Asian American Studies Research Articles

The Why and Whither of Asian American Studies: Toward a Reckoning

The Why and Whither of Asian American StudiesToward a Reckoning Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (bio), Lily Anne Y. Welty Tamai (bio), and Paul Spickard1 (bio) Ring the bells that still can ringForget your perfect offeringThere is a crack, a crack in everythingThat's how the light gets in. —Leonard Cohen, "Anthem"2 Remember that consciousness is power. Consciousness is education and knowledge. Consciousness is becoming aware. … Tomorrow's world is yours to build. —Yuri Kochiyama (1921–2014) On March 11, 2020, roughly three months after the first death attributed to the newly discovered SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) virus was confirmed in Wuhan, China, the World Health Organization elevated its characterization of the ensuing outbreaks from "public health emergency of international concern" (PHEIC) to global pandemic. Despite then-President Donald J. Trump's assurances of contagion containment via China-focused travel restrictions, concomitant dismissals of disease severity, and predictive assertions that the virus would simply "go away," the United States would—by the end of March 2020—surpass China and the world in confirmed COVID-19 cases. Situated against a chaotic backdrop of nationally declared emergency, inconsistent masking protocols, ventilator [End Page vii] shortages, and personal protective equipment (PPE) scarcities, what was previously considered unthinkable in terms of business shutdown and statewide lockdown would become both normal standard operating procedure and de rigueur reality. As contemporaneously significant and retroactively predictable, the COVID-19 pandemic as health crisis would on the one hand promulgate a politics of divisiveness that was part and parcel of the Trump administration; on the other hand, the remorseless racist characterization of "China viruses" and "Kung flus" by the forty-fifth commander-in-chief would foment an all-too-familiar resurgence in anti-Asian/Asian American violence. The recent pandemic past (along with the persistence of COVID-19 in the present) inadvertently yet productively foregrounds this special issue's "reckoning" focus. To briefly recap and further clarify: this special issue was originally born out of a conversation we as editors began in 2018, at the annual convening of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) in San Francisco, California. Acknowledging that almost fifty years had passed since the 1968 West Coast institutionalization of ethnic studies as a distinct discipline while simultaneously noting that 2019 marked the fortieth anniversary of the AAAS as an identifiable academic organization, we initially used "reckoning" as a means of contemplating the hopeful visions of past activists in order to reconcile a contradictory present of neoliberal institutions and academics. Yet, as 2020 and beyond make clear, past is not necessarily causal prologue; instead, the past more often than not assumes the accretive dimensions of a coda, a contrapuntal endpoint that paradoxically makes urgent other connections, possibilities, and resonances. Accordingly, we editors, along with the contributors to this special issue, acknowledge from the outset that the formation of Asian American studies—along with ethnic studies and gender/sexuality studies—was first and foremost a paradigmatic endeavor, one that, as Lisa Lowe productively characterizes it, remains "key to thinking in comparative relational ways about race, power, and interconnected colonialisms."3 Despite such analytical capacities and activist potentialities, we return to a question of relevance in order to highlight what gaps remain and what still must be done to reconcile the interdiscipline's aspirational vision and social justice agenda. Such reckoning uses as a first premise what Leonard Cohen in the above epigraph notes is the recognition of "cracks" as sites for hope and optimism. What operates as a productive through-line for the essays included in this special issue is the worthwhile assumption that consciousness is, as Yuri Kochiyama maintains, intimately fixed to an institutional and interdisciplinary "tomorrow" that has yet to be built. To surmise and summarize: Is there a reason for Asian American studies? What are its preoccupations, its problems, and its possibilities in our present moment, more than fifty years on from our [End Page viii] beginnings, in a time fraught with nativism and racial conflict? What ought Asian American studies be doing as we go forward? These are the master questions for this introductory essay and this issue of the Journal of Asian American Studies. Asian...

