Asian American Studies Center Research Articles

Lessons Learned From TranslateCovid, a Multilingual Online Resource Hub for Asian American and Pacific Islander Communities and Beyond.

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated health disparities among immigrant communities. Delivering accurate information and addressing misinformation on protective measures and vaccination to linguistically disadvantaged groups was critical for mitigating the effects of the pandemic. One group that was especially vulnerable to miscommunication about COVID-19 was non-native English-speaking immigrants. To address these disparities, the Asian American Studies Center and the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles, partnered to create a multilingual resource hub, TranslateCovid.org, to disseminate credible and reliable information about COVID-19 safety measures, the science behind the vaccines, and vaccine safety. We identified >1300 verified resources in 60 languages from government, academic, and nonprofit organizations and reposted them on the TranslateCovid website. We also developed public service announcement videos on handwashing, use of face masks, and social distancing in 10 languages and a fact sheet for frequently asked questions in 20 languages. We used a participatory approach to develop strategies for disseminating these resources. We discuss lessons learned, including strategies for forming government, community, and academic partnerships to support the timely development and dissemination of information. We conclude with a discussion on the unique role of universities in promoting equitable access to public health resources among immigrant communities in times of crisis.

Myanmar. Romancing human rights: Gender, intimacy, and power between Burma and the West By Tamara C. Ho Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press; Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 2015. Pp. xxvi + 118. Notes, Bibliography, Index.

Myanmar. Romancing human rights: Gender, intimacy, and power between Burma and the West By Tamara C. Ho Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press; Los Angeles: UCLA Asian American Studies Center, 2015. Pp. xxvi + 118. Notes, Bibliography, Index. - Volume 48 Issue 1

The Study of Asian American Politics in the United States

A & Q 11 6 Works Cited Blyth, Mark. 2006. “Great Punctuations: Prediction, Randomness, and the Evolution of Comparative Political Science.” American Political Science Review 100, no. 4: 493–­ 98. Cumings, Bruce. 1997. “Boundary Displacement: The State, the Foundations , and Area Studies during and after the Cold War.” In Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, edited by Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, 261–­ 302. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. Hero, Rodney E. 2016. “American Politics and Political Science in an Era of Growing Racial Diversity and Economic Disparity.” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 1: 7–­ 20. Jaschik, Scott. 2010. “Should Political Science Be Relevant?” Inside Higher Ed, no. 8. Johnson, Chalmers, and E. B. Keehn. 1994. “A Disaster in the Making: Rational Choice and Asian Studies.” The National Interest, Summer, 14–­22. Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber. 2005. “The Imperialism of Categories: Situating Knowledge in a Globalizing World,” PerspectivesonPolitics 3, no. 1: 5–­14. Schmitter, Philippe C. 2009. “The Nature and Future of Comparative Politics.” European Political Science Review 1, no. 1: 33–­ 61. Smith, Rogers M. 1997. “Still Blowing in the Wind: The American Quest for a Democratic, Scientific Political Science.” Daedalus 126, no. 1: 253–­87. The Study of Asian American Politics in the United States Janelle S. Wong Is there a place for ethnic studies, and specifically Asian American studies, in political science? Ethnic studies is an interdisciplinary field that places race and racialization at its center. It strives to understand the ways in which racial categories are created and maintained and their consequences for representation, resource allocation, and identity. As such, the concerns of ethnic studies overlap with the concerns of political science and the study of governance, the state, and the institutionalization of social and economic power. Ethnic studies scholarship would argue, for example, that political institutions and the distribution of social and economic power reflect state-­supported racial formations. Hence ethnic studies has advanced the concept of “the racial state” (Omi and Winant 2014). Asian 12 A & Q American studies is a subfield of U.S. ethnic studies, focusing on the experience of members of the Asian diaspora residing in the United States. Over the course of my career, I have come to believe that there is, in fact, an important place for Asian American studies in political science. Importantly, Dr. Don Nakanishi, a Harvard-­ trained political scientist (PhD, 1978), played a central role in establishing both the subfield of Asian American politics and the multidisciplinary field of Asian American studies . He did this both through research and through institution building. For example, he was on the Executive Board of the Asian Pacific American Caucus of the American Political Science Association, eventually receiving the Lifetime Achievement Award from the association’s Section on Race, Ethnicity, and Politics, and he served for twenty years as the director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, the oldest and largest Asian American studies center in the nation. Nakanishi’s research and field development created intellectual connections across political science and Asian American studies. In 1976, for instance, Nakanishi and several other scholars of the Asian American experience published a series of essays in Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America (Gee 1976). In this collection, several authors documented and analyzed the participation of Japanese, Korean, Indian, and Chinese immigrant communities in the United States in leftist and nationalist movements. The authors emphasized the development of a distinct Asian immigrant politics in the United States informed by both international affairs in the immigrants’ countries of origin and the deep discrimination that Asian immigrants were facing in their daily lives in the United States in the era of Asian exclusion. In a chapter in this volume titled “Minorities and International Politics,” Nakanishi (1976) forwarded a critique of the traditional political science international relations literature with a claim that while it addressed inequalities between nation-­ states, it failed to consider the fact of white supremacy. Similarly, he critiqued the literature on race relations in the United States because it failed to take into account power differentials between the United States and the home countries of Asians in the United States. Over the course of the next forty years, the study of international politics, comparative politics...

