Dianne Shen
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
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Dianne (she/her) is an archivist/curator living in Oʻahu. She has worked at the J. Paul Getty Museum, The Broad Museum, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, Los Altos History Museum, East-West Center Gallery, and most recently as Curatorial Assistant for the Hawaiʻi Triennial 2025: Aloha Nō. She is working on her PhD in American Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she also works as the program coordinator for the Asia-Pacific Museum Exchange (APME). Her research looks at Asian American/diasporic visual and material culture, vernacular and family photography, and museums from the early twentieth century to the contemporary period. Her work investigates the politics of collecting and advocates for community archival praxis as an anticolonial/decolonial approach to cultural stewardship.
Bearing Witness to Museum Labor in Island Southeast Asia, Hawaiʻi, and the Pacific
Museums are living spectacles of colonial looting, land dispossession, and Indigenous genocide for communities in Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific. Drawing from the work of cultural theorist Tony Bennett, the birth of museum institutions in Europe and America legitimized Western governance and settler expansion into sovereign island nations. In the contemporary moment, museums remain colonial spaces where trauma is reanimated again and again for marginalized communities as they still hold cultural objects and ancestral remains captive within their walls. The need to confront these truths and build anticolonial coalitions seeded the early idea for the Asia Pacific Museum Exchange (APME).
In July 2025, 13 museum curators, educators, conservators, and cultural stewards based in Island Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands gathered in Honolulu for the inaugural APME Face2Face Workshop. APME is a new initiative that aims to build a network of undersupported museum workers to rethink “best practices” and ideate new methods of collections care, preservation, and exhibition-making that prioritize cultural and Indigenous practices of the region. Connected by our oceans, the APME cohort bore witness to each other's labor and together imagined liberatory possibilities of museum stewardship to heal colonial legacies and cultural disruptions.
This roundtable features 4 fellows from Saipan, American Samoa, Palau, and the Philippines, and 2 facilitators based in Hawaiʻi—all archipelagic lands that bear scars of American imperial violence. The discussants share reflections from the F2F Workshop and discuss how APME’s model can be replicated. With the 2026 AAAS Conference held in Hawai’i, a site of on-going U.S. occupation and Asian settler colonialism, this conservation especially considers how museum workers can insist on Kānaka Maoli cultural recovery and resurgence.
From Salzburg With Love: On Transnational Solidarities and Confronting the Asian American Far-Right
Since 1947, the Salzburg Global Seminar at the Hotel Schloss Leopoldskron in Salzburg, Austria has hosted forums on pressing global issues, convening expert discussants from multiple industries throughout the world. In September 2024, the Salzburg Global American Studies Program organized “Crossing the Pacific: The Asian American Experience in U.S. Society and Discourse.” Along with Asian American studies scholars, civil rights lawyers, activists as well as American Studies scholars in European and Asian contexts, the program included members of the Asian American far-right, namely activists against critical race theory, anti-affirmative action organizers, a eugenicist, and even a legal scholar with pending war crime charges, who backed out of attending.
While the Seminar forbids its attendees from disclosing individual statements through the Chatham House Rules, the panelists of this roundtable nevertheless felt the need to reunite and reflect on the remarkable connections and international solidarities that were built, alongside the shocking and often insurmountable confrontations with Asian American conservatism. As a mixed panel of humanities academics and legal civil rights leaders, we first think together on ways to promote the vision of Asian America that combats antiblackness, imperialism, and the worst ravages of racial capitalism. Second, we consider the bonds and breaks within our community while confronting ideological opponents. Third, considering ideological and political limits presented in the forum, we ask what does Asian Americanism have to offer a global audience--from places as diverse as Germany, Romania, Thailand, Mongolia and Poland--who may be largely unaware of its paradigms and ideological limits?
Dianne Shen
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
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