7 To Be Hybrid Anticipates the Future: Multiracial and Multiethnic Community and Activism

7 To Be Hybrid Anticipates the FutureMultiracial and Multiethnic Community and Activism Lily Anne Welty Tamai (bio) Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) wrote in his application for the Guggenheim Fellowship that he received in 1927, "My father … has long been known as an interpreter of the East to the West, through poetry. I wish to do the same with sculpture."1 Nearly eighty years later, a fourth-generation Japanese American mixed-race writer, Akemi Johnson, reflected upon her family's mixed-race identity: "By my generation, Yonsei, the climate was safe enough for me to examine that learned shame and reclaim some of our lost cultural identity. It's a multigenerational, cyclical story that seems classically American."2 Throughout the twentieth century, but to a greater extent, since the late 1970s and early 1980s, multiracial and multiethnic AAPI scholars, activists, artists, and writers like Noguchi and Johnson carved out a space for themselves inside and outside the academy to research and to legitimize the mixed-race community. Humanities, the social sciences, and fields within ethnic studies, specifically Asian American studies and African American studies, largely became the intellectual home for mixed-race scholars and scholarship. Organizations like the Multiracial Americans of Southern California, founded in 1986, and Hapa Issues Forum, founded in 1992 at UC Berkeley, began in the early days of the multiracial movement, addressing the needs of the community on the West Coast.3 Later, community organizations like Loving Day in New York City, launched in 2004, and MidWest Mixed, founded in Minneapolis in 2014, [End Page 229] helped to reach out to diverse communities in different geographies.4 Even in Vancouver, Canada, Hapa-palooza, founded in 2011, hosted events and raised awareness around diverse and mixed-race issues.5 Scholars of Asian American studies presented countless papers on research pertaining to multiracial and multiethnic AAPIs at the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) conferences over the years, and a multiracial caucus group meets regularly at the annual meeting. In 2010, the Critical Mixed Race Studies Association (CMRS) formed, and in 2014, founded the Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies to broaden the dialogue to focus on the needs of the growing scholarship about the multiracial and multiethnic community.6 Both AAAS and CMRS provided the space and support for multiracial and multiethnic representation and legitimacy in the academy, yet mixed-race people, their presence in the community, and their activism existed long before the formation of these organizations. At the beginnings of Asian America, the mixed-race AAPI community was a part of Hawai`i and the United States, doing this work all along.7 Even with the social stigma associated with interracial marriage and multiraciality, people like Edith Maude Eaton inserted mixed-race themes into their writing, and Isamu Noguchi made art that reflected their multiplicity. This essay examines how multiracial activists, writers, and artists consistently created work to make a place for themselves and at times demanded inclusion into the AAPI community and the national fabric before and after Asian American became a collective political identity. I argue that mixed-race history is Asian American history. Despite mixed-race people's presence in these spaces, monoracial communities continue to racialize mixed-race members as outsiders, as conditional members of the broader AAPI community, or even as a new hybrid race. I discuss some of the issues of importance for multiracial and multiethnic people within Asian American studies, including the politics of intermarriage, blood quantum, decentering whiteness, health, religion, and adoption. Multiracial AAPIs have been a part of the AAPI community since the first generations of families formed in the United States, and today are a part of each AAPI ethnic subgroup. Multiracial Americans are one of the fastest growing populations within the Asian American Pacific Islander community.8 According to the US Census, between 2000 and 2010, the numbers of White and Black multiracial persons doubled, while the number of multiracial White-Asian Americans increased by 87 percent. If current rates of population growth continue, census data predict that by 2030 the Japanese American subgroup will be a majority multiracial.9 It is projected that by 2040, nearly 55 percent of the subgroup Native Hawaiian...

