Disrupting the Scripts: Asian American Womxn in Racial Justice Activism

• In Event: 28.042 - A Critical Exploration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Resistance in Higher Education

Abstract

Student activists in the 1960s Third World Liberation Front movements demanded a more relevant undergraduate education and a more responsive institution to the needs of minoritized students (Lee, 2015). These demands remain relevant today and extend to the experiences of minoritized graduate student populations. Several dominant scripts render the active participation and resistance by Asian American womxn doctoral students invisible.
For the purposes of this proposal, we focus on three dominant scripts. First, Asian Americans are perceived as not caring about racial justice as a whole and only care when their own communities are directly impacted. However, there is long history of Asian Americans engaging in both ethnic-specific and collective efforts (Lee, 2015; Manzano, Poon, & Na, 2017). Second, literature on graduate students of color is typically focused on their academic experience with some attention paid to how these students resistant a white dominant academic culture (Harris, 2007; Turner, González, & Wong, 2011). Lastly, Asian American womxn’s intentions and abilities to be leaders and activists are questioned for when they do engage in activism (Trinh, 2009), requiring a need to challenge who are “legitimate” creators of knowledge and who determines what activism is or looks like (Delgado Bernal, 1998; Trinh, 2009).
We disrupt these dominant scripts by offering an alternative portrait of how these identities not only intersect but are necessary to our survival in academia. Using critical collaborative autoethnography as methodology, we sought to answer the following question: What does it mean to be Asian American graduate womxn activists engaging in racial justice work in the current day contexts? This paper challenges the white supremacist and male-dominated scripts of higher education by centering our identities as Asian American womxn in an effort to explore how our lived experiences critique and extend what is said (and unsaid) about graduate activists of color. We explore our unique context of pursuing doctoral degrees at predominantly white institutions in the Midwest (Chan, 2017; Kodama, Poon, Manzano, & Sihite, 2017), while engaging in racial justice work and other forms of activism. We investigate the ways our doctoral curricula support, challenge, ignore, and erase our engagement and our bodies in activism. Exploring questions of where we find spaces to engage in this important work and howow we push back or within our doctoral programs?
Critical collaborative autoethnography provides an integral lens of “questioning power and power relationships to bring about social change” (Bhattacharya, 2008, p. 306) through a collective examination of individual autobiographies to understand a sociocultural phenomenon (Chang, Ngunjiri, & Hernandez, 2013). This methodological approach also provides us a form of empowerment to author our counterstories to the dominant scripts (Ashlee, Zamora, & Karikari, 2017). In this paper, we share brief narratives of our individual journeys to activism in graduate school to contextualize our stories. Then, we describe our collective data analysis. Through this process, we identified three preliminary themes: (1) integration of activism and higher education, (2) coalition building and mentoring across identities in the Midwest, and (3) negotiating unpaid and unrecognized labor and service.

Authors

• Vanessa S. Na, University of California - San Diego

• Jacqueline Mac, Indiana University - Bloomington

• Aeriel A. Ashlee, Miami University - Oxford