Faculty Awardees
Srijani Ghosh, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, “Sustaining Bengali Cultural Traditions in the United States: An Oral History Project”
The US Census Bureau estimated in 2023 that there were over 453,000 Bengali-speaking individuals in the United States, a community shaped by a complex history of immigration starting in the mid-1880s. This journey began with merchant immigrants, followed by sailors seeking better opportunities, and later included skilled professionals after the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act and during the 1990s Indian IT boom. This project focuses on Indian Bengali Americans and the lack of present-day personal narratives that demonstrate the challenges of sustaining Bengali cultural traditions in the diaspora—despite the ostensibly hyperconnected world made possible by the internet. To address this gap, the project aims to collaborate with Bay Area Bengali organizations and the North American Bengali Conference to conduct semi-structured interviews with Bengali American community members and collect oral narratives that highlight the challenges and triumphs of sustaining Bengali cultural practices in the United States. Key objectives include amplifying community voices, documenting cultural practices, and exploring identity negotiation in a multicultural context. The anticipated outcome is a dedicated website showcasing these oral histories, promoting accessibility and understanding of individual Bengali American experiences across generations. Ultimately, this initiative seeks to enrich the understanding of cultural heritage's role in identity formation within Asian American communities. (Funding provided by AAPI Data Project.)
Vernadette Gonzalez, Ethnic Studies, “Growing Dragon Fruit - Oral Histories of Trans and Gender Nonconforming Members in Lavender Phoenix”
This project explores the past and present experiences of the trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) members of Lavender Phoenix, a trans and queer grassroots Islander San Francisco Bay Area organization focused on political issues affecting the Asian American and Pacific Islander trans and queer community. “Growing Dragon Fruit” is an extension of the Lavender Phoenix Dragon Fruit Project. Currently, more than 60 oral histories from the project are archived in the UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library. The “Growing Dragon Fruit” project will add 10-20 additional oral histories, focusing on TGNC members of the Lavender Phoenix organization. This focus on TGNC members also marks a significant leftward political shift in the organization’s orientation. “Growing Dragon Fruit” thus not only broadens the existing archive of this community, but also documents the stories of the Lavender Phoenix’s membership as they grappled with political goals beyond marriage equality. The project is a collaboration between Vernadette Gonzalez, a faculty member in the Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies program; Sine Hwang Jensen, a librarian in the Ethnic Studies Library; and members of Lavender Phoenix.
Abigail De Kosnik, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, “AAPI Films and Television Series, 2019-2024: An Analysis of Quality and Quantity of Diversity”
In this project, we will apply the diversity scoring methods developed by my research lab (the Media Education Research Lab, or MERL) to 12 Asian American/Pacific Islander-led media texts (films and television series) released between 2019 and 2024 (including: Everything Everywhere All at Once, Minari, Fresh Off the Boat, Never Have I Ever, Beef, Past Lives, Joy Ride, Avatar: The Last Airbender, The 3 Body Problem, Turning Red). We will analyze the quantity of AAPI representation in the main cast of each text, evaluate whether the characterizations of AAPI people reinforce or diverge from historical stereotypes and biases, and research audience reception of these texts to identify whether depictions of AAPI people or cultures incited debate, controversy, or garnered praise. We will also interview 6-8 academic scholars whose work focuses on AAPI in media and AAPI Hollywood workers (i.e., producers, screenwriters, actors) to comment on the evolution of AAPI representation in the film and TV industries. Based on our data and interviews, we will create curricular materials intended for use in undergraduate classrooms about AAPI media texts, including video lectures, discussion questions and worksheets. We will also detail our data and findings in a 15-20-page report, intended for a general audience rather than specifically for scholars, which we will publish on our lab’s website. (Funding provided by AAPI Data Project.)
SanSan Kwan, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, “Two Doors Remount and Curated Program”
I will premiere my new dance, Two Doors, at the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at UC Davis October 18-20, 2024. Two Doors is inspired by an incident in New York City in 2021 in which doormen closed their doors after seeing an attack on an Asian woman outside their lobby. When we witness a violent act, a pain is felt in the body. Through a choreographic study of the aftermath of violence, Two Doors explores the viscerality of anti-Asian racism and the sovereignty that we wrest for ourselves in response.
