Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
Vina Orden will present on her essay in CUNY FORUM Volume 11:1, examining how narratives in popular media can perpetuate or challenge existing power structures and colonial mentalities.
Betty Lee Sung, co-founder of the Asian American / Asian Research Institute (AAARI), Professor Emerita, City College of New York, and recipient of the 2017 Association for Asian American Studies Lifetime Achievement Award, has established an endowment of $100,000 at the City University of New York to create a research fund under the auspices of AAARI, on Asian American topics. The fund is intended to support the research by providing funds for a research assistant, copywriter, research travel, acquisition or access to research material and similar costs so that the researcher can complete the project.
In Caring for Caregivers: Filipina Migrant Workers and Community Building during Crisis (University of Washington Press, 2025), Valerie Francisco-Menchavez centers the perspectives of Filipino caregivers in the San Francisco Bay Area from 2013 to 2021, illuminating their transnational experiences and their strategies and practices to help each other navigate the crumbling U.S. healthcare system.
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.
In her CUNY FORUM essay, writer Vina Orden discusses quincentennial commemoration of the Magellan-Elcano circumnavigation across the Pacific to South America, and presents a critique of colonial Spanish and Filipino history, utilizing Luis H. Francia’s play, “Black Henry,” as a radical work of imagination and jumping off point to deconstruct colonial history.
Prof. Karen B. Hanna (Connecticut College) will discuss her research, featured in CUNY FORUM Volume 6:1, into the KDP (Katipunan ng mga Demokratikong Pilipino) organization, from 1973 to 1986, and the exploration and views of sexuality during that era by its members.