13 Unwelcome Truths: On Chinese International Students and Asian American Studies

13 Unwelcome TruthsOn Chinese International Students and Asian American Studies erin Khuê Ninh (bio) "These students, they cheat." "And they come late or leave early—they take phone calls during class!" "They're filthy rich, so what do they care." It was a meeting of a few UCSB faculty willing to speak to a reporter about our experiences teaching Chinese international students. This was the fall of 2018, and the idea was to take to task administrative policies that had casually turned teaching—and learning—into nonessential considerations of the classroom. We were not all Asian American(ist)s around that table, and comments soon took on an unsettlingly personalized sense of grievance. As voiced by white colleagues, these resentments, though not empirically unfounded, were a hardly veiled alarm at the barbarians. To argue against the proliferation of Chinese undergraduates in US higher education is to risk feeding into such Sinophobia, though the latter is not my intent. In a blog post from September 2016,1 I'd mainly worried that Asian American students would be tarred by the same xenophobic brush—Will we come to miss the Model Minority Overachiever stereotype, if it is replaced by the Unqualified Cheat?—but that concern has become so quaint since the violent end of the Obama years. Yet the present era of pitched nativism and anti-Asian violence has not made an honest accounting of the plight and presence of Chinese international undergraduates less necessary, just exponentially more tricky. This essay holds that we all have things to answer for: administrators, Chinese [End Page 319] international students, Asian American studies. But whether the critique I pose here—of structural problems and structural responses, yes, but of individual investments and answerability, as well—will be legible for the difficult reckoning it is remains to be seen. In the United States, we are well aware of the structural conditions that have driven colleges and universities to aggressive pursuit of international undergraduates: In 2014, these students contributed more than $30 billion to the American economy, according to a report issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce. International students, often paying full freight, … help colleges address budget shortfalls (especially as state governments cut funding).2 International tuition and fees have been a kind of emergency transfusion to replace the public funds that public and private institutions both need to survive, but which neoliberalism's profit model has banished.3 Supply and demand have gladly met in the push factors of China's own neoliberal reforms, producing a post-socialist economy in which increasing numbers of newly "upper-middleclass families" seek the greater cultural capital and yet more relaxed admission standards of a Western college education: "This time abroad is called dujin, a 'golden vacation' that also improves job prospects. … [A] foreign degree was worth a lot on a resume back home."4 And like anyone on vacation, these students also prove huge boons to the local economy.5 Of the more than 1 million international students in the United States in 2016–2017, mainland Chinese made up one-third.6 At UCSB, Chinese students comprised 90 percent of the undergraduate international student population on campus in 2018–19 (the next countries of origin being the United Kingdom and Japan, at very distant seconds of 2.8 percent each)7, and 12 percent of the undergraduate population overall. The state of affairs in 2011 was already such that the Chronicle of Higher Education christened it "The China Conundrum." How does the situation read now, a decade later, having passed (through) a virulent Trump administration but still in the throes of an anti-Chinese/anti-Asian pandemic? "Fall 2020 saw a whopping 91 percent decrease in new international student enrollment in U.S. academic programs."8 But while fall 2021 enrollment figures were, as of this writing, not yet available, applications are said to be up 43 percent from last year nationally, and 77 percent of "U.S. colleges and universities … continue to fund outreach and recruitment of international students at the same levels or higher than previously."9 If this moment proves only a lull, it's one that university administrators but also faculty within...