AARC funding will support the presentation of Two Doors in the Bay Area in spring 2025. I will be a featured artist in the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center’s annual United States of Asian American Festival. The ability to re-present Two Doors in San Francisco, after three shows in Davis, will allow me to develop the work and to share it with a wider diversity of communities. Included on the program with Two Doors will be shorter pieces choreographed by the cast of Two Doors. I am excited to curate a collective program demonstrating the creative power of Asian American femme artists.
Clancy Wilmott, Geography, “A Geospatial Sea of Islands: Exploding Oceania Geospatial Data for Pacific Islander Spatial Analysis”
A Geospatial Sea of Islands proposes to build an interactive island-level spatial database of the Pacific Islands for use by researchers, community groups and data scientists in their data analysis. Pacific Islands spatial data is beleaguered by ongoing issues with incongruent administrative levels and diverse and incompatible modes of spatial classification, resulting in an uneven data landscape which makes geospatial analysis of Pacific Island communities and environments labor-intensive and technically complex. Furthermore, the current arrangements of geospatial data are undergirded by political affiliations (countries, states, territories), which sits at odds with the way in which many Pasifika communities imagine their realities.
As such, this project proposes to undertake preliminary data research to redefine Pacific Islands spatial data at the level of the island by exploding the ~1700 island polygons in Oceania, and building an interactive Web App (either through Python Dash or R Shiny) for download of island shapefiles in a range of data formats (geojson, shapefile, csv) in user-defined data groupings. It forms the basis for a larger participatory mapping data project to a) undertake a full-scale survey of Pacific Islander toponymies and b) determine data structures which allow greater flexibility for geospatial analysis of Pacific communities both in and beyond the US. (Funding provided by AAPI Data Project.)
Student Awardees
Tak-Huen Chau, graduate student, Political Science, “Linguistic Leverage”
Do anti-bilingual education policies facilitate minority assimilation on dominant group language? This project argues it can backfire. That is, not only are these policies normatively undesirable, they can actually lead to lower levels of linguistic assimilation. I develop a formal model to examine linguistic assimilation, focusing on minorities' decisions regarding effort spent on acquiring the dominant language (e.g., English), their mother tongue (e.g., Cantonese), and other dominant group traits. Minorities also decide on interactions, preferring to communicate effectively with others, but language acquisition costs vary by policy and individual.
The model predicts that as the proportion of younger minority population grows, restrictions on bilingual education can reduce minority linguistic assimilation. Since proficiency in the minority language remains essential for communicating with older generations, individuals may reduce interactions with the dominant group in favor of maintaining their mother tongue. This can result in group-based communities and decreased assimilation on other dimensions. This may explain observations from California. In 1998, voters passed Prop 227, raising the cost of minority language education. However, the same electorate, including many non-Hispanic whites, repealed this measure in 2016.
I plan to recruit both White non-Hispanic and Asian American respondents for descriptive data on attitudes and experience with bilingualism, as well as to test how perceptions of demographic shifts affect both attitudes on bilingual education and assimilation. (Funding provided by AAPI Data Project.)