Narrative inquiry as travel study method: affordances and constraints

This article maps how narrative inquiry—the use of story to study human experience—has been employed as both method and form to capture cross-cultural learning associated with Western doctoral students’ travel study to eastern destinations. While others were the first to employ this method in the travel study domain, we are the first to comprehensively explore the affordances and constraints of the methodology and the possibilities it holds for illuminating knowledge developments, community growth, and identity transformations on the part of participating students. Story fragments illustrating each of these opportunities and challenges are drawn from the China Study Abroad Program, a program sponsored by the University of Houston’s Asian American Studies Center that has been underway since 1995. Affordances of the narrative inquiry research method include such things as detailed accounts of individuals in interaction with diverse people/places/things and explications of stories people live in and by. Accounts, which are “true for now,” as opposed to true for all time and the dangers of human fallibility form two examples of narrative inquiry’s constraints.

A Richard Aoki Forum: What Does It Take to Destroy a Legend?

Organized by UCLA Asian American Studies Center Publications Manager Mary Kao, this Amerasia Forum addresses the recent controversy over the claim that Richard Aoki worked as a FBI informant. Gathered here are a collection of short essays from personal friends and colleagues of Richard Aoki: Douglas Daniels, Harvey Dong, Wayie Ly. The pieces offer personal portraits of Aoki as the contributors consider his legacy and achievements in light of recent events.

Before Internment, Between Nations, Beyond Integration: Asian Migration Studies in the Shadow of Yuji Ichioka, Him Mark Lai, and Edgar Wickberg

In the last two years, a pair of giants of Chinese American and Overseas Chinese migration history have passed away—Him Mark Lai and Edgar Wickberg. As each passing led to an examination of his individual impact upon scholarship, it is perhaps fitting that all of us who have benefited from the foundational work that an earlier generation of scholars performed pause a moment to take stock. A decade ago, the historian Valerie Matsumoto guest edited a special issue of Amerasia entitled and Historians in the Making, which featured reflections by Him Mark Lai and Yuji Ichioka (who passed away in 2002) about their pioneering work as scholars.1 Another essay reflected upon the work of Alexander Saxton, who helped found the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA, and I wrote an essay for the volume that used the rather inelegant conceit that, in the field of Asian American history, we were all dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. In the last decade, it does seem even more striking that a genera...

Reflections on Linking the Global South and Asian American Studies

Paralleling my research has been my involvement in practice, particularly the institution building of Asian American Studies. In this short piece, I provide some vignettes from the first two decades of Asian American Studies. In the 1970s and 1980s, when our numbers were small, there was no road map on how to develop a new interdisciplinary field, and linkages across regions had to be built to develop a national professional organization. In recognizing the retirement of Don Nakanishi, Director of the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA, I also reflect upon aspects of how my various interests and activities have dovetailed with Don, Asian American Studies, and the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, especially around efforts to broaden Asian American Studies to include an international dimension.

A Tribute to Don Nakanishi and the Folks at the Center

Elsie Osajima presented a speech at the 40th anniversary commemoration of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center on May 2009. Her speech discusses how she was hired to be an administrative assistant in the newly established Asian American Studies Center during the Vietnam War, women's movement, and the movement for people of color.

Utang na Loob: Our Debt to Don Nakanishi

Susie Hsiushan Ling describes how Don Nakanishi never gave up trying to blend the passion of 1960 idealists with the cutthroat competitive reality of the academic world. She also describes how the UCLA Asian American Studies Center is a caring giant that remains relevant to real people.