6 A/Moral Divide: Questions for an Asian American Studies Research Paradigm

6 A/Moral DivideQuestions for an Asian American Studies Research Paradigm Russell Jeung1 (bio) Customer began screaming at me for no reason while in line and correctly distanced at six feet. I am mostly Chinese and my family has been in San Luis Obispo since the 1860's. I am 4th generation in San Luis Obispo, but guess I will never be an American. (71-year-old person, San Luis Obispo, CA) As I was leaving the restaurant, a white male stormed up to me and verbally harassed and terrorized me—screaming "Return to China you f***ing Asian!" and other hateful, racial slurs … threatening me physically. A clear case of racial hatred towards me. I gave a verbal account to an officer who arrived later. I have not heard back from anyone. (67-year-old person, Alamo, CA) These elders' accounts, reported to Stop AAPI Hate's reporting center, are just two of the 10,000 incidents and counting that we have received since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Not only do they exemplify the vitriolic hate that Asian Americans have experienced, but they also highlight the perpetual foreigner status we embody and the marginalization we experience from public institutions and mainstream society. Addressing these root sources of anti-Asian racism has become the aim of the Asian American Research Initiative (AARI) of [End Page 211] San Francisco State University, one of the co-founding partners of Stop AAPI Hate (SAH). SAH, as a coalition, has been instrumental to the broader movement to stop anti-Asian violence. We are grateful to be rooted as a trusted community institution, so that SAH was able to gather many more reports from the Asian American community than a government agency could have. With knowledge of our history, we have been able to demonstrate how the COVID-19 surge in anti-Asian racism is an extension of the historic and institutional Yellow/Dusky Peril racism that Asian Americans have faced since the nineteenth century. Our data demonstrated the widespread nature of the hate incidents, thus legitimizing the issue as one for policy-makers and journalists to address. And furthering the strength of our advocacy, we provided evidence-based research for each of our policy recommendations. Yet AARI's membership within the SAH coalition also raises difficult questions about whether AARI can take an objective, neutral stance toward the issue of anti-Asian hate. Indeed, AARI has a political and vested stake in documenting and analyzing this issue. For example, reporting high numbers of racism keeps the issue on the agenda of policy-makers and in the media. However, AARI can be accused of over-alarming the community in its reporting of numbers in order to gain attention and support. Further, AARI now receives funding from the State of California. AARI can have a conflict of interest if it is involved in evaluating the policies and programs that SAH supports, such as researching the effects of ethnic studies on race relations. These questions relate to the institutional field of Asian American studies (AAS) as well, and raise for me the broader debate about the research paradigm of AAS. This paradigm includes assumptions about the 1) positionality; 2) questions; 3) aims; and 4) language for our research. At SF State, our students learn about an ethnic studies paradigm that radically differs from one directed towards objective analysis and theoretically oriented discourse. As required by our curriculum, they have to decide where they stand in relationship to the academy and to the broader community.2 These two sites make competing demands of Asian American scholars, who find themselves often caught in a bind such as I find myself with AARI and SAH. Academia addresses lacunae in the field in order to build theories in conversation with other researchers. The end goal is publication, which disseminates one's work and confers legitimacy. The community, on the other hand, continues to face social issues such as anti-Asian hate and is in dire need of organizing tactics and policy solutions. Research for the community ultimately aims to effect social change. Each side of the divide poses separate questions, employs its own jargon, and places specific demands...

8 More Than an Outcome of War: Adoptions from Asia to the United States

8 More Than an Outcome of WarAdoptions from Asia to the United States Kimberly D. McKee (bio) When adoptions from Asia to the United States began in earnest in the mid twentieth century, it's doubtful that the primarily white adoptive parents caring for children from Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea saw themselves or their children as part of a broader immigration movement or as part of the growing Asian American population in the United States. Transnational adoptions operated outside of restrictive and racist immigration laws, allowing families to bypass immigration quotas as they brought home "their" children. Adoption agencies also instructed adoptive parents to "raise them as their very own" and, in cases of adoptions from Asia, underscored the assimilability of Asian children into white American families. These early adoptions paved the way toward reshaping the category of Asian American in similar yet distinct ways like mixed-race and mixed-ethnic Asian American families, even if adoptive parents of monoracial and mixed-race Asian children did not see themselves as raising Asian American children. To trace the earliest adoptions of Asian children, scholars often point to the first wave of Korean War orphans as laying the groundwork for not only South Korea's more than seven-decade-long participation in international adoption, but also establishing the transnational adoption of Asian children to the United States. Yet, Chinese children from Hong Kong also entered the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, and preceding those adoptions were adoptions [End Page 247] of mixed-race Filipino children following the Spanish American War and mixedrace Japanese children following the Second World War.1 The history of Asian adoption thus tells the story of US militarism. It is woven into US empire and expansion, as US servicemen play a seminal role in transnational adoptions of mixed-race children. Adoption cannot, however, be seen only as an artifact of the past, not only because adoptions from Asia persist in the twenty-first century. Rather, the lingering effects of adoption tell a profoundly Asian American story. Catherine Ceniza Choy notes, "In Asian American studies, the word 'adoption' is increasingly significant for elucidating the breadth and depth of Asian American demographics, cultural expression, contemporary issues, and history."2 The interdiscipline must attend to the ways adoption indelibly shapes Asian American communities and histories of belonging, citizenship, and kinship. Korean adoptees were one of the largest immigration streams of Koreans to the United States in the mid twentieth century. In the mid-1990s, adoptions from China surpassed those from South Korea, and the mass movement of Vietnamese children as part of Operation Babylift in 1975 remains one of the more notable transfers of children to the United States in modern history.3 While these three countries are not the only nations sending Asian children for adoption, adoptees from Korea, China, and Vietnam are overrepresented in memoirs, documentaries, and scholarship on Asian adoption due to markedly lower rates of adoption from other Asian nations. When examining Asian adoptions, broadly, in the last two decades (1999–2019), adoptions from Asia represent 49 percent of all US international adoptions, with Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese adoptees representing 80.5 percent of adoptions from Asia.4 The shift from the adoption of mixed-race Asian children to monoracial Asian children in the early and mid twentieth century illustrates the intersections of adoption and capitalism. The markets of adoption injected much needed monies into national economies, while simultaneously alleviating the state from providing social welfare supports to support low-income, working-class families and single mothers. These adoptions also reflected the tiered nature of adoption economies, whereby Asian children were sought-after due to their "honorary white" status and assumptions about assimilability into American society, as well as the way antiblackness shaped adoptive parents' investments in certain children of color over others.5 In creating new family formations, these transracial, transnational families upended notions of family as predicated not only on genetic relatedness, but also race- and religion-matching as seen in previous iterations of domestic adoptions.6 These Asian adoptees thus found themselves negotiating what it meant to be Asian (American) in non-Asian families, as most of these adoptions...