Cheng-Chai Chiang, graduate student, English, “The Theatre and its Dubber: Accenting Asian America”
My research project seeks to theorize the phenomenon of “theatrical dubbing” in recent Asian American dramatic productions, in which multilingual diasporic speech is represented through dramatic experiments with accents, often in consultation with community members. In reckoning with accents as a fraught index of Asian American and Asian diasporic identity, these theatre practitioners intervene in stereotypical representations of immigrant speech that conflate “accented” speech with linguistic deficiency even as they retool this racist legacy through experiments with accents’ dialectical volatility to imagine alternative linguistic kinships. Although accent is often seen as a “phonological index of identity,” recent scholarship in interdisciplinary accent studies emphasizes that the perception of accents as indexing identitarian difference is a relational affair, which depends as much on the “coloring ear” of listeners whose assumptions of what constitutes accentual difference have been conditioned by language ideologies acquired through situated histories of speaking and listening. Actors deploy the reality effect of accents in indexing their characters’ identity in social space (as perceived by an audience) even as they reveal assumed accents to be the function of an actor’s training and radically susceptible to manipulation. My project will undertake archival and ethnographic research to consider how this dual aspect of accents—as socially constructed by an actor’s training while also materially limited by the actor’s embodied linguistic history—has become an important aesthetic resource in recent Asian American theatre that figures accents as ethnolinguistic passports and roadblocks in dramatizing the long history of exclusionary laws that has shaped Asian diasporic migration to the US
Jishan Jiang, undergraduate student, Legal Studies and Data Science, “California Community College and Asian EL Students' Self-Perceptions of Success: A Comparative Study of Asian American English Learners and International Asian Students”
Asian American English Learners (ELs) and international Asian students, though distinct, share educational struggles, with their needs often overlooked in policy support and their voices unheard. This study investigates the self-perceptions of both groups in Northern California community colleges, focusing on how academic confidence, cultural identity, and social integration influence their transfer experience to four-year institutions. Through a mixed-methods approach—integrating statewide data, surveys, and interviews—this study explores how these students balance concrete preparations with their self-perceptions of transfer readiness, examining how issues like “imposter syndrome"influence their success.
The study also examines how policies like AB 705 and Proposition 58, aimed at improving equitable transfer placement and support for ELs, impact students’ educational trajectories. Logistic regression on statewide data will quantify policy influence, while qualitative interviews will offer a more intimate understanding of their experiences. This study hypothesizes that both Asian American ELs and international students see community colleges as “stepping stones” to higher education, but face distinct challenges. Asian American ELs may struggle with financial and cultural pressures, and international students face visa issues and adapting to a new system. Policies like AB 705 likely benefit Asian Americans more directly, while international students may encounter gaps in tailored support as non-residents, impacting their transfer readiness.
Ultimately, this research aims to raise awareness of the gaps in institutional support, with the goal to inform stakeholders and encourage more equitable practices, ensuring that all students, regardless of language or background, have equitable access to higher education and the opportunities it provides. (Funding provided by AAPI Data Project.)
David Lau, graduate student, Rhetoric, “In the Beginning, and In the End”
My dissertation thinks through the, still systematically undertheorized, intersections between Asian American diasporic studies, psychoanalysis, law and literature, and critical race theory. I use the conceptual and disciplinary tools from these fields for my dissertation research as it relates to Asian diasporic imaginations and cultural expression. My dissertation falls along three main lines of investigation around explorations of the Asian (American) diaspora. These three investigations aim not at providing a definitive, and conclusive, statement regarding Asian diasporic subjectivities, but rather function as interventions aimed at illuminating frames of reference for imagining and thinking through the often-vexed processes of Asian diasporic subjectification. These three theoretical scenes function as gestures towards a more capacious understanding of the state of Asian diasporic subjectivity and life. The dissertation investigates these questions through a, broadly, 1) aesthetic investigation, 2) psychoanalytic investigation, and 3) legal investigation of the Asian American diasporic state. My dissertation represents an urgent intervention, another tentative imagining, that exposes, perhaps just slightly, a gap that might lead not towards further breakdown, but towards an always emerging state of play: a diasporic state and gap that plays in the spaces between our lived reality and those that we can only imagine.
Jessica Law, graduate student, Sociology, “Knowing Race, Achieving Racial Equity”
My dissertation project examines one of the prevailing frameworks for understanding and addressing racial injustice: diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). “Racial equity” and DEI are now ubiquitous. Corporations, universities, governments, and non-profit organizations have offices or employees dedicated to assessing and implementing organizational practices to achieve diversity and inclusion. Previously, the framework of color-blindness, which minimizes the role of race in favor of other explanations for racism like individualism or meritocracy, has dominated American politics. However, due to popular protest, color-blindness has become increasingly untenable and “racial equity” has acquired legitimacy as a way of responding to the intractability of inequality. As a dominant methodology for understanding and addressing racial disparities, DEI is not only a political program but also a form of racial knowledge, one that offers its own set of definitions of “race” and “identity.” Given the institutionalization of “racial equity” and the growing backlash against it, it is important to interrogate its internal logic. How has this logic shaped how social issues are now posed and solved? How have governments and constituencies taken up or rejected the DEI framework? The answers to these questions may give us insight into the state of racial politics and how community leaders, alongside technocrats, shape our political discourse and understanding of inequality. I hope to examine how the San Francisco Office of Racial Equity, city agencies, and community groups understand the central concepts within “racial equity,” how they seek to “know” the problem of inequity, and how that knowledge shapes policymaking.
