Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
The Asian American / Asian Studies across CUNY Brown Bag Series for CUNY faculty, staff, and students, showcases research, scholarship, and/or creative projects that engage the complex and heterogeneous histories, issues, and experiences of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. The AA/AS across CUNY Brown Bag Series provides a regular space for CUNY members to present their work in an informal setting, as well as an opportunity for members of CUNY interested in Asian American / Asian Studies to connect, network, share information, and build cross-campus community.
If you have any questions about the Brown Bag Series or would like make a presentation, please e-mail us at info@aaari.info.
Fall 2023 - Spring 2024 Schedule
November 3, 2023
"Collisions of the Diasporic: Cambodian Cultural Production in the United States"
Sokunthary Svay (City College of New York)
December 15, 2023
"Globalized Filipino Activism: Resisting Neoliberalism and State Repression in Diaspora"
Jackelyn Mariano (Hunter College)
February 16, 2024
"Desire Paths & Han: Scholar Activism with NYC's Immigrant Food Delivery Workers"
Do Jun Lee (Queens College)
March 15, 2024
"Building the Southeast Asian Consortium at SUNY and CUNY"
Nerve V. Macaspac (Queens College/CUNY Graduate Center)
April 19, 2024
"Valiente Bangla: Bangladeshi Migrants Mobilize for Immigrants Rights in Spain"
Chaumtoli Huq (CUNY School of Law)
This presentation, based on 2023 ethnographic work as a Fullbright Scholar in Spain, focuses on the community-based organization, Valiente Bangla/Brave Bangla, based in Madrid, formed after a successful mobilization to stop the deportation of 34 Bangladeshi nationals in Cueta.
Funded by the Luce Foundation, Prof. Nerve Macaspac will discuss a collaborative four-year project to establish a Southeast Asian Studies network in the State University of New York (SUNY) and City University of New York (CUNY) systems. The SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium (SEAC) is an interdisciplinary initiative to promote research, teaching, and related efforts around Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian Americans in New York’s public universities.
In recent years, New York City’s food delivery workers, a largely Asian and Latina/o immigrant workforce, have struggled against being characterized and policed as public safety “problems” even as these same workers became essential but unprotected during the Covid-19 pandemic. To better unpack the temporality of desire paths of delivery workers, Prof. Do Jun Lee mobilizes han, an indigenous Korean word for the inherited and collective emotions of transgenerational trauma from systematic oppressions. As such, understanding how and why food delivery workers are simultaneously “essential” and a “problem” is to re-member the intertwined and complex histories of place, migrations, mobilities, labor, and governance, which opens up possibilities for redefining the “problem.”
Jackelyn Mariano will discuss her research and community activism among diasporic Filipino social movements, particularly the Malaya Movement’s broad anti-fascist coalition building during the Philippine elections, and the Justice for Jollibee Workers campaign that has challenged the fast-food corporation’s systemic abuse of workers’ rights.
The entry of Cambodians in the United States was not simply a migration, but a crash-landing as refugees after an incredible loss of population, humanity, culture & arts, religion, and thinkers. How, then, do the diasporic inheritors of this history respond via cultural production? And how does artist-scholar Sokunthary Svay’s own work including her newly published memoir, Put It On Record, address this question?
Join us for an in-person follow-up discussion about efforts at LaGuardia Community College and across the City University of New York to organize AAPI communities. Bring questions, stories, and strategies from experiences on your own campus!