ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM

Description: This course examines how journalists produce and circulate meaning within and across societies. We analyze the role of journalist positionality, newsroom DEI initiatives, and institutionalized norms and values, in the coverage of social difference. We explore the influence of news audiences –both imagined and real –in journalistic knowledge production. Our goal is to critically interrogate the ideological underpinnings of present-day journalism practice.

Description: This class introduces students to a broad survey of migratory and displacement patterns of those living in Asia as agitated by militarism, capitalism, imperialism, war, racism, sexism, classism, and nationalism stemming from within the region and abroad. What are the multiple and competing narratives of how these histories and experiences are produced? Once in the United States, how did similar—although not identical—processes of racialization, economic and labor exploitation, legislative and political exclusion, social and cultural othering, and strategies for survival and resistance work together to transform these heterogeneous populations into “Asian Americans”?

Description: This course examines the history and major ideas about multiracial people in the United States through the lens of the emerging academic field of Critical Mixed Race Studies. How have laws constructing and regulating race, gender, sexuality, and immigration led to national ideas about who “mixed race” people are? What accounts for the national obsession about inter-racial marriage and multiracial people? And how do people who identify with more than one racial category navigate life in this society? Critical Mixed Race Studies is a field that interrogates these discourses and analyzes them within the context of society.

Description: How does an idea, a question, or a phenomenon become a research project? Once completed, how is that research to be used? As a multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary field, Asian American Studies employs research methods from traditional disciplines including Anthropology, English, Film, History, Psychology, and Sociology, as well as problem-based fields including queer studies, feminist studies, and disability studies to produce knowledge about difference towards the aim of social justice. In this class, we will practice reading and evaluating texts with the intent of understanding how scholars develop their research questions, modes of “data” collection, and structures of writing. We will also discuss the ethical concerns of conducting research on, about, and with intersectional Asian Americans. You will also develop practical skills such as developing research questions, writing a literature review, completing the IRB process, gathering and analyzing data, and presenting your findings to your peers. While this class is designed for those are completing a senior thesis or will be next year, 2 nd year students applying for SURG (or a similar program) are also welcome.

Description: This course introduces students to a community-engaged approach to knowledge-building. Through a partnership with Full Spectrum Features, a Chicago-based nonprofit committed to transforming the independent media landscape through equity in production, representation, and media audiences, we take a hands-on approach to learning how to create a research proposal to conduct collaborative research.

Description: This course offers an interdisciplinary examination of queer, trans, and nonbinary of color politics, poetics, and cultural productions. Drawing from the overlapping—at times contentious—intellectual frameworks, activist analytics, and genealogies of “queer and trans of color critique,” we will interrogate how writers, artists, activists, and performers have labored to enact life worlds in the face of interlocking systems of oppression, such as racial capitalism, cisheteropatriarchy, ableism, and transphobia. Students will have the chance to engage the Chicago area as a site of queer and trans of color worldmaking and activism aimed at imagining a more just and equitable world.

Description: Asian American literary and cinematic arts invite us to understand their achievements in terms of an ongoing interrogation of the nature and nativity of speech: From "model minority" to "enemy aliens," from fortune-cookie clichés to talk-stories, and from "FOB" to "crazy rich" the representation and self-representations of Asian Americans weave an ambivalent -- sometimes affirmative, sometimes monstrous -- and ever-changing story. In this class, we will explore works of fiction, film, and other media by which Asian American realities are created, disturbed, and otherwise transformed, with a concentration on the themes of speaking, silence, place, displacement, protest, deviance, and exile.