Ethnic Studies Research Articles

Collective Curation across Difference: Performing Live with Race, Gender, and Sexuality

This piece charts the creation of a gallery within an ethnic studies unit, a syllabus in conjunction with said space, and a student-artist group exhibition titled Objects Who Hold/Objects Who Let Go. The exhibition asks one to consider how we learn to withhold and let go of the memories that bridge gaps between permanence and ephemerality. Curated in community by the artists themselves, the show drives the audience to embrace this tension of holding on and letting go as one intentionally engages with experimental art that pushes the boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality across expressions of loss and mourning.

Diversity's Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity by Efrén O. Pérez

Diversity's Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity is a welcome addition to the literature on racial and ethnic studies. Efrén O. Pérez finds that the color line is an enduring social division but that Black, Latino, and Asian Americans increasingly share an identity as people of color (PoC ID). Their distinct racial identities and national loyalties are still important but are nested within this broader, independent identity category. To support his contention that a PoC ID is a growing force in American politics, Pérez uses a wealth of data sources and multiple methods to analyze his surveys, experiments, and focus groups. He finds that a PoC ID exerts a powerful influence over the individual's world view and can galvanize unified action among the three major racial and ethnic groups. This identity construct was years in the making, but now many Blacks, Latinos, and Asian Americans subscribe to this pan-racial identity. A PoC ID holds the potential to shape attitudes, facilitate the formation of coalitions, and support initiatives seen as benefitting people of color. Given that they now constitute almost 40 percent of the U.S. population, the emergence of this new identity formation holds the potential to remake American politics.

Use of Bland-Altman Analysis to Examine the Racial and Ethnic Representativeness of Study Populations in Community-Based Pediatric Health Research

Children from marginalized racial and ethnic groups are underrepresented in health research. To improve external validity and routinize race and ethnicity reporting, a specific and standardized methodology for quantifying representativeness of participant populations is needed. To develop a standardized method for quantifying the racial and ethnic representativeness of study samples. In this cross-sectional study, data from 7 US community-based health studies (conducted between 2003 and 2017) were retrospectively pooled to assess the school-level representativeness of enrolled samples by race and ethnicity. The sampling frame for the study was constructed using the National Center of Education Statistics Common Core of Data, which provides year-specific racial and ethnic counts by grade. Representativeness was quantified by aggregating children's data at the school level, reported individually for Asian, Black, Hispanic or Latino, Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, White, or multiple races. In this analysis, the Asian and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander subgroups were combined. Data were analyzed from April 1 to June 15, 2022. Community-based nutritional health studies conducted with children in grades 1 to 8. Visual comparisons of percentage expected and percentage observed of the pooled sample by race and ethnicity were performed using scatterplots and Bland-Altman plots. Spearman rank-order correlation was used to assess associations. This study included 104 study schools (N = 5807 children) located in California, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Mississippi, and South Carolina. Bland-Altman analysis revealed notable patterns and variability in the representativeness of racial and ethnic groups. Differences in the overall representativeness of Asian or Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander children (0.45 percentage points [95% CI, -7.76 to 8.66]), Black children (0.12 percentage points [95% CI, -15.73 to 15.96]), and White children (-0.72 percentage points [95% CI, -23.60 to 22.16]) were negligible, but measures of spread suggested that target population demographics affected representativeness differently across groups. The results of this cross-sectional study suggest that replicating, testing, and scaling the proposed method for quantifying racial and ethnic representativeness, which uses measures of spread, could improve the transparency of race and ethnicity reporting during publication and lead to a more externally valid health evidence base. During implementation, investigators should adopt community-based research methods and allocate appropriate resources during recruitment, including a priori assessment of population demographics, as these conditions may affect racial and ethnic study enrollment differently. Prioritizing these methodological decisions could alleviate rising inequities.

