Asian American Research Center Research and Programs

AAPI Data is a leading national research and policy organization that aspires to transform public and private systems to ensure that all Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities are recognized, valued, and prioritized. AAPI Data was founded in 2013 by Dr. Karthick Ramakrishnan, a political scientist and policy researcher known for his work in advancing demographic data and policy research centered on AANHPI populations. Since then, AAPI Data has earned a strong reputation and national profile as a go-to source among major media outlets, policy leaders, research institutions and key decision makers who engage and invest in AANHPI communities. Utilizing a Data-Narrative-Action framework, AAPI Data produces accurate data and research to support community narratives that drive action toward enduring solutions. AAPI Data is nationally recognized for its public opinion surveys, community-oriented demographic data tools, federal and state engagement on data policy, and data-informed news coverage on AA and NHPI communities. AAPI Data is based at the Asian American Research Center at UC Berkeley and is led by UC Berkeley researcher Karthick Ramakrishnan, Ph.D.

This project is working to conserve and digitize an archive of Japanese-language literary journals published at the Tule Lake Segregation Center during World War II. Led by Andew Way Leong, the team is establishing a consultative framework for expanding English-language access to the Itaru Ina Tule Lake Literary Journal Collection; a rare archive of first-hand perspectives of Issei and Kibei Nisei incarcerated at Tule Lake. A Community Advisory Board will provide guidance to the Translation Collective (a group of scholars and translators) who will prepare advance draft translations of the journal Tessaku produced by incarcerees at Tule Lake during World War II, and facilitate review and feedback of these documents by Tule Lake survivors and descendants. The collection will greatly enhance the nation’s understanding of Japanese American incarceration and, with descendant community approval, will be made accessible both in person at the University’s Ethnic Studies Library and online. The project is funded by the National Park Service’s Japanese American Confinement Sites Grant Program

The Asian American Research Center has received a grant of $150,000 from the National Endowment for the Humanities for a new project: Community Archival Resilience and Engagement (CARE): Voices of Asian American Elders in the San Francisco Bay Area. The project, funded as part of NEH's Cultural and Community Resilience Program, is an oral history and community archival project with elderly Asian Americans in San Francisco documenting the cultural practices that have developed as responses to the shared collective experience of the COVID-19 and anti-Asian hate pandemics. We consider how the survival mechanisms from past collective traumas of migration or world events and cultural knowledge help Asian American elders during the pandemics and document their cultural resilience and resistance from their own perspectives. The research team includes Associate Vice Chancellor for Research Lok Siu as P.I., Project Director Loan Dao, Ph.D., recent alumni Sou Saechao and Aian Mendoza as Project Coordinators, and Ethnic Studies and Asian American Studies Librarian Sine Hwang Jensen as the Project Archivist. Three undergraduate students, Elaine Cheng, Isayah Nuestro, and Abigail Verino, have received research grants of $1000 to develop their own projects related to CARE. The project supports preservation practices with community-based co-creation of knowledge through partnerships with Bayanihan Equity Center and Lao Seri Association, organizations serving low-income Filipino, Laotian, and Thai elders. The CARE team is training young community interviewers to conduct intergenerational oral histories of elders and offer the elders archival workshops to preserve their memories. Their stories will be accessible via the CARE collection in the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library’s open access public search engine to reach a broad audience and for use by future researchers.

In 1969 Professor Emeritus Ling-chi Wang helped establish Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley and taught Asian American Studies’ first course. That same year he also helped found Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA) in San Francisco. In 2007 Amerasia dedicated a special issue to Ling-chi Wang entitled “The Quintessential Scholar-Activist.” AARC is partnering with CAA Oral History Project to document Ling-chi’s contributions to key civil rights causes and the voices of others who have been influenced by him over the years. The aim of the documentary project is to produce a series of short educational videos that can be used in the classroom and in the training of organizers and activists. The video topics are: campus service to community life and community interest in higher education access; the importance of immigrant advocacy and language rights in a multiracial democracy; varieties of antiAsian bias on local, regional and national levels; the role of Asian American cultural representation in an evolving media landscape; how to expand Asian American political representation; the seeding of an internationalist vision for Asian American Studies and the conscientious role of Ethnic Studies in American higher education. The production team includes: former CAA director Henry Der, AARC chair Colleen Lye, film director Ursula Liang (9-Man, 2014; Down a Dark Stairwell, 2020), cinematographer and editor Seng Chen (Block by Block: the Struggle to Bring Community College to SF Chinatown, 2023; Home is a Hotel, 2023) and UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies graduate student Sarah Halabe. Production is anticipated to run from July 2024 into the Fall of 2024. All raw footage of the interviews will be archived in the Ethnic Studies Library.

