Navigating Race: Pacific Islanders in Higher Education Research Journals

• In Event: 35.072 - Reflecting on the P in REAPA: Education Research on (and for) Pacific Islanders

Abstract

This paper presents a review of literature synthesizing extant research and perspectives addressing contemporary historical, political, and sociocultural dynamics that Pacific Islander communities have experienced. Pacific Islanders have often been designated to the “Asian American/Pacific Islander” umbrella; however, scant educational research has specifically examined the multi-faceted issues and opportunities that shape how Pacific Islanders experience higher education. The process of racialization has had a significant impact on Pacific Islander, casting an extremely diverse group of people into one catchall term “Pacific Islander,” while simultaneously imbuing that group with all of the racial imagery and stereotypes that Asian American scholars have worked to dismantle. This paper seeks to address the following research question: how has the racialization of Pacific Islanders as “Asian American” in educational research influenced discourse about Pacific Islanders?
This study utilizes Gutiérrez’s framework on rethinking educational discourse and inquiry, which challenges the ways in which educational researchers study cultural communities and can become complicit in allowing dominant narratives frame and perpetuate inequity for non-dominant communities (Gutiérrez, 2006). In doing so, we rethink education research as it has been applied to Pacific Islanders, focusing on how the process of racialization of the “Asian American/Pacific Islander” racial category has served to reify an inaccurate and misleading discourse about this community. Gutiérrez’s framework serves as a complementary backdrop for use of critical discourse analysis (CDA) as a tool to analyze how education research on Pacific Islanders has produced empirical research that depends on, and in turn reifies, the racial identity “Asian American/Pacific Islander.” We use CDA as a means to expose how the language that education researchers employ towards Pacific Islander communities works to accommodate (Gildersleeve, 2010) the American system of race.
Existing education research literature on Pacific Islanders is our primary source of data, including empirical research, policy reports, and published works. In order to access this material we will conduct a careful query using multiple databases (including campus search engines, ERIC) with search terms “Asian American and Pacific Islanders,” “Asian Pacific American,” “Asian Pacific Islander American,” “Asian Pacific Islander,” paired with the words “higher education.” Our search includes literature published between 1970-2013. Once we gather and sift through this literature, our critical discourse analysis will take place.
The significance of this study is based on its open acknowledgement of the unique political and historical relationships that characterize various Pacific Islander communities (for example, the fact that many Pacific Islanders are also indigenous to US territories). By revealing the underlying discourse that operates to racialize Pacific Islanders as Asian Americans/Pacific Islanders, we seek to promote dialogue within the research community in order to explore new directions in scholarship on AAPIs, as well as pursue fresh lines of inquiry.

Authors

• Natasha A Saelua, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Ester Sihite, Loyola University Chicago