Diversity in the prevalence and correlates of extramarital sex in a probability sample of Latino adults.

Individuals from different Spanish-speaking countries are often combined into a single Latino group. However, this group is diverse, with immigrants and naturalized citizens coming from multiple countries. The present study was conducted to (a) examine potential differences in the annual prevalence of extramarital sex as a function of cultural group (Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, or other Latino) and nativity (born inside or outside the United States) and (b) identify explanations for any observed differences in the prevalence of extramarital sex, drawing on known correlates of extramarital sex and other psychosocial constructs that may be associated with cultural group or nativity that could account for such associations. Results from the National Latino and Asian American Study, a probability sample of Latinos in the United States, indicated that the annual prevalence of extramarital sex was significantly higher among (a) Puerto Ricans relative to Mexicans and (b) foreign-born individuals relative to those born in the United States. Probability of extramarital sex was significantly associated with marital satisfaction and frequency of religious attendance, but these variables did not account for the subgroup differences in the prevalence of extramarital sex. Marital adjustment, acculturation (English proficiency and use), enculturation (ethnic identity), and family cohesion were not significantly associated with probability of extramarital sex. Results underscore the need for continued research on understanding subgroup differences in the prevalence of extramarital sex within the diverse Latino community and identifying characteristics that account for such differences. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

