‘Asian’ meaning as a social and educational construction and social location. Building on theories of racialization, I study an urban context where multi-group ethnic and racial relations are negotiated. My dissertation examines how Asian American and Black students, as well as staff, engaged in discourses and practices that reproduced patterns of inequality among groups of students of color in a high-poverty school that was 99% non-White, but where Asian Americans comprised almost half the student body. This research clarifies how positive but conditional notions of Asian-ness were created through and against negative ideas of Blackness, in particular. Staff generally contrasted engaged Asian American students with oppositional Black youth, despite the diversity of students’ aspirations and performance. While some contested these constructions, many students acted in ways that reinforced them. These biased perceptions ultimately led to greater support for Asians American students, who expressed a stronger sense of belonging to and ownership of the school than non- Asians. My work examines formal and informal stratification among racial minority youth and elucidates the ideologies and mechanisms that normalized it. Despite their academic heterogeneity, urban Asian American students were privileged through a re-inscription of the model minority myth that imputes a cultural basis for Asian American educational success, while Black students were interpreted through negative stereotypes and expectations. This dissertation highlights the costs of Asian American students’ privilege in this context and draws attention to the continued marginalization of racial minority students. It argues that the model minority trope and the trope of the oppositional and deficient Black subject were bound together in the schooling of Asian American and Black students. It reveals the power of the myth to shape how all students are positioned in a racial hierarchy, thus giving insight into racialization itself.

Despite the growing social consciousness of issues relating to environmental justice (EJ) and the abundance of literature in the disciplines of EJ studies and Asian American Studies, analysis of As...

Capturing belonging as a dynamic social process for Asian Americans in the historically White rural United States.

Socioeconomic success doesn’t yet mean social or sexual acceptance for Asian American men.

Asian American poetry flourished in the first two decades of the 21st century. In 2004, the Asian American literary organization Kundiman hosted their inaugural workshop-based retreat at the University of Virginia, connecting poets from the United States and North America across generations. (The retreat continues to be held annually at Fordham University and has included fiction writers, as fellows and faculty, since 2017.) The first year of Kundiman’s retreat coincided with the publication of Asian American Poetry: The Next Generation, edited by Victoria Chang, which introduced emerging poets Kazim Ali, Cathy Park Hong, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Srikanth Reddy, and Paisley Rekdal, among others, to a broader audience of readers and critics and, at the same time, urged a reassessment of the contemporary poetry field. Both events signaled an emergent generation’s desire to find community and acknowledgment for their work. Not only were these goals accomplished, but the collectivization of young Asian American poets and critical attention from universities and other cultural institutions also evinced how powerfully the impact of a previous generation of Asian American poets had been felt. That generation arguably began with the publication of Cathy Song’s Yale Younger Poets Prize–winning book Picture Bride in 1982 and grew to include Marilyn Chin, Li-Young Lee, Garrett Hongo, and Agha Shahid Ali, whose work can be found in Norton anthologies of poetry and various other canon-defining projects. The critical and cultural acceptance these poets enjoyed at the end of the 20th century blazed a trail for Asian American poets of the 21st century, who increasingly balance the lyric conventions of emotional expressiveness and imagistic language with audacious political subjectivity. In doing so, Asian American poets of the 21st century have opened up conceptions of lyric, particularly regarding voice, to incorporate questions of identity, immigration and migration, and American cultural experience. Contemporary Asian American poets frequently reimagine the lyric tradition through a distinctly Asian American political imagination.

