Cathy V. Schlund-Vials

Cathy J. Schlund-Vials is Professor of English and Asian/Asian American studies at the University of Connecticut (Storrs); she is also Associate Dean for Humanities and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in UConn’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Prior to this appointment, she served as the Director of the Asian and Asian American Studies Institute (2009-2018). In addition to published book chapters, articles, reviews, and edited collections, she is the author of two monographs: Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing and War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work. She has edited and coedited a number of anthologies and collections, which include Disability, Human Rights, and the Limits of Humanitarianism, Keywords for Asian American Studies, Interrogating the Perpetrator: Violation, Culpability, and Human Rights, Beiging of America: Personal Narratives about Being Mixed Race in the Twenty-First Century, Flashpoints for Asian American Studies, and Asian America: A Primary Source Reader, among others. She is a coeditor for Temple University Press’s Asian American History and Culture series and was the president of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS, 2016–2018).

Planned Obsolescence, Strategic Resistance: Asian American Studies and the Neoliberal University (Cancelled)

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Set within an all-too-real administrative imaginary of budget cuts, metric-laden assessments, programmatic justifications, and shrinking faculty lines, Ethnic Studies (along with Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) occupies a decidedly precarious position within the so-termed “corporate university.”If student strikes and Civil Rights movements instantiated the original institutionalization of ethnic studies as a necessary interdisciplinary field of inquiry, the current state of academic affairs reflects a long-standing neoconservative, laissez-faire “planned obsolescence” (to quickly access Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s provocative analytic). It is against this admittedly dystopic backdrop of planned obsolescence, which reflects and refracts the foci of Flashpoints for Asian American Studies (Fordham University Press 2017), that this presentation considers possible sites and administrative practices of strategic resistance.

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