1 Critical Refugee Studies and Asian American Studies: Vietnamese Refugees in Asian America

1 Critical Refugee Studies and Asian American StudiesVietnamese Refugees in Asian America Yê´n Lê Espiritu (bio) Refugee Story # 1 – In 1975, I arrived in the United States as a refugee from Vietnam, speaking no English. I attended cash-strapped schools, where I encountered underand mis-education, anti-Asian racism, and language and class discrimination. I did not know at the time that just a few years earlier, Asian American (and other US Third World) students had protested against systemic racism and demanded fundamental changes in higher education: better access for students of color, more inclusive and relevant curricula, and the creation of Asian American studies programs. Although I entered higher education after the Asian American protest movement, I became a direct beneficiary of these struggles—personally, intellectually, and materially. Asian American studies opened up for me the world of critical scholarship and pedagogy. It also helped me secure my first job: an Asian American studies position at UCSD that students had fought for—long and hard. More than thirty years later, I am still at UCSD, teaching, mentoring, writing, ever mindful of the legacy of Asian American student activism that brought me there. Refugee Story # 2 – In the summer of 2019, I was contacted by the campus police with startling news: the mother of one of my students had threatened to physically harm me. According to the police, the mother, a Vietnamese refugee herself, was [End Page 159] furious that I had encouraged her daughter to major in Asian American/ethnic studies. Having worked 16-hour days for years to ensure a better future for her children, she felt betrayed that her daughter had chosen a non-STEM major—and she blamed me. I wonder if her fury were further fueled by the fact that I was Vietnamese, and thus, in her opinion, should have known better—that a college education is an investment in your family, and not in yourself. Although I did not fear for my safety, her threat deeply troubled me because of what it implied about the perceived relevance of Asian American studies to the communities that it purports to serve, both materially and ideologically. Materially, what could I say to my student's mother about the practical usefulness of an Asian American studies major? Ideologically, what could Asian American studies scholars say to refugees who seemingly embrace the "politics of accommodation,"1 not because they are duped but because they do want a better life in the United States for themselves and their family, having risked so much to get here. I open this essay with these two refugee stories because they reveal both the promise and limits of Asian American studies. Born out of the 1960s civil rights movements and liberation fronts, Asian American studies forged pan-Asian solidarity by exposing and linking the histories of racial and class discrimination against Asians in the United States. But Asian America's heterogeneity—its class, ethnic, national, generational, and ideological diversity—has always been there, shaping the trajectory of the field.2 As Viet Thanh Nguyen and others have established, Asian America is capable of "promising equality" but also of "practicing hierarchy when it comes to dealing with various Asian ethnic groups with conflicting interests."3 Some critics have decried the field's privileging of East Asians over less established Asian groups—an indictment of the suppression of diverse histories, epistemologies, and voices within the pan-Asian framework: "To be merely peripheral subjects, hasty additions to course syllabi, or latecomers at Asian American Studies symposiums does not satisfy."4 In Asian American Panethnicity, I critique the intermittent but strategic absorption of Vietnamese and other Southeast Asians into the Asian American framework, showing how this "differential inclusion" has benefited the more dominant groups within the panethnic coalition, but left intact the social, political, and economic inequalities within Asian America.5 In her 2003 review of the state of the field, Linda Trinh Võ concludes that the inclusion of Vietnamese refugees into the teachings, research, and theories of Asian American studies "remains undeveloped or neglected."6 Even today, Vietnamese lives, histories, and politics continue to be peripheral to the cultural, literary, and political center of the...

14 Defamiliarizing Asian American Studies

14 Defamiliarizing Asian American Studies

12 The Privilege of South Asian American Studies

12 The Privilege of South Asian American Studies

10 Contingent Labor and the Contradictions of Asian American Studies

10 Contingent Labor and the Contradictions of Asian American Studies

3 The Success of Asian American Studies

3 The Success of Asian American Studies

Immigration-related stressors and mental health problems among Asian-American Immigrants

Focusing on Asian-American immigrants in the National Latino and Asian American Study, this work examines (1) whether immigration-related stressors are associated with 12-month depressive disorder and suicidal ideation, and (2) how individual religious involvement moderates the associations. Findings from regression analyses reveal that limited English proficiency increases the risk of both 12-month depressive disorder and suicidal ideation. No significant differences in 12-month depressive disorder and suicidal ideation are found by age at immigration. Most importantly, religious coping — frequently seeking comfort from religion — buffers the negative effects of limited English proficiency on suicidal ideation. Our findings suggest the importance of individual religious involvement in helping Asian-American immigrants cope with stress associated with immigration. Mental health professionals may need to integrate religious coping mechanisms into the clinical setting to offer more effective treatments that are sensitive to individuals’ religious and spiritual needs.

The Relationship Between Latinxs' Acculturative Experiences and Mental and Behavioral Disorder in the National Latino and Asian American Study.