Do considerations of Asian America as, to use Kandice Chuh’s words, a “subjectless discourse” entail a turn toward objects? “Object theory” refers to a broad range of intellectual currents that take up objecthood, things, and matter as starting points for reconceptualizing identity, experience, politics, and critique. A few prominent threads of object theory include new materialism, thing theory, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology. Versions of object theory have also been developed in disability studies, critical ethnic studies, posthumanism, and multispecies studies. What spans these varied, sometimes contentious fields is an effort to displace anthropocentrism as the measure of being and knowledge. By troubling the (human) subject, the poststructural and deconstructive turns in Asian American studies have especially primed the field to more closely engage the place of objects in Asian America. While Asian American writers and critics have tirelessly explored subjectivity and its mixed fortunes—from providing access to legal rights, political representation, and social resources to facilitating the reinforcement of racial and ethnic hierarchies—they have also sought to tweak the historical relationship of Asian Americans to objects. Asian Americans have been excluded, exploited, and treated as capital because they have been more closely associated to nonhuman objects than to human subjects. Asian American literary studies develops object theories to grasp these dynamics through investigations of racial form, modes of objecthood, material things, ecology, and speculative fiction. Ultimately, object theory leads Asian American literary studies to reconsider the place of human subjectivity in politics, attend to the formation of Asian America through nonhuman matter, and develop positive visions for Asian American futures from speculative imaginations of being and reality. This article discusses the place of object theory in Asian American literature and surveys key topics, including phenomenologies of race, transvaluations of objecthood, speculative realisms, and ontologies of Asian America.

Asian Americans' peculiar combination of high levels of socioeconomic attainment, high rates of citizenship acquisition, and low rates of voting defies conventional sociological theories of assimilation, which tend to view political integration as occurring in step with socioeconomic integration; and traditional political science theories of political engagement, which emphasize socioeconomic determinants of participation. It also complicates the position advanced by some social scientists that Asian Americans are "becoming white." Beyond the theoretical puzzle, low rates of electoral participation from one of the fastest-growing segments of the American population have sobering implications for the practice of democratic self-governance and the representativeness of public policies.In this dissertation, I approach the puzzle of Asian American under-participation in electoral politics from a contextual perspective by investigating how different political contexts change the extent to which Asian Americans under-participate in the electoral process. I employ a multi-method research design, beginning with statistical analyses that identify the correlates of under-registration and under-voting among Asian American citizens. I find that it is at the registration stage where Asian American "exceptionalism" in the sense of an unusually large and unexplained degree of under-participation in electoral participation occurs. I then perform an in-depth comparison of two California counties that differ substantially in their magnitude of Asian American under-registration relative to whites, and in their values of the correlates. I find that the incentives for electoral candidates and political parties to target Asian Americans for registration differ substantially between the two counties, and that the mobilization strategies that follow from those uneven incentives are what accounts for the difference between the counties in the degree of Asian American under-registration. I conclude that, when political agents are incentivized to target Asian Americans for mobilization, the gap in voter registration between socioeconomically comparable Asian and white American citizens is significantly reduced. The missing piece in the puzzle of Asian American under-participation in electoral politics is political mobilization.

