Brian Chung
Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies, Cal State University Fullerton
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Brian Su-Jen Chung is an Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. He researches Asian American suburban community formations and racial segregation in the residential, commercial, and public spaces of technoscience. His research explores the intersections of urban/suburban history, information economies, and homeownership politics and cultures. He also enjoys exploring media studies, particularly television, and discussions of genre, representation, and storytelling.
The Politics of Racialized Space: Community Formation and Resistance (Social Sciences Caucus)
The papers in this panel analyze the intersections of community formation, grassroots mobilization, and cultural representation in ethnic and racialized spaces. They analyze the dynamic urban and suburban spaces where Asian Americans are concentrated, covering multiple sites within the Los Angeles, New York City, Orange County, and Silicon Valley region. The papers address how immigration flows, socioeconomic inequalities, housing segregation, suburban/urban redevelopment, and technological transformations affect and determine the possibilities for organizing resistance and cultural change. These research projects are also attentive to the unprecedented geopolitical and structural forces that have realigned and altered ethnic formations and racial relations. The panel includes scholars trained as historians, political scientists, sociologists, and urban planners who will discuss the shifting resources and discourses that activists and groups use to mobilize, navigate collaborations, and shape public policies. These projects provide insights into future struggles of sustainability and cultural preservation and innovation as well as potential opportunities for communities to change the built and natural environment.
Seeing Ourselves, Being Ourselves: Exploring Critical Intersections of Community Building and Identi
Historically, U.S. popular culture has contributed to the making of a national public sphere that narrowly defines citizenship with heteronormative whiteness, perpetuated through mass mediated narratives, characters, celebrity culture, and racial stereotypes. The recent visibility of Asian and Asian American comedians, pop music icons, and actors leading U.S. blockbuster films has encouraged discussion amongst Asian Pacific Islander Desi Americans (APIDAs) of their presence and claims to the national public sphere. Expansive offerings of Asian diasporic and APIDA content, such as reality television, stand-up comedy specials, sitcoms, and superhero and romantic-comedy movies on streaming networks and filtered through its generic conventions of storytelling similarly signal how global media corporations have enabled, yet constrained the racial, gendered, class, and sexual representations of Asian diasporic and APIDA identities, cultures, and experience. Yet, such globally mediated content, including social media, has also generated transformative acts of fandom for Asian Americans audiences.
Join our students, activists, and scholars as we explore problematic and essentialist representations of APIDAs in popular media, as well as grassroots-level and social media-based pushback and resistance to these representations. Our broad questions, inspired by multiple meanings implied in “sustainable publics” are: 1) Given that representation influences self-perception and beliefs, what myths, ideas, assumptions, and stereotypes does popular media sustain (and perpetuate) from its [mis]representation of APIDA publics? 2) Considering that media is as powerful a force only because of how and whom it [mis]represents, how might we reimagine publics that are truly and genuinely sustainable?
Brian Chung
Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies, Cal State University Fullerton
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