Visualizing Asian American Identities: Connecting Cultural Roots to Otherwise Possibilities Through Collaging

• In Event: Critical Visual + Multimodal Research for Racial Justice

Abstract

In a digital, multimodal research study conducted, we share collages, facilitated by researchers and constructed by Asian American youth ages 17-23 about cultural roots and possibilities. We emphasize how visual data is inherently part of youth culture, highlighting how the visual mediates identity, mobilizes political participation, and works as a conduit for activism and resistance. The visual collages act as a way of conversation with both oneself and the researcher through construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction—how does the placement of images evoke critical conversations around race, gender, sexuality, class, language, and ability? By juxtaposing images alongside youth narratives to generate multimodal data, we center the social, material, political, and cultural identities of young people. That is, youth identities are not simply racialized but complex, layered and, importantly, agentive—more than the sum of their traumas. This chapter illustrates how collaging—and, by extension, other forms of making—opens possibilities for shared, participatory meaning-making, destabilizing hierarchies between the researcher and the researched. Beyond the colonial gaze of traditional visual anthropology, we offer collaging as a participatory production where young people participate in image-making rather than passive subjugation to the researcher gaze.

Authors

• Haeny S. Yoon, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Catherine Yanan Cheng Stahl, Teachers College, Columbia University