Eroding Community Cultural Wealth: How Schooling Devalues Latina/o/x Students’ Identity, Pride, and Language

Educational narratives written by several cohorts of Latina/o/x students in a college-level ethnic studies course, first-year retention program showed how the current hegemonic educational paradigm—with its attendant neo-liberal, colonial, white supremacist and Eurocentric logics—abates the accumulation and employment of community cultural wealth. Specifically, thesesystemic obstacles impact linguistic, navigational, and resistant capital as Latina/o/x students recount how learning English, feeling othered by classmates and teachers, and internalizing assimilationist and deficit-based ideologies to avoid harassment or mistreatment factored into their educational experiences. Situating community cultural wealth amid the Americanization, deculturalization, or assimilationist projects that have shaped the schooling conditions for students of color better accounts how educational practices, curriculum and spaces can destabilize the range of community cultural wealth competences Yosso has classified. This project adds complexity and highlights the fluidity in the community cultural wealth model by recognizing competing forces at work: the cultivation of these assets via family/community home spaces, discourses and networks, as well as the attrition of these competencies in formal educational spaces. As such, this study contributes to the existing research about CCW by underscoring a dimensionality not yet fully addressed, and, by recognizing the epistemological significance of these skill sets.

Struggles For/With/Through Ethnic Studies in Texas: Third Spaces as Anchors for Collective Action

Background/Context: Ethnic Studies is an umbrella term for a group of academic disciplines attentive to identifying oppression, restorying history, and creating liberatory futures. These disciplines were born from social movements, with students, educators, and community members demanding educational spaces guided by people who looked like them, curriculum that told their stories, and pedagogies that could transform their communities. Around the country, elementary and secondary schools are expanding Ethnic Studies offerings at the school, district, and state levels. Ethnic Studies work is deeply local, and, as such, different approaches to expanding access to Ethnic Studies have been taken across localities and states. The power and potential of Ethnic Studies to shift social reality beyond the classroom is both a strength in the struggle for just, liberatory futures and a factor that draws the disciplining eyes of the state. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: Like the discipline of Ethnic Studies, Ethnic Studies research is activist, transformative, and community embedded. In this article, we illustrate the ways that our research about the movement for Ethnic Studies in Texas is inextricable from our community-based work to expand access to Ethnic Studies, which is itself woven in and guided by the theories that ground the disciplines of Ethnic Studies. We write with the theories, thinkings, and actions of feminists of color, sharing vignettes that braid together our research and advocacy, highlighting community fostered organic third spaces, in what we call decolonial policy praxis. Research Design: We use digital and auto-ethnography methods to build our vignettes. Conclusions/Recommendations: We note the critical importance of building coalitions and of remaining committed/connected to the liberatory theories of Ethnic Studies in our research and in the collaborative development of culturally sustaining policy. This means building with community, in community, and for community in pursuit of liberatory, Ethnic Studies futures.

Transimperial Rhythms

In an effort to expand the fields of literary, cultural, and ethnic studies, the collection of articles herein focuses upon an often-overlooked set of imperial relations between Britain and Latin America in the nineteenth century. The most common and central theme for the style of scholarship represented would be ‘transimperial’. A touchstone for this model is described through the example of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Author’s Note’ to the 1917 edition of Nostromo (1904). A close reading of the note demonstrates how time serves a metonymic function for British narratives set in South America, notably the relationship of the past to the present and the socioeconomic implications of that correlation on a Latin state. By tracking significant, yet typically ignored, cultural productions ranging from periodicals, social clubs, political groups, and fine art, all four authors (Keith Clavin, Jessie Reeder, Luz Ramirez, and Omar Miranda) demonstrate a dedication to the deep study of the transimperial.

Elder Wisdom, 1960s Asian American Activism, and the Struggle for Third World Education

The 1960s Asian American Movement and 1968–69 Third World Liberation Front(TWLF) Strikes dismantled racist stereotypes of Asian Americans as “silent citizens” while alsoconnecting the community to a broader global liberation movement. This research explores howthese 1960s radical movements continue to influence modern Asian American communityorganizing and efforts to build multiracial solidarity. This paper draws upon the wisdom ofinterviewees who participated in the 1960s TWLF Strikes at SFSU and UC Berkeley, and theradicalizing lessons they shared with a younger generation of students, activists, and communityleaders.Through a series of conversations with former TWLF student members and leftistactivists, this paper reflects on the following questions: In light of the broad political changesthat emerged from the 1960s Third World struggle, how do we begin to understand thesignificance of these movements today? What lessons can we learn from Third World solidarityand the origins of Asian America, given the institutional limitations of the Ethnic Studiesdepartment at UC Berkeley? The theoretical and social foundations of these past movementschallenge capitalist, imperialist perspectives and emphasize an urgent community focus. Byrediscovering community-oriented learning and “self-determination,” Asian American studentscan revitalize the spirit of the Third World struggle in Ethnic Studies and the broader community.

