Research With/About Asian American Youth: Youth Participatory Action Research Through Asian Diasporic and Transnational Lenses

• In Event: Asian Diasporas as Methodologies

Abstract

Employing Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) through Asia Diasporic and transnational lenses, our research challenges conceptual and methodological nationalism that functions as blindspots in understanding race, racism, and anti-racism in the United States. YPAR aims to “conduct and disseminate education research with/about youth in actionable ways” (Caraballo et al., 2017, p. 313). Meanwhile, our YPAR methodology builds upon and extends Asian American Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit), a framework grounded in Critical Race Theory and the histories and lived experiences of Asian Americans from intersectional, comparative, and transnational perspectives (Chang, 1993; Matsuda, 1996). AsianCrit education scholars have pursued groundbreaking research in multiple fields, illuminating the exclusion of Asian Americans in the historical narration and understanding of the United States (An, 2017; Coloma, 2006; Hsieh & Nguyen, 2021; Kolano, 2016; Lee, 2009). However, few research has centered the multi-generational, transnational knowledge and oral histories of Asian American youth and their implications for educators and policymakers in creating socially just curriculum.

Asian Americans are embedded in transnational networks through family, cultural, financial, travel, and technological connections (Kwon, 2020). They build, expand, and leverage the knowledge grounded in these transnational networks (Kwon, 2022; Coloma, 2017). The idea of transnational funds of knowledge (Kwon et al., 2019) informs our positioning of Asian American youth as researchers and knowledge producers. It foregrounds Asian Americans’ cultural and transnational epistemology that will inform their process of conducting and analyzing oral history.

Asian Americans’ lived experiences and ways of knowing are untapped and silenced in schools, which center on monolingual, monocultural, and static views of language, culture, and identity (Bajaj & Bartlett, 2017; DeNicolo et al., 2017; Sun & Kwon, 2020). Our methodological approach to oral histories and digital archives as counterstories that can offer “an alternative epistemology that is represented through stories and can inform theories and praxis in meaningful ways” (Iftikar & Museus, 2018, p. 941; He & Yu, 2017).

By highlighting Asian American histories, families, and communities as well as the multi-stranded connections that they share across countries, we will expand the dominant framing of racialized minorities that limits their experiences within the geo-political boundaries of the United States. By situating Asian Americans in transnational contexts, our study will generate a more complex and accurate understanding of the historical and current conditions of Asian Americans as a racialized diasporic community. Their oral histories, to be captured by youth researchers, are much needed to complement and extend prevailing conceptualizations of race and migration in the US that primarily center on African American and Latinx communities. Our research will also have methodological significance by showcasing innovative knowledge construction and mobilization when youth are supported as researchers and storytellers of the past committed to promote a more equitable present and future. This project will contribute to the existing literature on racial equity and education, foreground the voices of underrepresented Asian American youth and families (Kim, 2020), and enact a more complex storytelling of race and transnationalism to reimagine the terms of inclusion, belonging, and citizenship in the United States.

Authors

• Min Yu, Wayne State University
  Presenting Author

• Jungmin Kwon, Michigan State University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Wenyang Sun, University of Utah
  Non-Presenting Author

• Roland Sintos Coloma, Wayne State University
  Non-Presenting Author