How Asian American Women Leaders Fought for Culturally Supportive Spaces at Indiana University Bloomington

• In Event: Centering Asian American Midwestern Voices in Educational Historiography

Abstract

This study focuses on the leadership and activism of Asian American women student leaders from 1990 through 1998. As foundational mobilizers, resourceful leaders, and determined collaborators, their incremental activism helped create culturally supportive spaces—student organizations, an Asian-interest sorority, and a cultural center—that celebrated Asian Americans’ presence on campus.

This study was reconstructed from archival records, oral history interviews, and local media coverage. Primary source materials are housed at the Indiana University Archives or held in personal collections of IUB alumni. These records include student organization event flyers and planning documents, proposals, student government legislation, and budgets. I also consulted local and student publications that are housed at the IUB Microfilm collection. I also conducted five 60-minute oral history interviews of alumni involved.

I used document-based historical methods to reconstruct events, ideas, and meanings relevant to Asian American women student leaders. When consulting primary sources, I considered issues of artifact authenticity, author intent, and trustworthiness (Howell & Prevenier, 2001). I supplemented document analysis with oral history interviews to provide historical context and significance (Leavy, 2011).

Starting in 1990, women student leaders lobbied administrators to fund a cultural center headed by an Asian American advocacy dean. When the university denied funding, women formed culturally supportive spaces that became training grounds for Asian American political advocacy. Within these spaces, women established culturally supportive programming such as the Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Through the founding of the Asian-interest sorority, Kappa Gamma Delta, the Multi-Cultural Greek Council, and the Asian Student Union, women bridged the Asian American community to other student groups with parallel demands to change university culture and policies to be more inclusive of marginalized populations. This paper illustrates that women instigated social change through incremental advocacy and through collaboration across ethnic and racial lines.

This study is significant because it centers the voices and experiences of Asian American women that are often undocumented or silenced in existing institutional and Asian American histories (Chow, 1992; Lien, 2001). It extends previous scholarship on Asian American women by demonstrating how leadership development in college can lead to life-long skills and advocacy (Kawahara et al., 2007; Nguyen, 2020). The lessons that IUB women alumni learned as student leaders helped them advocate for racial and social change as current professionals and community leaders, particularly in the rise of anti-Asian violence and hate during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Author

• Stephanie T.X. Nguyen, Indiana University
  Presenting Author