Uprooted but Unbroken: Ethnic Studies Programs in California Prisons

Asian Americans compose a relatively small but growing portion of the prison populationboth nationwide and in California, with the number of AAPIs incarcerated in the US quadruplingfrom 2000 to 2010. Incarcerated Asian Americans face unique challenges, often having arrivedto the US as refugees fleeing war and genocide and struggling with intergenerational trauma,familial isolation and stigma, and a lack of culturally informed programs in prison. Thus, thisresearch project focuses on ethnic studies programs in California prisons, with a specific focuson Asian American studies programs. Constructed through interviews with participants andfacilitators of these programs, this project finds that ethnic studies programs have transformativeeffects on incarcerated people’s sense of self, personal healing, sense of community, and capacityas agents of change for themselves and others during and after incarceration.

Abolition and ethnic studies in early care and education

The authors enter this conversation on equity, inclusion, and belonging in early care and education with abolition and ethnic studies as necessary standpoints that must be embodied to build what the world can and should be for its youngest inhabitants. Early care and education systems have been marked by damaging practices, pathologizing portrayals, and carceral pedagogies, which demand radical reimagining. The authors offer this writing as a collective—of early childhood educators, motherscholars, and community workers—realizing that there is more expertise and possibilities for change from the collective than any one person alone. This article shares how ethnic studies and abolition gave the authors the language and concepts to put their dreams of humanizing learning experiences for young children into action. They describe key concepts and examples of how abolition and ethnic studies can serve as methodological frameworks to attend to the survivance of young children and communities of color.

Ethnicity, Imprisonment, and Confidence in Police and Courts: Evidence from an International Survey

AbstractThis article investigates the sources of ethnic disparities in confidence in police and courts. After reviewing studies of ethnicity and trust in legal authorities and comparative research on prisons, I argue that ethnic divides in confidence in police and courts are based on power imbalances between majority and minority groups and exacerbated by punitive legal systems. I test these claims using data from waves 6 and 7 of the World Values Survey, including 99,480 people in 59 countries. Results from mixed effects logistic regressions indicate that, overall, ethnic majority group members are more likely than minority group members to be confident in police and in courts. However, the differences are larger in countries with higher imprisonment rates. In fact, there are no ethnic differences in confidence in police or courts in countries with low imprisonment rates. The patterns remain net of individual- and country-level controls for crime and other factors. These results suggest that ethnic disparities in confidence in legal authorities are rooted in power dynamics intrinsic to the minority-majority dichotomy and that punitive legal authorities amplify the divides.

Exploring public health education's integration of critical race theories: A scoping review.

Public health has declared a commitment toward diversity as a whole, with a commitment toward addressing and dismantling racism being at the forefront. Although public health has admirably taken on this mission, and the foundational principles of public health align with social justice and health equity, public health as a discipline is vastly behind other fields in integrating and utilizing critical race theorizations. Of particular concern is the lack of critical race theorization within public health education materials. Public health education serves as a precursor to public health practice and situates topics and competencies that are essential to one's foundational public health knowledge and skillset, thus the use of strong theoretical groundings is critical in public health education. Therefore, to explore the current landscape of public health educational research that employs critical race theories, this study sought to conduct a scoping review investigating the current literature of public health pedagogical, instructional, and curricular efforts that utilize race and antiracist theorization principles as a means to administer public health education. More specifically, we sought to investigate how have faculty and instructors published their integration of race theorization in public health curriculum/instruction within the United States since 2011. We found 18 examples from peer-reviewed literature of curricular, pedagogical, or instructional practices and strategies that integrate critical theories of race, including contemplative pedagogy (n = 1), antiracism (n = 3), Public Health Critical Race praxis (n = 4), Critical Race (n = 5), critical service-learning/community engagement (n = 2), ethnic studies (n = 1), and intersectionality (n = 2). These articles present a wide breadth of innovative approaches to infusing critical race studies within public health higher education, ranging from individual assignments to course design and implementation to institutional culture change, thus demonstrating the multifaceted nature of critical race studies within micro-learning communities and macro-discipline practices. Identifying theoretically grounded, exemplary models and scholarly recommendations of pedagogical, instructional, and curricular practices provides readers the opportunity to borrow from successful practices and implement concepts of race, racism, antiracism, intersectionality, and more into their classrooms.

