ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES PROGRAM

Description: This is a comparative course that will examine the international migration histories of different Asian groups in the 20th century and the development of community and ethnic identity of those groups in different national contexts. We will interrogate the concept of diaspora versus migration versus immigration, and the notions of identity and community implicit in each framework. We will discuss notions of group belonging and ideas of citizenship, nationality and ethnicity, and also compare how different ethnic groups and different national societies have handled ethnic/racial/cultural diversity. We will, in short, be examining the crossing and construction of multiple borders, the cultural encounters and the mixings of various Asian groups in various socioeconomic and political contexts in different nation-states.

Description: This course introduces students to both historical and contemporary representations and expressions of Asian Americans in mainstream, independent, and alternative models of media. Such sites of production and reception include: documentaries, narrative film, television, print media, music, social media, literature/memoirs, video games, and more. A central focus of this course will be the various tensions that emerge vis-à-vis multiple and competing interpretations about the meanings, purposes, and affects of media for/in/about Asian Americans. Students will engage the power, pain, and pleasure of race, gender, sexuality, class, immigration, nationalism, health, and other topics through/within the multiple mediascapes of Asian America.

Description: Far from apolitical, histories of science in the United States have been deeply shaped by structures of racism—such as slavery, settler colonialism, immigration, militarism, policing, and more. This course examines how racism has persisted across scientific fields and how technology has been used to advance systems of discrimination, from medical and biological sciences to chemistry, physics, and computing. Along the way, the course will explore justice-oriented technological approaches developed by activists that offer new ways of envisioning the relationship between science, technology, and the social world.

Description: Twice since 9/11, politicians have referred to the World War II imprisonment of Japanese Americans as a possible precedent for policies toward Muslims. Yet many Americans remain ignorant about this important and understudied episode in U.S. history. This seminar-style course examines events leading up to the mass imprisonment of a group of people based on race, the role played by wartime emergency language, the experiences of Japanese Americans, and the consequences of this wartime policy. It focuses on the intersections between race, gender, nation, and law. Readings include secondary and primary sources, including related court cases, executive orders, documentary films, memoirs, and fiction.

Description: In this course, students will explore how, as the United States empire expanded, powerful elites and politicians decided what kind of people could be part of the polity and on what terms. Students will learn the history of U.S. citizenship law, why certain people were eligible for U.S. citizenship, and why some territories became independent, others became states, and still others remained colonies. This course puts the histories of U.S. territorial acquisition in North America, the Caribbean, and the Pacific in conversation with one another. By paying attention to how the United States constructed race in different times and for different populations, students are encouraged to see commonalities in the classification and treatment of Asian (American), Latin American (and LatinX) and Indigenous peoples. As a whole, the course will demonstrate how U.S. elites and state actors repeatedly invested in and defended the idea of the United States as a white nation.

Description: Since 1942, the United States has been engaged in permanent war – from World War II and the Cold War to the ongoing War on Terror. We will explore how this society emerged from complex entanglements between racism, militarism, capitalism, and empire: the military-industrial complex. Through historical, cultural, and social analysis, we will examine how war is waged in our everyday lives: in our workplaces, classrooms, laboratories, and local communities. And along the way, we will learn from anti-war movements driven by visions for more just and decolonial worlds.

Description: In this course, we use food to illuminate histories of migration, colonization, and empire, and discuss food’s entanglement with capitalism, politics, and (gendered) labor. We ask how the production, representation, and consumption of food have become contested sites of racialization, resistance, and the negotiation of boundaries around difference. Through media texts and experiential learning, we consider Asian American foodways as a space to examine multiplicity, authenticity, and hybridity. We place Asian American food in the local context, through exploration of Chicagoland space and place-making. There will be at least one mandatory off-campus trip.

Description: How are digital spaces shaping – and shaped by – Asian American identities, communities, movements, and experiences? In this class, we explore the intersection of race and technology, labor and (im)migration, and our relationship to screens, code, and algorithms. We ask how surveillance, weaponization of data, the politics and circulation of (mis/dis)information, and resistance informs Asian American digital cultures. From hashtag activism to digital intimacy, we examine cultural production on social media platforms, dating apps, and viral videos and memes. Students will engage in a quarter-long digital ethnography project.

Description: Although the Midwest is imagined as the white heartland of America, Asian Americans and other racialized minorities have a long history in the region. This upper-level undergraduate seminar course posits an Asian American Midwest through memoirs, documentaries, oral histories, and primary sources documenting the experiences of Asian Americans in the region. The course will ask students to consider what differentiates Asian American histories and experiences in the Midwest from other regions and how an Asian American Midwest might be defined.

Description: Kim Jong Un bans mullets and skinny jeans. North Korea is a nuclear weapons nightmare. These ripped-from-the-headlines statements are part of popular ‘Western’ conceptions of the DPRK as dangerous, unknowable, and absurd. In this course, we ask how the production of knowledge, expertise, and media shape dominant representations of North Korea, and how these images circulate in ‘Western’ discourse about the country – in news, popular culture, and digital spaces. By critically examining our ways of knowing, we explore the construction, circulation, interpretation, and contestation of ‘Western’ knowledge about North Korea.

Description: As a bookend to an "introductory" course, the capstone seminar allows Asian American Studies majors, minors, and graduate students to examine-at an advanced level- emerging shifts, trends, and provocations in contemporary scholarship to dabble in the politics of knowledge production within this interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field. Students will integrate theories and methods from the course with their intellectual interests and community commitments to develop a culminating research, creative, or praxis-based project. Potential topics, guest speakers, field trips, and films may address Asian Americans and: electoral politics, queerness, transpacific studies, the law, inter and intra race relations, transnational activism, health/wellness/disability, film and media, education, and more. I also welcome other advanced students doing thesis/capstone projects related to Ethnic/Gender/American/Queer/Sexuality/Disability Studies.