The PACH Initiative is a community-campus collaboration launched to develop a community health workforce pipeline that will create a new cadre of health care leaders for the Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) community. It is led by the Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Program, Asian American Pacific Islander Health Research Group, and the Asian American Research Center. PACH is funded by the California Endowment.

The 21-22 report on PACH to the California Endowment is available here.

More information on PACH is available here.

The Asian American Research Center is partnering with the Pipeline for Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander Community Health (PACH) Program to offer two undergraduate awards of $500 each spring to UC Berkeley students. The funding is made possible by a California Endowment Grant. More information.

This annual prize is for UC Berkeley graduate and undergraduate students from any department who are researching and/or writing about Korean American literature, film, and cultural studies. Topics in history and politics will also be considered. More information.

AARC is partnering with the Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley to preserve and digitize the Loni Ding and Center for Educational Telecommunications Collection, which is housed at the library and will be available for public use. The collection contains the comprehensive works of Loni Ding as well as her extensive research files from her three-decade career. Ding was a renowned filmmaker, activist, scholar, and educator, and she was considered by many to be the "godmother of ethnic filmmaking." Over the span of her career, she produced over 250 broadcast programs which earned her international awards and recognition. The archive documents this scholar-activist’s lifetime of work to increase the representation and opportunities for filmmakers of color and to change the face of public history. More information on the collection and Loni Ding is available here.

The Asian American Research Center (AARC) funds current UCB faculty and graduate students working on scholarly, community engagement, and/or creative projects that focus on Asian American populations and center Asian American perspectives, agency, and epistemologies. Projects that engage communities as partners and/or involve Asian American populations are a priority. More information, including past funded projects and the application, is available here.

Violent attacks against Asian Americans have risen exponentially since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. Public debates often describe anti-Asian violence as a unitary phenomenon resulting from nation-state exclusion, drawing a direct line between the historical legal context and the violence of today. A predominant response is to assume that this violence will end through more state-sanctioned surveillance, policing, and the designation of cases of anti-Asian violence as hate crimes. But these dominant narratives seem to put too much weight on the concept of hate and ignore the racial and gendered violence of criminalization, thereby obscuring complex reasons for this violence and suggesting limited responses. As a result, anti-Asian violence tends to be most legible as a mere effect of individual prejudice, rather than as a condition of structures of systemic racial violence or global conditions of war, racial capitalism, and empire. This project will develop an in-depth examination of the underexplored and multifaceted conditions of this violence, the dominant policy responses to this violence, and possible responses that would be attuned to both heterogenous Asian American communities, and to the question of Asian American relationality with other groups. The project will lead to a white paper critically mapping both origins of and responses to anti-Asian violence.

PI: Leti Volpp

Berkeley Law Co-Investigators: Laura Kang, UC Irvine; Lee Ann Wang, UCLA,; Susette Min, UC Davis
UC Berkeley working group members: Carolyn Chen, Asian American and Asian Diasporic Studies (AAADS), Catherine Ceniza Choy (AAADS); Lok Siu (AAADS), Colleen Lye (English); Andrew Way Leong (English); and Mel Chen (Gender and Women’s Studies).

This project is funded by University of California Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives, Center for Race and Gender, Othering and Belonging Institute, Asian American Research Center

To belong in a land away from home is a diasporic dream. What does belonging mean and how does one belong? This project looks deeper into these questions by reframing different ways in which belonging can manifest. What is culturally significant to diasporic communities? What does their culture and rituals look like? How do they celebrate their culture? The project showcases the rich history and traditions of diasporic communities in California and educate the public about their history and culture. This project aims to empower the underrepresented diasporic communities by giving them visibility and an equitable space. We want to bring visibility and cultural fluency about these communities. In the first phase, we plan to showcase the Sikh, Afghan, Yemeni, Eritrean, and Ethiopian diaspora. We will be looking at these diasporas through the intersectional lens of gender, religion, race, and culture. We hope to include cultural and religious events, rituals, and festivals of selected communities and showcase it in a photo-exhibit and curate short video with voice-over from the student researchers. After the photo-exhibit, we plan to make it a traveling exhibit, taking it to schools, other libraries on campus and across the UC system. We plan to invite middle and high school students to this event as well.

Project Director: Harpreet Mangat

The Cultures and Communities Project is based at Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative and supported by Asian American Research Center, along with other campus units.