Building Asian American Studies across the Community College Classroom is a program to expand the teaching of Asian American Studies in community college classrooms across humanities disciplines. The program will begin with a Faculty Development Summer Institute for CUNY Community College Faculty and will be followed by a monthly public Colloquium in Asian American Studies at BMCC in the 2016-17 academic year.

Through engagement with academic scholarship, literary texts, community organizing and cultural work, this interdisciplinary Summer Institute for CUNY Community College Faculty will support participants to study and develop curricular materials for use in the classroom. The Institute will examine the following areas: critical concepts and frameworks in Asian American Studies; new Asian immigrant communities in New York City; gender and sexual labor; transnationalism and cultural production; Asian/American racialization, race and caste, cross-racial relationships, and diaspora. Being grounded in the diversity of our local communities allows us to cultivate what historian Robin Kelley calls a “polycultural” framework, or one that recognizes interrelationships between different cultures. By learning from texts by and about local Asian American communities, we can gain a better understanding of the dynamism and complexity of New York City itself.