We are pleased to announce Asian American Studies in the 2020s: Disciplinary, Ethnic, Diasporic Identities as the theme for our 2024 conference. Since its inception, Asian American Studies has been particularly sensitive to histories of inclusion, marginalization, exclusion, and elision—in political life, narratives, and canons. In our (post) 9/11 and COVID moment of heightened political and social turmoil, marked by a sharp rise in anti-Asian American violence in the US, how might we reevaluate and remap what disciplines, ethnoracial groups, and diasporic processes have defined Asian American Studies and, by extension, decentered others?    

Asian American Studies in the 2020s: Disciplinary, Ethnic, Diasporic Identities will be held April 2024 in Seattle, Washington. The deadline for submissions is October 4, 2023—at midnight PDT.

There are myriad examples of marginalization and decentering, but to elaborate on two, social scientists from underrepresented fields – namely, psychology, political science – were heavily involved in the formation of the association, Amerasia Journal, and Asian American Studies more generally, and yet those fields (as well as anthropology, communications, economics, sociology, etc) have not been centered – discretely or interdisciplinarily. Without claiming that these underrepresented social sciences are unproblematic, still, how might they and their methods help us shift our scholarly, pedagogical, and public-facing work as well as the broader discipline? Similarly, how might a more focused and intensive treatment of South Asian American Studies, placing South Asian Americans and South Asian nations at the center of our (inter)disciplinary inquiries, shift our understanding of the raced and gendered global economic order, of transnationality and diaspora, of the post 9/11-COVID era, of Asian American Studies? 

We invite Asian American Studies practitioners, scholars, teachers, artists, activists and beyond to engage broadly with questions of inclusion/exclusion, examining a series of topics including, but not limited to:  

• Rethinking 1968 and the Rise of “Asian American”
• Asian American Studies Then and Now
• On Presentism and Futuricity
• The Historical Imagination
• The Social Scientific Imagination & Methodology
• Disciplines: Multi-, Inter-, and Trans-disciplinarity 
• The Model Minority and its Discontents
• The Racialized “Foreigner”: The Terrorist, the Temptress, the Virus, the Competition, the Empire 
• The Racialization of 9/11 and Covid: Comparisons
• Caste and Asian America
• Meditations on the Atlanta and Sikh American Massacres 
• Ranking Oppressions or Contextualizing/Interrelating Oppressions
• How the Global & Transnational relate to Asian “America” 
• Centering/Interrelating: South Asian/American Studies, Pacific Islander/Oceanic Studies, Southeast Asian/American Studies 
• On Critical Mental Health Studies, Disability Studies, Environmental Studies, Queer Studies

Nadia Kim, Program Co-Chair

Sameer Pandya, Program Co-Chair