Asian American and Pacific Islander Religious Communities, Community-Based Research, and Photovoice

This Roundtable is part of a digital humanities project focused on Asian American and Pacific Islander religious communities in Southern California, coordinated by Tammy Ho and SueJeanne Koh, and funded by the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI).

Using the community-based participatory research method of Photovoice, our collaborative multi-sited project focuses on faith-based communities, Asian Americans, and Pacific Islander diasporas. Student-researchers will present their work with community members to document stories and experiences related to religion and being Asian American and/or Pasifika in California. Our Roundtable will showcase how religious communities function as a site of cultivating not only community relationships, but also reciprocity, mutual aid, and resistance.

This Photovoice project aims to amplify voices and perspectives not often acknowledged within mainstream conversations about US religions and to better situate Asian American and Pasifika religious communities both geographically and historically. We aim to seed an archive of oral histories and images for future pedagogy and research; to develop students’ skills in community-based research and building good relations; and to enrich knowledge about Asian American and Pasifika faith communities.

In this Roundtable, undergraduate and graduate student researchers will share images, information, and reflections from their respective research sites in this collaborative community-based participatory research project and offer a preview of a photographic exhibit emerging from the APARRI Photovoice project’s collective endeavors.

Student presentations will be 10-12 minutes each, allowing ample time for questions and discussion with the audience.

Require projection for images/powerpoint and photo files.

"Black California Gold" by Wendy M. Thompson: Book Discussion Roundtable

This Book Discussion Roundtable focuses on Black California Gold (Bucknell University Press, 2025) by Wendy M. Thompson.

Poet and Associate Professor of African American Studies, Thompson is descended from two migrant waves who arrived in California in the twentieth century in search of greater opportunities: post-1965 Chinese immigrants from Southeast Asia and Black southerners of the Second Great Migration. Thompson’s mother is a Chinese immigrant from Burma/Myanmar, and her father is the son of Black Southern migrants.

In Black California Gold, Thompson traces the past and present of California’s Bay Area, exploring themes of interracial family, migration, girlhood, and identity against a backdrop of urban redevelopment, advanced gentrification, and the erasure of Black communities. Thompson’s arresting debut poetry collection maps a region where race, class, and language are just some of the fault lines that divide communities and produce periodic tremors of violence and resistance. Confronting assimilationist myths of the American Dream, Thompson depicts a setting that is more a smelting pot than a melting pot, subjecting different ethnic groups to searing trials and extreme pressures. Yet, her poetry also celebrates the Black and multiracial Asian American residents of the Bay Area who have struggled to sustain home, family, and hope amid increasingly desperate conditions.

This Book Discussion Roundtable assembles scholars of Burma/Myanmar, the nation from which Thompson’s mother migrated, and multiracial Asian American scholars of Burmese descent to share their reflections of and responses to Black California Gold as a work that explores not only Black life in the Bay Area, but also overlapping layers of ethnicity, identity, race, and kinship within Burmese and Chinese diasporas in the United States.

In keeping with the conference theme, this Roundtable will examine how Thompson’s poetry testifies to historical trajectories that have brought migrants of different races in relation in northern California. Black California Gold not only traces how China, Burma/Myanmar, and the US mainland are bound together in Thompson’s embodied memories and multilingual narrative voice, but also eloquently explores global and historical processes of relation, racial capitalism, land, capital, racialization, settler colonialism, displacement, and the legacies and logics of white supremacy.

Professional/Cultural Representation: Academic Outsider-ness and Asian Otherness

This panel brings together three interdisciplinary scholars with books recently published within this past year on social exclusion of Asians and Asian Americans in society.

Each of the three authors will briefly talk about their new monographs, but they will share how those academic works inform their own positionality within the Ivory Tower. The authors will also do a cross-examination of each other’s work to consider how dominant images of Asian/Americans as Other shape personal and collective feelings of academic outsider-ness. The discussant will offer reflections on the three recently published books and Asian American insider-outsiderness.

This panel is significant in not only unpacking Asian marginalization, but it deconstructs what it means to be a scholar-teacher of Asian descent today with the panelists speaking to issues of being Filipina, Vietnamese, Sino-Burmese, and Korean as well as woman of color, queer, first-gen, immigrant, working class. The panel centrally aligns with this year’s theme on sustainable publics in terms of working through issues of work-life balance and identity-labor.

On the 25th Anniversary of Asian Settler Colonial Critique: An Amerasia Special Issue Roundtable

It has been twenty years since the 2000 publication of Haunani Kay Trask’s essay, “Settlers of Color and Immigrant Hegemony” in Amerasia Journal. Recognizing this, in an upcoming Amerasia special issue, scholars, activists, and community organizers will reflect on shifting conversations and debates in the field of Asian settler colonialism. Their collective articles, forums, creative pieces, and reflection essays re-orient and ground scholarship about Asian settler colonialism in Indigenous land and water based-struggles. In this way, they open more capacious engagements of decolonization- ones that are rooted in alternative futurities for Asian and Indigenous communities beyond different settler colonial states.
This roundtable brings together the forum contributors to the special issue. Grounded in their ties to Guåhan, Okinawa, Guåhan, and Turtle Island, Ryan Buyco, Eleanor Craig, Himanee Gupta-Carlson, Tamara Ho, Josephine Faith Ong, and Areerat Worangwongwasu unsettle the binary that is often attributed to Asian American and Indigenous experiences in Turtle Island and the Pacific, re-orient Asian settler colonial scholarship towards decolonial praxis, and raise robust questions about the functioning of Asian nation-state as settler states that participate in the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous peoples in Asia

Place, Practice, and Ethics: Interracial Engagements of Spirituality, Land, and Relationality

Given how responsibility and relationships to land have been central to Indigenous spiritualities, what might Asian Americanists learn from Native American, Pasifika, Palestinian, and indigenous epistemologies about ecology, faith, and environmental ethics? How might scholars of Asian American and Pacific Islander religions take seriously the environment, land, and food as spiritual? One of the starting points for this panel’s interdisciplinary conversation is Candace Fujikane’s 2021 book Mapping Abundance: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai'i, which engages with Indigeneity, Euro-American-Asian settler colonialism in Hawai‘i, and fraught intersections of Asian and Pacific identities. The panelists share an interest in the critical nexus of spirituality, coloniality, and relationality, and offer their views of different embodied practices and narratives that resist settler-colonial epistemologies and cultural amnesia. Our exchange aims to animate discussions of Asian American and Pacific Islander interventions in relation to food security, land and water sovereignty, climate change, and the environment.

Ethnic Identity and Ethnonationalism in Burma/Myanmar: Critical Asian North American Perspectives

Chariring panel on Burma/Myanmar