SYMPOSIUM:

Building Asian American Studies in Polycultural New York City

Friday, March 10, 2017

BMCC Express (255 Greenwich St., NYC),

CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College

Registration is full due to space limitations.

Please Click Here to Join the Waitlist!

Keynote Speakers
Premilla Nadasen, Associate Professor of History, Barnard College
Eric Tang, Associate Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies, Univ. of Texas, Austin

This symposium is part of a year-long, NEH-funded program focused on expanding and supporting the teaching of Asian American Studies in community college classrooms across the humanities, hosted by the Center for Ethnic Studies at CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College.

The symposium is an opportunity for faculty to share their research within the context of a critical Asian American Studies. We invite presentations that are grounded in the diversity of our local communities in New York City and thus cultivate what historian Robin D. G. Kelley calls a “polycultural” framework, or one that recognizes the interrelationships across different cultures that are neither fixed nor discrete.

In highlighting scholarship about the dynamic and complex experiences of Asian Americans in New York City, especially the cultures of new, diasporic, and/or refugee immigrant communities, we hope this symposium will contribute to the building of a critical Asian American Studies that is always locally resonant and polycultural.

Be sure to RSVP if you are interested in attending!

Schedule

Keynote Speaker Biographies

Premilla Nadasen, Associate Professor of History, Barnard College

Premilla Nadasen is an associate professor of history at Barnard College and a scholar-activist who writes and speaks on issues of race, gender, social policy and labor history. She is most interested in visions of social change, and the ways in which poor and working-class people, especially women of color, have fought for social justice. She has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grass-roots community organizing. She is the author of two award-winning books, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (Routledge 2005) and Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (Beacon 2015), a history of domestic worker activism in the post-war period.

Eric Tang, Associate Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas, Austin

Eric Tang is an Associate Professor in the African and African Diaspora Studies Department and faculty member in the Center for Asian American Studies. His first book, entitled Unsettled: Cambodian Refugees in the NYC Hyperghetto (Temple University Press, 2015), is an ethnographic account of refugee life in some of New York City’s most impoverished and socially marginalized neighborhoods. A former community organizer, Tang has published several articles on race and urban social movements, including award-winning writing on post-Katrina New Orleans. Tang is currently working on a new book, to be published with the University of Texas Press, entitled East Avenue: African Americans in Austin’s Terrain of Inequality.
Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the CUNY Asian American / Asian Research Institute(AARI).

 

About AAARI

The Asian American / Asian Research Institute (AAARI), of The City University of New York (CUNY), is a university-wide scholarly research and resource center that focuses on policies and issues that affect Asians and Asian Americans. It covers four areas: Asian American Studies; East Asian Studies; South Asian Studies; and Trade & Technology Studies.