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

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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Distant Islands: The Japanese American Community in New York City, 1876-1930s

Prof. Daniel H. Inouye will discuss his book, Distant Islands (University Press of Colorado, 2018), a modern narrative history of the Japanese American community in New York City between America’s centennial year and the Great Depression of the 1930s. Often overshadowed in historical literature by the Japanese diaspora on the West Coast, this community, which … Read more

Asian/American Scholars of Education: 21st Century Pedagogies, Perspectives, and Experiences

Nicholas D. Hartlep and Daisy Ball will discuss their book Asian/American Scholars of Education: 21st Century Pedagogies, Perspectives, and Experiences, which shares the knowledge and travails of Asian/American luminaries in the field of education. This unique collection of essays acknowledges the struggle that Asian/American Education scholars have faced when it comes to being regarded as … Read more

“We’re the New Citizenship”: LA’s Asian and Latin@ Immigrant Activists on Politics as Embodied and Emotional

In recent decades under runaway neoliberalism, “foreignized” and unauthorized immigrants have increasingly made political inroads by way of grassroots community activism and by sidestepping the need for formal political channels and, at times, even dismissing them. By way of nearly four years of ethnographic observation, 49 in-depth interviews, and extensive document analysis, Prof. Nadia Kim … Read more