Trish Morita-Mullaney
Purdue University, Associate Professor
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Trish Morita-Mullaney is an Associate Professor in Literacy and Language at Purdue University with a courtesy appointment in Asian American Studies and serves as the Co-Director of the Center for Literacy and Language Education and Research. Her research focuses on the intersections between language, race, national origin, and gender identities and how this informs the identity acts of educators within multilingual communities. Guided by critical and feminist thought, she examines these intersectional identities and how they inform the logics of educational decision making for multilingual individuals and families. As a former ESL and bilingual teacher and administrator, she draws from her experiences and relationships within schools, programs, and communities to understand the assemblages of economic, political, and social capital. Her newly published book with Multilingual Matters, “Lau v. Nichols and Chinese American Language Rights: The Sunrise and Sunset of Bilingual Education” examines the Lau v. Nichols (1974) language rights case as developed, experienced, and implemented by the Chinese American community of San Francisco’s Chinatown. With co-editors Khánh Lê, Zhongfeng Tian, and Alisha Nguyen, she has a forthcoming edited volume entitled, “The long overdue voice: Asian Americans in Bilingualism and Bilingual Education” capturing the narratives of the Asian diaspora within bilingual education.
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The Lead-up to Lau v. Nichols: The Chinese Freedom Schools of San Francisco
The purpose of this study is to examine the history of the Chinese Freedom Schools of San Francisco, a representative movement in San Francisco’s Chinatown call for language rights in the lead-up to Lau v. Nichols (1974), which called for differentiation of treatment of students. In 1971, the Chinese Freedom Schools were quickly assembled in opposition to mandatory busing. The media and school district framed the Chinese as racist, asserting that Freedom Schools usurped Brown’s aims. Yet, such positioning of the Chinese dismisses their resistance based on a history of exclusion, leading to a busing boycott. The Freedom Schools was Chinatown’s call for self-determination and autonomy (language rights), a logic that would later galvanize the implementation of Cantonese bilingual education throughout the Bay Area of California.
The Lapdog Syndrome: Polyethnographies of Asian Women Navigating Power and Identity
The Lapdog Syndrome within professional spaces posits that Asian women serve as capable experts in their respective fields, yet are often called upon to do racial interlocution tasks for their white colleagues and/or administrators when conflicts between whites and non-Asian people of color emerge. Thus, Asian women are positioned as seemingly objective and fair arbitrators of racial conflict, a co-construction that makes them ‘raceless’. Such interlocution work is done in relative invisibility further reinforcing Asian women's peripheral and incomplete positioning as legitimate contributors to the more public endeavor of social justice work for racial solidarity.
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