Stopping AAPI Hate: COVID-19 Related Racism and Discrimination Against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, Its Origins, Our History and Avenues for Redress

Between March 2020 and March 2022, Stop AAPI Hate received over eleven thousand reports of anti-Asian hate and discrimination. Analysis of the data indicates that 67% of incidents involve harassment, 17% involve physical assault and 12% involve civil rights violations, including refusal of service, vandalism and discrimination in housing and the workplace. Impacts on community members have been significant. Many have turned to criminal law enforcement as the answer. Given that a significant majority of incidents reported to Stop AAPI Hate are not hate crimes, more appropriate means of addressing the harm include prevention and non-carceral approaches, such as civil rights enforcement, community safety, and education equity. Toward that end, Stop AAPI Hate focused its efforts in California on the No Place for Hate CA Campaign that resulted in the enactment of two bills, SB 1161 and AB 2448, to address harassment in public transit and discrimination in retail. Stopping anti-Asian hate and preventing it from happening in the future can only be achieved through a comprehensive framework which includes providing redress and resources to victims through civil rights enforcement, ensuring long term community safety through strong wages and safe, affordable housing, and guaranteeing education equity by teaching ethnic studies in K-12 schools.

Destabilizing Race in Political Communication: Social Movements as Sites of Political Imagination

ABSTRACT How do social movement actors use consciousness-raising communicative practices to reconfigure political understandings of race? And how can such practices shape the analysis of political communication? We explore these questions by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, semi-structured interviews, and archival materials to examine two case studies: an historical example of Grace Lee Boggs’ structural guidelines for creating a revolutionary study group in the Asian Political Alliance and a contemporary example of Equality Labs’ anti-caste political organizing by engaging across racial and caste social hierarchies. These cases illustrate the analytic value of engaging alternative theoretical frameworks of race and politics from critical ethnic studies, feminist of color scholarship, and social movements as rich sites of political theory through cultivating political consciousness in service of radical political imaginations. This article offers two main contributions to the field of political communication. First, by looking at the creative work of racial theorizing within social movements, we destabilize the limits of race as a demographic category. Second, we demonstrate the analytic value of studying political education and consciousness-raising as communicative practices that emphasize relational reconfigurations of race. This article recasts racial political discourse from public opinion and campaign messaging measured quantitatively to political imaginations that must be interpreted within historical and material contexts. As our cases demonstrate, centering the shifting category of race within movement building opens up the field of political communication to the communicative processes of consciousness-building and also offers dynamic understandings of race and racialization.

The Multicultural History Society of Ontario and its Resources for Ethnic Studies

The Multicultural History Society of Ontario and its Resources for Ethnic Studies

Black Poetics of Affect: Intimate Public Encounters with Strangers in Claudia Rankine’s Just Us (2020)

This article aims to explore how Jamaican-born writer Claudia Rankine displays the ways in which, as a black woman and a first-generation migrant settled in the United States, she ‘regularly has to negotiate conscious and unconscious dismissal, erasure, disrespect, and abuse’ (Rankine [2020] Just Us: An American Conversation, New York: Penguin, p. 23). Just Us: An American Conversation is a genre-defying work that includes poems, essays, photography, visual art, posts from social media, and academic and journalistic sources that tackle the discursive constructions of whiteness in cultural and political life in the United States. In this volume, the private and the public merge through conversations with white strangers and friends at the airport and the train station, in the classroom, in the backyard, in the street and in social distancing interactions via Zoom. Berlant ([2011] Cruel Optimism, Durham: Duke UP.) writes about public spheres as ‘affect worlds’, where emotions precede rational or deliberative thought, attaching strangers to each other and defining the terms of the state-civil society relation. I also use Sara Ahmed’s idea of ‘encounter’ (2000, 2012), defined as a meeting with others that surprises and involves conflict, because it shifts the boundaries of the familiar or assumed knowledge. In this sense, Rankine creatively looks for traces of racialized and gendered experiences in encounters that involve bodies or texts, including the devastating effects of Covid-19 on marginalized black communities. The volume completes a vital trilogy that includes the hybrid book-length poems Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (2004) and Citizen (2014). This lyrical series conform what I call ‘a black poetics of affect’, shaped by intimate public encounters with racism and sexism that disrupt the fantasy of a post-racial society. Rankine’s sustained reflections on ‘the affective dimensions of Black life’ (Palmer [2017] ‘“What Feels More Than Feeling?”: Theorizing the Unthinkability of Black Affect’, Critical Ethnic Studies 3:2, pp. 31–56.) provide new and situated insights on affect theories and feminist studies.

