Asian American / Asian Research Institute
The City University of New York
For October, Filipino American History Month, the Asian American / Asian Research Institute is excited to uplift the voices of student researchers and activists with presentations from Gabriela Sagan and members of the Filipino Curriculum Project on Filipino activism for women and school curriculum in Hawai’i.
This presentation, based on an article by Prof. Glenn Magapantay, studies local LGBTQ AAPI organizations over the past twenty years. It reveals the constituent elements that have allowed them to survive and thrive. While they continue to face internal challenges in building their organizations, the National Queer Asian Pacific Islander Alliance (NQAPIA), a federation of LGBTQ AAPI organizations, has helped them expand their capacity and longevity. A sustainable model of infrastructure that builds local LGBTQ AAPI community is needed. That sustainable model is where organizations balance the social and, political, as well as peer-support and educational programming. Prof. Magpantay dubs this practical theory a “TIGER Analysis” or “Typography of Intersectional Gender and Sexual Empowerment and Resistance.”
Many historians and Japanese Americans cite the loss of U.S. citizenship rights as the biggest injustice of the camps, and many believe cooperation and not resistance was the norm. Join Dr. Gary Okihiro as he outlines the nature of the oppression in that historical experience, and the resistance posed to those oppressive acts.
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.