Since the beginning of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian racism has become visible in the U.S. mainstream in new and pronounced ways. Yet critical attention to the structures of anti-Asian racism—and myriad forms of Asian American resistance—have been subsumed under sanitized slogans such as “Stop Asian Hate.” Framing anti-Asian racism as exceptional, individualized acts of hate, such understandings do not clarify the structural roots of anti-Asian violence, nor do they provide the sustained momentum to build a movement to overthrow such structures.

Responding to this year’s conference theme of sustainable publics, this panel brings together contributors to the forthcoming Asian America Rising: Movement Visions and New Directions in Asian American Activism to share reflections on sustaining Asian American movements in the face of carceral violence, institutional co-optation, environmental crises, and beyond. Key questions we hope to address include: What are the uses and limits of Asian American identity in the context of an increasingly diverse Asian American community? How do local and transnational movements around the issues of deportation, gentrification, prison abolition, decolonization, and militarization decenter the US nation-state as the sole arbiter of political rights? And what kinds of ethical practices and modes of relation are possible between the academic discipline of Asian American studies and the social movements many of us seek to work alongside?