Mental and behavioral disorders are among the leading contributors to disability among US-residing Latinxs. When treated as a homogeneous group, important disparities in the prevalence of such disorders among Latinx subgroups (e.g., by ethnic heritage) are obscured. However, Latinxs may also be characterized by their acculturative experiences while living in the USA, such as discrimination, neighborhood context and family conflict. Latent Profile Analysis with distal outcomes was used to estimate differences in psychiatric disorder prevalence across acculturative subgroups. Data from 2,541 Latinx participants (age 18 +) in the National Latino and Asian American Study (NLAAS) were used to estimate differences in the proportion of three categories of DSM-IV disorder: depressive, anxiety and substance use by four latent subgroups of Latinxs based on their acculturative experiences. Latinxs reporting more positive acculturative experiences had the lowest prevalence of all three disorders (14.8%, 13.6% and 7.1%, respectively). Those whose lives were characterized by high levels of family conflict and discrimination combined with low levels of social cohesion and neighborhood safety had the highest disorder prevalence (34.0%, 26.6% and 22.5%; all p < 0.01 compared to positive experiences subgroup). Latinxs with moderate levels of discrimination and conflict, along with those with high conflict and cohesion, were better off as compared to those with high negative experiences and low cohesion. These latent subgroups of Latinxs according to their acculturative experiences hold important implications for identifying high-risk groups for developing a psychiatric disorder. Findings also point to the protective role of family and neighborhood cohesion when facing high levels of adversity, which may inform prevention and intervention efforts.

Contributors

Jessica Ball, MPH, PhD, is a professor with the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria, Canada. She has taught, consulted, and completed research on the determinants of marginalization of children and youth on three continents, focusing primarily on Southeast Asia. Her recent studies have addressed outcomes of transnational labor migration for children and families in Indonesia as well as the experiences of forced migration among young people from Myanmar and the Middle East who are living in Thailand and Malaysia (www.youthmigrationproject.com).Harriot Beazley is an associate professor of human geography at the University of the Sunshine Coast Maroochydore. Her research interests are located within social and development geography and children's geographies in Southeast Asia and the Pacific.Amanda R. Cheong is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia. Her research examines the relationships between legal status and inequality, with a focus on undocumented, stateless, and refugee populations. She is currently working on a book project, tentatively titled Omitted Lives, that explores the causes and consequences of exclusion from civil registration systems.Carolyn Areum Choi is a Guarini Dean's postdoctoral fellow in Asian and Asian American studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines how race, class, education, and migration intersect across the Asian diaspora, and her current book project looks at the rise of South Korean labor and educational mobilities in intra-Asian and different Anglo-American settler contexts.Sari K. Ishii is a professor at the College of Sociology, Rikkyo University, Tokyo. Her research interests include minorities, transnationalism, citizenship, and statelessness. Her work has focused on migration and tourism in East and Southeast Asia, especially Thailand and Japan.Misaki Iwai is a professor with the Department of Asian Languages, Kanda University of International Studies, Chiba, Japan. Her research interests are in the fields of family relations, care, and transnational marriage migration, with a special focus on Vietnam.Maggi W. H. Leung is a professor of international development studies with the Department of Geography, Spatial Planning, and International Development at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the uneven geographies of migration and development, Chinese diaspora, and the internationalization of education.Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is a professor of sociology and gender and sexuality studies at the University of Southern California. Her areas of interest include gender, labor, migration, family, and economic sociology.Nicola Piper, formerly a professor of international migration and founding director of the Sydney Asia Pacific Migration Centre at the University of Sydney, Australia, is a Global Professorial Research Fellowship awardee, funded by the British Academy, at the Queen Mary University of London. Her key research interests are global and regional governance of labor migration, advocacy politics, and gendered migration.Charlie Rumsby is a fellow at the Sociological Review Journal, based at Keele University, and has a visiting research fellowship with the Anthropology Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her recent work explores identity and belonging among Vietnamese children living as de facto stateless in Cambodia, and it covers themes such as citizenship, human rights, morality, religious conversion, ethnicity, and intergenerational mobilities.Johanna L. Waters is a professor of human geography at University College London, where she is the codirector of the Migration Research Unit. She specializes in migration, transnationalism, and (international) education. Her work has largely focused on East Asia and trans-Pacific educational mobilities.