“What Do We Do When We Win?”: Don Nakanishi's Visionary Leadership for the New Generation

As director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, Don Nakanishi embodies what visionary leadership means in practice. His actions and ideas anticipate three new leadership challenges for the new generation: first, the responsibility to seek out—and not avoid—positions of power and to use these positions to change relations of power in society; second, the responsibility to use power and resources not only for the benefit of Asian Americans but for all, especially other communities of color; and third, the responsibility to continue to develop Asian American Studies as a multidisciplinary field embracing multiple constituencies and emphasizing linkages between academicians and community leaders. By embracing these responsibilities, Don demonstrates to young professional how visionary leadership can change powerful institutions and redefine the identity of Asian Americans.

L. Ling-chi Wang: The Quintessential Scholar-Activist

The following remarks were presented by Prof. Don T. Nakanishi, Director of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, on the occasion of Prof. L. Ling-chi Wang's retirement dinner, San Francisco, May 12, 2006. They have been edited for publication and are followed by comments by Russell C. Leong, Amerasia Journal editor and an adjunct UCLA English professor.

New publication released by UCLA's Asian American Studies Center

New publication released by UCLA's Asian American Studies Center

Health issues for minority adolescents

Adolescents are an underserved group in terms of health care. Poor and minority youth are particularly shortchanged in our current system. In view of the high incidence of many medical and psychological syndromes associated with poverty and discrimination, this situation is paradoxical. This book examines both common and unique health issues associated with a number of different groups - African-American, Latino, Native American, Asian-American, and Hawaiian - and explores the role of traditional and nontraditional treatments for each. The chapters represent a compendium of the most up-to-date studies summarized by leading researchers and include specific recommendations for improving health care services, which will prove valuable to providers and those concerned with public policy. The authors conclude that unless greater attention and resources are devoted to these youth, the consequences will continue to be dire, both for the groups involved and for society as a whole.Marjorie Kagawa-Singer, a nurse and anthropologist, is an assistant professor in the School of Public Health and Asian American Studies Center at ucla. She is the author of numerous articles concerning cross-cultural health care and multicultural issues in cancer care. Phyllis A. Katz is a clinical and developmental psychologist. She is the director of the Institute for Research on Social Problems, where she researches children's gender-role development and racial attitude acquisition. She is coauthor of Big World, Small Screen: The Role of Television in American Society (Nebraska 1992). Dalmas Taylor, provost at the University of Texas at Arlington, is the author of Ethnicity and Bicultural Considerations in Psychology: Meeting the Needs of Ethnic Minorities. Judith Vanderryn is a psychologist at the Denver Veterans' Affairs Medical Center, where she treats patients with severe post-traumatic stress disorder.

Asian American Religion: A Special Topics Bibliography

This bibliographic search was conducted on the Amerasia Journal Cumulative Bibliography Database 2996 maintained in the UCLA Asian American Studies Center Reading Room. The database is a cumulation of all citations from the Amerasia Journal ”annual bibliographies” that were published in print to volume 17, as well as those electronically compiled and managed thereafter since volume 18 up through volume 21. Consisting of over 17,800 records, these records are easily searchable and retrievable by author, title, and key words. Each record is also indexed with descriptors, which are terms not found in the title. The 1996 edition is only available for use in the Reading Room, and it will not be distributed. By late Spring 1996, the Reading Room will produce a limited number of copies of AJCB 1995 (2nd update), which will be the last update we will produce. It will contain over 16,000 citations representing Amerasia’s annual bibliographies to volume 20. Moreover, only Macintosh versions will be produced and updated. We‘ve already sold all our DOS licenses and cannot afford to both purchase more licenses and produce the database in this version. Based on my understanding of ”religion,” I approached my search for information on anything that would tell me about the beliefs, interests, concerns, practices, and experiences of Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans, i.e., their world of ”spirituality.” What makes ”spiritual” experiences unique is that these experiences are felt to explain, describe, and shape meaning relating to Asian American lives beyond the visible and operate on intuition or faith rather than logic or reason. I took both the institutional and personal manifestations of religion and spirituality into consideration.

The Academy of American Poets Symposium, UCLA Asian American Studies Center, April 23, 1992: Asian American Literature: Questions of Identity

(1994). The Academy of American Poets Symposium, UCLA Asian American Studies Center, April 23, 1992: Asian American Literature: Questions of Identity. Amerasia Journal: Vol. 20, No. 3, pp. 1-8.