This dissertation examines the political participation and political incorporation of Hmong American communities across three states--California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin--between 1980 and 2012. This study asks two main questions: First, given Hmong Americans' particular contexts of exit and contexts of reception, how and to what extent have Hmong former refugees and their U.S.-born children been incorporated into the U.S. political system? Second, how do broader political contexts or homeland circumstances shape Hmong American politics and the state's treatment of Hmong in the U.S. and abroad? I address these questions through two historical analyses of Hmong Americans' non-electoral and electoral participation and two detailed case studies of Hmong Americans' social movements. The first historical analysis focuses on Hmong Americans' protest events from 1980 to 2011. Through news media reports and relevant archival materials, I examine 84 Hmong American protests, their contents, and their consequences on public policies and mobilizers' organizational capacity. My findings show that during the past three decades, Hmong Americans' patterns of protest participation are oriented toward both the host society and the homeland. Homeland-oriented protests, rather than declining in frequency, have occurred at a rate almost equal to domestic-oriented protests. The findings also show that Hmong Americans' engagement in protest activities, regardless of domestic or international orientations, has helped them nurture their civic sense and strengthen their organizational capacity. Specifically, protest mobilization has offered ample opportunities for Hmong Americans to develop younger leaders, form new civic organizations, and cultivate a broad alliance system. Protest mobilization has also helped Hmong to refine methods for building collective identity and building collective consensus through the use of common protest symbols such as the uniformed Hmong veteran and master frames such as the military service frame. My second historical analysis focuses on Hmong Americans' electoral participation across three U.S. states--California, Minnesota, and Wisconsin--between 1990 and 2012. I find evidence that Hmong Americans have achieved greater descriptive representation in Minnesota and Wisconsin compared to California. This difference in the level of descriptive representation appears to be due to differences in state and local political contexts. But a significant relative ethnic population size and the presence of ethnic collective mobilization are common to places with higher levels of descriptive representation. The first extended case study examines two interrelated social movements of the early to late-1990s: Hmong Americans' multi-site movements against the benefit ineligibility provisions in the federal Welfare Reform Act of 1996 and their movements in support of the Hmong Veterans' Naturalization Act since 1990. This study reveals that framing plays a crucial role in the success of protest/social movements. In both the movements against Welfare Reform and for naturalization provisions, `ordinary' Hmong social actors were able to construct and their institutional allies were able to make effective use of a specific collective action frame--the military-service frame--to bring about benefits and naturalization accommodations in existing state policies specifically for Hmong veterans. I argue that the state's dominant ideology and its foreign policy interests influenced its positive reception of the military-service frame.The second extended case study builds on the first case study to the extent that it examines in detail the contentious, interactive processes of social problem construction that underlie two other Hmong American movements for greater political inclusion. However, this second case differs from the first in that its central focus is on understanding how intra-ethnic conflict affects competing groups' ability to construct social problems and subsequently their ability to make claims upon the state--a state that is usually highly suspicious of ethnic movements for political inclusion. Drawing on interviews and primary written sources, I examine a Hmong American-led social movement that sought to incorporate Hmong history into the social science curriculum of California's public schools and the emotionally intense ethnic counter-movement that arose to meet it. My findings suggest that the mass media play crucial roles in creating cultural opportunities for the emergence of certain social problems and in (de)legitimizing such social problems. Although the California State Legislature showed deference to the military service frame and was willing to give token recognition to a broad, informal, quasi-racial category such as Southeast Asians, it trivialized and refused to hear the claims of an ethnolinguistic group regarding institutionally-produced language material inequity.I conclude that the collective mobilization of endogenous and exogenous resources in response to perceived political opportunities has been the key mechanism through which Hmong Americans have been able to participate in the U.S. political system. Hmong Americans' degree of political incorporation is a byproduct of the interplay between Hmong-led mobilization and the responses of the state.

This essay claims that Asian American political theory (AAPT) exists but needs to be more explicitly articulated. I contour AAPT as the practice and tradition of critical theoretical reflection upo...

Asian Americans with disabilities are an invisible minority within an invisible minority. Approximately 12% of the Asian American population of 14.6 million has a disability. Unfortunately, this population has attracted very little attention in the research literature on disability policy and Asian American studies. In particular, the labor market experiences of Asian Americans with disabilities have received virtually no mention in the academic literature of immigrant labor markets and ethnic enclave economies. This is largely due to cultural, religious and language stigma associated with Asian Americans with disabilities, that people with disabilities should be kept out of the public view. This dissertation aims to begin the identification and explanation of the challenges faced by Asian Americans with physical and developmental disabilities in their attempts to access the U.S. labor market. The dissertation starts with conceptual models delineating the challenges and barriers Asian Americans with disabilities face in trying to find employment. The methodological approach utilized is a parallel mixed-methods design. Focus groups of English and non-English speaking Asian Americans with disabilities were conducted to gain insight into their labor market experiences. Data gathered from the focus groups was used to inform and formulate questions for the individual interview stage. The second part is analysis of PUMS 2005 census survey data measuring the effects on employment and income, given disability, English-speaking ability, race, gender and location. The third part of the research consisted of open-ended qualitative interviews with 18 Asian Americans with disabilities to collect text data to further explain the causal relationships revealed by the focus groups and PUMS analysis. The results of this research revealed that disability has a significant effect on labor market opportunities for Asian American with disabilities. Further, gender and English-speaking ability also have significant measurable effects. Arguably, disability, gender and English-speaking ability in combination produced the clearest results of labor market disparities. The study concludes with recommendations for future research and implications for policy makers and practitioners. Potential audiences for this dissertation are individuals with disabilities and their families, community-based organizations, federal employment programs, work search programs, mainstream disability service organizations, legislators and planners.