Mapping two decades of multiple sclerosis rehabilitation trials: A systematic scoping review and call to action to advance the study of race and ethnicity in rehabilitation research.

Multiple sclerosis (MS), is prevalent across many racial and ethnic groups, and disproportionately impacts racially minoritized populations. Rehabilitation interventions are an important component of comprehensive MS care. Yet, we do not know the extent to which MS rehabilitation trials consider race and ethnicity in defining eligibility criteria, planning recruitment strategies, selecting outcome measures, supporting intervention delivery, and designing approaches to promote adherence and retention. We conducted a scoping review of five databases (MEDLINE, CINAHL, Cochrane Central, EMBASE, and Web of Science) to locate randomized controlled rehabilitation trials published from January 2002 to March 2022. We extracted data from relevant studies, assessed their methodological quality, and narratively summarized results. Reporting of this review is in line with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR). Fifty-six studies of neurorehabilitation (n=3), cognitive rehabilitation (n=6), exercise training (n=9) and self-management (n=38) interventions were included in this review. The studies were predominantly from North America (n=44; 73%) or Europe (n=12; 20%) and included 4280 participants. Most participants (n=3669; 86%) were Caucasians. Less than 10% of participants were Black (n=282), Latinx/Hispanic (n=60), Asian (n=46), Indigenous (n=7), or Arab (n=2). Few studies discussed how race and/or ethnicity were considered in trial planning or execution. Without consistent and systematic attention to race and ethnicity, both in terms of trial design and reporting, it is impossible to know how MS rehabilitation interventions will translate into real-world applications. This call to action - to the MS rehabilitation research community to ensure trial and intervention processes that accommodate the needs of diverse racial and ethnic groups - is an important first step in addressing inequities in rehabilitation care for persons with MS.

More Is Required of Us: Complicating an Ontology of Experience at the Heart of Community-Based Research

More Is Required of Us: Complicating an Ontology of Experience at the Heart of Community-Based Research

Queer Voids

Queer Voids

Racial Literacy Development (RLD) via ethnic studies: Latinx youth speaking back to and resisting Racism

ABSTRACT This article explores student Racial Literacy Development (RLD) within a secondary Ethnic Studies (ES) classroom. It documents how one Latinx student iwas supported with developing the language and praxis to ‘read’ the existence of institutional racism and to disrupt its effects. Utilizing interviews, participant observations, field notes and literacy artifacts, this study investigates the learning and growth of this student’s racial discourse and analysis through a four-stage meaning-making process of racial literacy development (RLD) that emerged from the data. This article offers important implications for (1) supporting liberatory, justice-centered student learning (2) the creation of racially just classrooms and school communities and (3) the effective implementation of K-12 ES by highlighting the affordances of racial literacy as a curricular, pedagogical and student development goal.

Six mois sur Duolingo pour apprendre le français, le chinois, et d’autres langues : An Experiential Diary Account of Linguistic Diversity

This essay is a diary account of learning French, as well as exploring eight other languages in six-months through the app, Duolingo, and how exposure to this diversity of languages has enriched my possession of cultural capital. My perspective is that of a sociology lecturer from Malaysia, specialising in ethnic studies, who also teaches Malaysian, international, and French exchange students among others, and is thus exposed to a cornucopia of languages. During the global pandemic, global trends such as the shift towards online learning and ‘levelling up’ through enhancing one’s skills, brought me to the idea of learning ‘foreign’ languages in an informal but guided sense, replete with a structured syllabus. I now recount, post-six months, my journey in learning French, my completion of two other language ‘courses’, as well as my exploration of several others, all through Duolingo. I contextualise my experience within the phenomenon of super-diversity (Vertovec, 2007), and encapsulate my benefits within Bourdieu’s (1984) concept of cultural capital in the linguistic domain.