ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM

Description: In our current social, political, and ecological climate, what is the role of Asian American Studies? How has its mission and vision changed since its inception 50 years ago? Throughout this course, we will question the limits and possibilities of Asian American Studies as a field, method, theoretical approach, mode of critique, political orientation, and platform for social justice. Themes and concepts will include: intersectionality, critical race theory, the politics of knowledge production, popular culture, drag queens, identity, activism, and strategies of survival and resistance.

Description: This class is critical examination of post-1965 Asian American communities in light of demographic, social, racial and economic trends in the United States and in Asia. Through exploring various material and political stakes involved in the call to “Asian American community,” this course introduces students to the debates, contentions, opportunities, and forms of solidarity that have emerged in recent decades. More specifically, this course, in response to current major global and national crises, including the global pandemic, escalating anti-Asian racism, violence against Asian/American women, and the tension between Black-Asian communities, will present and explore urgent issues, debates, and concerns facing Asian American communities. This course intends to examine the tension between the umbrella term “Asian American” and the diversity, divergence, inequity, and tension within this larger community.

Description: South Asian American cultures will introduce students to the social and linguistic lives of migrants from the Indian subcontinent to the US. Focusing on post-1965 communities, we will examine what it means to be South Asian American from the perspective of race, caste, class, religion, gender, and nationality. Areas of focus include: politics of space and place; cultural production and appropriation; language use and expressive culture; politics and the War on Terror; and solidarities against marginalization and oppression.

Description: This course is situated at the intersection of theoretical, cultural, medical, and commercial online discourses concerning the burgeoning Gender Affirmation-related surgeries presented online and conducted in Thailand. Using Gender, Queer, Trans, Asian American, and Digital Humanities Theories, we will discuss the cross-cultural intersections, dialogues, refusals, and adaptions when thinking about medical travel to Thailand for gender/sex related surgeries. We will examine Thai cultural/historical conceptions of sex and gender, debates concerning bodies and diagnoses, and changes in presentations of sex/gender related surgeries offered online. We will also explore how digital archives are created and managed. Investigating transcripts of live interviews, medical discourses, and an archive of web images offering GAS surgeries produced by Thais for non-Thais will serve as axes for investigating this topic.

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, 2nd year students applying for SURG (or a similar program) are also welcome.

Description: This course uses hands-on inquiry to learn about community-engaged approaches to knowledge building. Through an immersive community partnership with Full Spectrum Features, a Chicago-based nonprofit committed to using film and digital storytelling to spark empathic learning and work toward educational justice, we engage in experiential learning about the ethical co-creation of knowledge. Students will contribute to Full Spectrum Features’ latest narrative film project on Japanese American redress by pursuing projects based on their skills and interests. Each week, we will add to a toolbox of research methods that students can apply to future coursework, research, internships, and jobs.

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, 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.

Description: Issues and themes in Asian American society and culture. Recent topics include the Arab American studies, student protests, and minority conservatisms. May be repeated for credit with a different topic.

Description: What constitutes “Asian American,” “popular,” and “culture” within “Asian American Popular Culture”? How can we connect cultural productions by, for, and about Asian Americans to larger structures of race, gender, class, sexuality, (dis)ability, and nation? To grapple with these questions, this course will engage a variety of historical and contemporary cultural forms, such as memoirs, documentaries, film, poetry, music, performance, graphic novels, video games, social media, and more. This course final may be an on-campus community show, where students will showcase their engagements with the power, politics, and praxis of Asian American pop culture.

Description: What happens when you juxtapose the constantly shifting marker of “Asian/American” with the highly contested and expansive concept of “literature?” Instead of viewing these terms as predetermined givens to be represented or maintained, this class takes these terms as conditions of possibility for cultural productions and aesthetic expressions. This course is composed of two parts: The first is an introduction to early works of 20th century Asian American Literature and their social, political, and historical contexts. The second part is a study of contemporary texts that provide a more expansive view of what can be considered the proper subjects/objects of Asian American literature. Introduction to Asian American Literature invites students to investigate the role of a broad survey of stories, plays, films, music, and visual art in cultural politics and how we can highlight the frictions and possibilities of aesthetic production and social justice work.

Description: This course examines the conversations between, within, and across Ethnic Studies and Native American and Indigenous Studies. What are the central paradigms of Black Studies, Native Studies, and Asian American Studies and how do they conceptualize relationships among race, indigeneity, diaspora, immigration, White supremacy, and settler colonialism? This course prioritizes writing that addresses these questions relationally through sections on Black and Native histories of exchange in the US, theories of Asian/Indigenous relationships and land, race and indigeneity in the Pacific, and current debates across Black and Native Studies and on the question of slavery, settler colonialism, and non-Black people of color in North America. Instructor permission required.

Description: Detailed exploration of an issue and its ramifications in Asian American society and culture. May be repeated for credit with a different topic.

Description: “Sexuality”—as potential, productive, perverse, political, and pleasurable— is taken up in this course as a profoundly dynamic node of power and knowledge. This interdisciplinary course interrogates how “Asian American sexualities” are taken up as a problematic and/or analytic in history, performance, public health, film, sociology, anthropology, literature, and art to discuss diaspora and migration, activism and HIV/AIDS, intimacy and pornography, gender and labor. This course asks, “What are the possibilities and potentialities of Asian American sexualities? How do Asian American sexualities inform our thinking about how we understand, relate to, and imagine the world and what we want it to be?” Please be aware some texts and media might be too explicitly violent, graphic, or sexual for some students. This course requires attendance at events outside of the scheduled class time. Must be advanced-level or instructor permission required.