This short play is inspired by the author’s lived experience as a queer Vietnamese-American woman in academia and in US society. This theatrical piece, centered around two young women meeting for the first time after several years, reflects upon the mutable divergence of shared memory, while also exploring intersectional feminist theory and the Vietnamese-American community. This is also a critique of US-based stereotypes about young Asian-American women, and how social prejudices and microaggressions can result in internalized anti-Asian misogyny. Like the range of identities and life experiences that characters Laurel and Mattie have, the Asian diasporic experience in the United States contains multitudes.

This essay examines “Asian American Activism studies” and asks: What changes through the legibility of Asian American activism studies? What does Asian American activism research uniquely offer? We offer a historiographical analysis examining topical themes as well as theoretical and methodological interventions across time. We provide an overview of the articles in this special issue. We discuss future directions, attending to the ways that research on activism remains surprisingly sparse in certain major areas within Asian American studies as well as to the ways that particular trends within the field are anticipated to shape activism studies.

Labeled as a “model minority,” Asian Americans have often been excluded from the dialogue on discrimination. Previous studies frequently used discrimination measures that were initially developed for African Americans and lack items related to language and nativity. Although discrimination adversely affects mental and physical health, its relationship to health-related quality of life (HRQOL) has been understudied in this population. This dissertation evaluated self-reported discrimination among Asian Americans by examining its measurement and relationship with HRQOL. Manuscript 1 assessed the psychometric properties of everyday (ERDS) and major racial discrimination scales (MRDS) that were developed for Asian Americans. In a sample of 569 Asian American immigrant adults, reliability was excellent for ERDS but moderate for MRDS (Cronbach’s α=0.94 and 0.60). The latter is likely low given that MRDS is an inventory of events. For construct validity, weak positive linear correlations with perceived stress and depressive symptoms were observed (r=0.22 and 0.28 for ERDS and r=0.11 and 0.14 for MRDS; p

In this commentary, we put forth an Asian Americanist perspective on child development that frames, expands upon, and at times challenges the contextual, conceptual, and methodological ideas put forward by Kiang et al., Mistry et al., and Yoshikawa et al. (this volume). This Asian Americanist perspective draws upon scholarship in Asian American Studies and critical race theory to bridge the historical, conceptual, and methodological contributions of the three articles. We also aim to challenge current and future generations of scholars studying Asian American child development to look at Asian American youth and families as autonomous, self-determining agents who are capable of challenging, resisting, and affecting change in a racialized society.

Asian Americans are internally diverse, with a rich set of cultural differences and also a varied set of challenges suffering from systematic economic disparities, which too often go unacknowledged. With support from the Ford Foundation, the UCLA Asian American Studies Center (AASC) and the UCLA Center for Neighborhood Knowledge (CNK) have been able to conduct pioneering research on wealth inequality among Asian Americans. The goal is to uncover patterns that can guide the formulation of policies as programs that ensure financial security for all. Over the years, AASC and CNK has produced important findings, reported in thousands of lines of text. These pages visually represent some of the major findings relating to the theme of wealth and financial security -- defined as having enough assets to address short-term needs (unemployment spells, health and other emergencies) and long-term investments (education, retirement).

The ongoing demographic growth of the Asian American population enhances foundational support for Asian American studies; however, it also poses complex challenges for the formulation and direction of the field. Asian American studies has been shaped by transnational and regional economic and political conditions, as well as by the receptiveness and limitations of the academy, which has led to uneven disciplinary and institutional manifestations. This essay specifically analyzes what impact the transforming Asian American population has had on the formation of the field of Asian American studies and how the projected demographic growth will shape its future academic trajectory.

This introductory essay examines the shared interests and subject matter of Asian american Studies and Indigenous Studies. In addition of summaries of the essays included in the special issue, the essay touches on matters of Asian, Asian american, and Native political movements, cultural production, and identity.