(Re)Engaging Ethnic Studies in American Studies: The Possibilities of Creation, Solidarity, and Student Organizing

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

With budget cuts and the continued assault on critical spaces like Ethnic Studies classrooms and other social justice initiatives, the beginning of the year has only been marked by uncertainty given another Trump presidency. A year and a half after the latest iteration of genocide in Palestine and state-sponsored attacks on student protestors, this panel highlights subversive histories and alternative methods for resistance and education given the possibility that these classrooms where we gather, teach, and learn from one another may not exist much sooner due to all the threats to radical approaches to higher education. In these uncertain times, we are certain that education will persist. This panel demonstrates the utility of Ethnic Studies in transgressing institutional and nation-state borders to ensure the continuance of transformative education. The first paper discusses the struggle for Ethnic Studies at Mills College by placing particular focus on The Womanist, a student-led literary magazine, and highlighting histories of student organizing within Ethnic Studies as important sites of cultural memory that offer useful insights on broader strategies of resistance for academic freedom and liberated curriculum. The second paper discusses zines as creative pedagogy and visual method in two Ethnic Studies courses, Intro to Chicana/o Studies and Environmental Justice: Race, Class, and Gender, and sheds light on how zines and zine-making provide students at the margins the opportunity to see themselves as producers of knowledge and connect localized struggles with global liberatory struggles. The third paper interrogates how education post-1946 Philippine independence was used to tackle important global geopolitical issues such as the occupation of Palestine as well as highlight the unique position and politics that a newly independent Philippine state was in––pointing to the possibility of a postcolonial understanding that was aligned to a more radical Third World politics. Together, these papers highlight how education, student activism, and creative forms of knowledge production serve as sustainable tools of resistance, whether in the United States or the Philippines. In turn, we present a necessary (re)engagement of Ethnic Studies within American Studies as a means to ensure a path forward that rejects the dissolution of our critical fields of study and embraces a terrain through which to keep imagining alternative futures.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Beyond the Philippine Partition Vote: Postcolonial Possibilities, Intimacies, and Education - Edward Nadurata, University of California-Irvine

• Zine-making as Praxis: DIY in Ethnic Studies Classrooms and Beyond - Rocio Rivera-Murillo, University of California, Los Angeles

• In Defense of Ethnic Studies: Student Resistance, Generational Legacies, and Womanism at Mills College - Samantha M Barnett, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; Katherine Funes, University of California, Irvine

• Insurgent Desire: The Third World College Strike and the University’s Libidinal Economy - Aaron Allen, Arizona State University

• Student Media and Anti-Colonial Praxis in the University under “Late-stage American Empire” - Anna Zeemont, Suny Buffalo State

Chair

• Mellissa F Linton-Villafranco, Arizona State University-Tempe

Biographical Information

Katherine Funes is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Irvine in the Department of Global & International Studies. Born and raised in Los Angeles, they moved to Oakland for their BA in Ethnic Studies and Political Science at Mills College. After graduating they were the Director of the Rose Foundation for Communities & the Environment’s New Voices Are Rising where they organized alongside Bay Area youth on environmental justice issues. Their doctoral research takes up questions of resistance among LGBTIQ Salvadorans within an increasingly carceral landscape - illuminating how this community's organized collective action and seemingly mundane quotidian practices materialize an anti-carceral future where all Salvadorans can thrive. They have served as a UC Berkeley Othering & Belonging Institute Fellow, a UC Irvine Environmental & Health Equity Fellow, and are currently a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Innovation Fellow.

Samantha Marley Barnett is a native Chamorro from the island of Guam, and a P.hD. candidate in Indigenous Politics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She received a BA in Ethnic Studies from Mills College in Oakland, California. Samantha is the co-founder of Tåhdong Marianas, a collective of Chamorro artists and activists, and a lead author in a project with the University of Guam Press to write elementary school textbooks from a Chamorro perspective. She was recently awarded a research residency in the Oceania Collection in the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, and has been leading efforts to locate and repatriate Chamorro ancestral remains from German and Spanish museums. Her research charts the politics of Chamorro reclamations, rematriation, and haunting through analyzing Chamorro dispossessions caused by contemporary US military occupation in connection with historic practices of imperial grave-robbing and collecting throughout the Mariana Islands.

Rocio Rivera-Murillo is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA and holds a graduate certificate in urban humanities. Her research examines how women of color challenge and resist normalized state violence (i.e., criminalization, environmental injustice, food precarity, and policing).

Edward Nadurata is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Global and International Studies at UC Irvine with Graduate Emphases in Medical Humanities and Asian American Studies. He was an ACLS/Mellon Dissertation Innovation Fellow for 2023-2024 and a Visiting Fellow in the University of the Philippines’s Third World Studies Center. His research is on care, retirement, and aging in the Philippines amidst sustained labor migration and the COVID-19 pandemic. He is currently the Assistant Editor for the Journal of Asian American Studies and Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies. He received his M.A. in Asian American Studies from UCLA. His work can be found in Filipinx American Studies: Reckoning, Reclamation, Transformation, Amerasia, and is forthcoming in Genealogies of Anti-Asian/Asian Violence, from Fordham University Press.