“Freedom of Information in the Classroom: Teaching for Empowerment in the Social Sciences and in Ethnic Studies”

This article describes public records request assignments in courses in political science and in Asian American Studies. Beyond commonly known activities like voting, volunteering, signing petitions or peacefully protesting, students should gain experience in exercising their rights to an expansive set of government records that fall within the domain of “the people’s business.” Few courses include public records requests (e.g., implementation of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and state sunshine laws) as part of formal coursework assignments at the undergraduate level, although responsive records would be useful in, for example, course papers and in class oral history projects. For scholars of Asian American Studies, the FOIA can be used to uncover invaluable data and information that would otherwise be unavailable in traditional scholarly publications, textbooks, news articles and online posts. More generally, many students report that they are more interested in politics, knowledgeable and empowered regarding their political efficacy, as well as critical of bias in information flows from pundits in the media and from other sources after completing FOIA exercises.

Why Is There No Asian American Studies Program in Brooklyn College?

This document provides a transcript of the documentary video produced by the Asian American Studies Project at Brooklyn College in 2021. The documentary was created through student research, led by faculty member Cherry Lou Sy, which interrogated the lack of Asian American Studies at their institution. The video collects reflections and observations from numerous students, faculty, and alumni advocating for the development of an Asian American Studies program and curriculum. Participants also reflect on their experiences as Asian Americans, their support for the program, and/or their understanding of why the college has not developed this area of study.

Why Bother with Asian American Studies? Reflections on a Documentary Research Project

This document catalogs the reflections of a team of students and one faculty member who researched the history of demands for an Asian American Studies program at Brooklyn College. The authors explain their initial interests in the Asian American Studies Program project, describe their learning process as well as the research methods used. They discuss how their commitment to the project transformed during the research process, as well as their reactions to the final documentary video product, Why Is There No Asian American Studies Program at Brooklyn College.

Demands from Duke Asian Students

This document shares the 2021 demands by students at Duke University, as they seek to create Asian American and Ethnic Studies programs on their campus. It includes an original letter of demands by a coalition of student groups directed to university leadership, an extensive timeline of such demands from previous students, and a call for campus-based cultural centers. The document also demands better data disaggregation and a change in how the institution understands hate and bias incidents.

MAST Teach-In Pamphlet (2021)

This document is a copy of the program used by Mobilizing Asian Students Together, a coalition of student organizations and individuals at Duke University, to promote a teach-in aimed at calling for the establishment of Ethnic Studies programs and the enhancement of campus cultural centers. It lists eleven scheduled speakers who presented their arguments for the creation of Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies departments and support of cultural centers like the Center for Multicultural Affairs. The teach-in was held in the Bryan Center Plaza on September 24, 2021, and was also livestreamed for online participation.

What do we know about acculturation? A measurement invariance examination of acculturation domains between Asian and latinx populations

ABSTRACT Acculturation has emerged as a key variable in racial/ethnic minorities and immigrant research. Although findings generally conclude acculturation leads to adverse outcomes (e.g., risk behaviors), scholars often find contradicting results. This increased attention to the core definitional questions about what acculturation is and how it should be measured, specifically across different racial/ethnic groups. This study examined the measurement invariance using Multigroup Confirmatory Factor Analysis (MG-CFA) by comparing three common domains of acculturation measures across Asian and Hispanic populations (i.e., Ethnic Identification, Language Proficiency and Preference, and Acculturative Stress) using the National Latino and Asian American Study (NLAAS). A total sample of 4,649 (nLatinx = 2,554 and nAsian = 2,095) was used. The results suggested that aspects of ethnic identification and acculturative stress measures significantly varied between groups. For example, Latinxs had higher factor loadings in certain Acculturative Stress items related to government and legal status. In contrast, Asians had higher factor loadings in an item related to Ethnic Identification. The results suggested that aspects of acculturation do not necessarily measure the same way across all populations; researchers/clinicians should consider racial/ethnic specific scales when using acculturation related measures. Future research should test universal acculturation scales across other ethnic subgroups and include more complex acculturation measures like cultural values and norms.