Christina Ong
Postdoctoral Scholar
Actions
dr. christina ong (she/her) is a postdoctoral scholar in Asian and Asian American Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She obtained her PhD in Sociology from the University of Pittsburgh in 2024. Her research uncovers how diasporas create community through place-based activism and art production. Her current work chronicles the impact of the Basement Workshop (1969-1986), the first pan-Asian political and arts organization active in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
New Archives of Asian American Art and Literature
This panel features scholars with new approaches to Asian American art and literary archives. From the editors of Aiiieeeee! to scholars such as literary critic Floyd Cheung and art historian Alexandra Chang, there has long been a movement to recuperate and recover Asian American literature and culture. Our interdisciplinary panel builds on this body of work by rethinking well-known archival figures and texts, while also presenting new "archives," broadly conceived, that shed light on hitherto underexplored artists, writers, and community formations. Across our papers, we offer directions for thinking about theoretical and affect-driven approaches to canonical texts and writers like Sui Sin Far; reconceptualize the importance of collectivity and community networks in the history of Asian American art and literature, from older networks like Godzilla: Asian American Art Network and Basement Workshop to recent ones like Kundiman; and share new public and digital humanities projects that hope to become archival resources for future scholars, students, and teachers. In conversation across multiple disciplines and approaches, our papers collectively ask: How do we illuminate important linkages between past and present, and recover the important work of communities and individuals? What new sociological methods or theoretical models might we draw on to document and archive Asian American culture, including oral history interviews or ethnography? And how can we share these new archival histories, in public exhibitions or in digital forms?
Identity, Protest and Power: Asian American Youth, Student Activists, and Elected Representation
How do we understand the political engagement, activism, and resistance of Asian Americans across various levels of social organization and government? This interdisciplinary panel highlights research on topics ranging from youth advocating for housing justice, to student-led divestment movements, to elected representation in Massachusetts, to other important sites of inquiry. We explore politics through the frameworks of racial capitalism, interpersonal relationships, and identity formation among others. Central to this panel is the examination of Asian Americans' roles in political spaces, from intimate settings to international arenas. Notably, this intergenerational panel features undergraduate researchers, graduate students, professional academic researchers, and junior and senior faculty.
‘We are Bulletproof’: The Transcultural Power of Fandom in #StopAsianHate
During the COVID-19 pandemic, people of Asian descent have been victims of physical and verbal harassment. Fears of the virus, alongside existing anti-Asian sentiment, resulted in 10,905 documented hate incidents against AAPIs in the United States, per the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center. In direct response to the rise of anti-Asian hate, most significantly after the Atlanta area shootings, people on social media began using the hashtags #StopAsianHate and #StopAAPIHate to increase public awareness of such violence. Considering anti-Asian racism also exists beyond the US, we ask: how does the use of these hashtags reflect the transculturality of responses to anti-Asian racism in a digital environment? To examine this, we used an open-source Python library to scrape 920,271 tweets between March 19, 2020 and May 31, 2022 that contained either hashtag. We defined a “spike” in engagement as any days where there were more than 5,000 tweets containing one/both hashtags, and found that of 24 spikes, 11 immediately followed the Atlanta-area shootings, unsurprisingly — however, an additional 11 spikes were related to South Korean megagroup BTS, primarily driven by responses to instances of discrimination against the group. Accordingly, we further examine engagement with these hashtags and discourse on Twitter largely driven by ARMY, the BTS fandom, to explore alternative pathways to combating anti-Asian sentiment. Taking seriously the role of fandom, we argue that the transculturality of both BTS and ARMY and the affective ties between them present an opportunity for accessible and sustained discourse about anti-Asian racism.
Christina Ong
Postdoctoral Scholar
Actions
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top