This panel presents three different aspects of Asian Americans Against Tyranny. The first speaker examines how struggles over heritage language instruction in U.S. higher education illuminate the entanglements of Asian American presence, racial capitalism, and settler colonial power—tensions that are spotlighted by holding AAAS 2026 in Hawai‘i. Through a case study of contemporary advocacy efforts to preserve Cantonese-language instruction in California institutions, this study analyzes how Asian American linguistic life is shaped by the same imperial and settler logics that structure U.S. occupations across the Pacific, including Hawai‘i. Rather than treating language maintenance as a cultural or curricular issue, this project reframes it as a relational and political practice that reveals the contradictions of Asian American subjectivity within a settler state: our simultaneous vulnerability to racialized erasure and our complicity in Indigenous dispossession. The second speaker examines Asian American mental health discourse through the lens of memoirs, framing it not just as a health issue, but as a cultural and racial one. The speaker analyzes the cultural and historical causes of mental health issues portrayed in Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H-Mart, Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, and other memoirs. Using Asian American rhetorical theory and psychologist Jenny Wang's clinical perspective from Permission to Come Home, as well as other rhetorical studies framework such as counter memory, the author calls for future research and pedagogical applications of Asian American memoirs as a counter memory and social justice approach. The third speaker talks about how to utilize technologies such as 3D printing, vinyl cutting, and virtual reality to help first-year, multilingual students explore and make sense of their border-crossing experiences as an anti-racist pedagogical approach. Using a translingual teaching approach, the project positions students' own knowledge and communication styles as the basis for learning. Together, the panelists present how relations, reciprocity, and resistance are shown in U.S. immigration policies, Asian American writing, and translingual teaching in writing classrooms. The panel invites conversations around how Asian American scholars and teachers can engage in critical Asian American rhetorical research and pedagogy.

Cody Gee Sheridan Hmelar is a graduate student in English Composition at the University of Pittsburgh.

Xiaobo "Belle" Wang is an Associate Professor of English at Sam Houston State University.

Xiqiao Wang is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.