Lisa Ng, graduate student, Ethnic Studies, “Urban Beautification as Care: Community Safety in Oakland’s Chinatown and East Lake”
Urban Beautification as Care: Community Safety in Oakland’s Chinatown and East Lake is a contemporary study of how urban beautification projects serve as opportunities for mutual aid and community care in response to government divestment of social services. Furthermore, it examines the role of community-led urban beautification projects in constructing notions of belonging and community safety in Asian (American) communities in Oakland. Using ethnographic methods such as participant observation, semi-structured, interviews, and archival research, I examine how the Asian (American) communities of Chinatown and East Lake construct notions of belonging and communal safety through the rituals of cleaning, removing trash, and maintaining the urban environments in which they live, work, and play. This research question is driven by these questions: What is a safe(r) community? How do community members understand the structures, maintenance, and (barriers to) participation of safe(r) communities? Why do community members voluntarily participate in urban beautification projects that involve ‘dirty’ activities such as street cleaning? How does the willingness to engage in these activities on a grassroots level build relationships that gesture towards alternative futures of racialized urban communities beyond one defined by financial divestment and municipal neglect? (Funding provided by AAPI Data Project and AARC general funds.)
Deborah Qu, graduate student, Psychology, “Bicultural Frame-Switching among Chinese Americans: Regulating Expressive Suppression”
Globalization has increased daily interactions between monoculturals, biculturals, and multiculturals. This can create miscommunication, as cultures differ widely in how they value emotional responding, which is a key part of communication. For instance, East Asian cultures emphasize group harmony and encourage suppression of outward emotion, while Western cultures promote autonomy and authentic self-expression (John & Gross, 2004). Bicultural individuals, like Asian Americans (AAs), likely navigate these contrasting norms by frame switching—shifting between cultural perspectives and behaviors in response to environmental cues (Huynh et al., 2018). Despite over 20 million bicultural Asian Americans in the U.S. (U.S. Census, 2020), they have been largely neglected in psychological research, and frame-switching has not been studied in the context of emotion regulation or expressive suppression.
The current research aims to address this gap by investigating whether bicultural Chinese Americans modify their suppression of emotions like excitement or frustration in response to Chinese versus American cultural cues. In Study 1, 150 Chinese Americans and 150 European Americans (controls) will be primed with either Chinese or American symbols, and their suppression in common interpersonal situations will be assessed. Study 2 (a & b) will extend this by using a more ecologically valid priming and emotion-eliciting design with 450 participants. This research deepens our understanding of how AAs navigate conflicting emotional norms through frame switching, offering new insights into flexible emotion regulation strategies. Future research will explore the implications for cross-cultural communication and mental health interventions to promote authenticity and belonging among Asian American populations. (Funding provided by AAPI Data Project.)
Crystal Song, graduate student, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, “Restaging the Model Minority in Asian American Dancesport”
While Asian Americans remain peripheral to the U.S. imaginary of ballroom dancing, their growing presence on the dance floor itself—a space where hegemonic relations have long been reproduced as well as disrupted—contests this marginal status. Indeed, when this group achieved mainstream awareness after the tragic mass shooting at a majority-Chinese dance studio in Monterey Park, California, one local instructor told the New York Times, “In this country, it would be the Asian American communities that have kept ballroom dancing alive” (Hubler et al., 2023). My dissertation brings sustained ethnographic focus to one such community—the Asian American dancesport scene in New York City—whose members are not only active, if unstudied members of an industry that remains predominantly white, but ones who unsettle ballroom’s racially charged hierarchies of skill, prestige, and belonging. I examine how the model minority—which I treat not only as a racist trope but also, in erin Khuê Ninh’s phrase, a “framework for personhood” (2021, 5)—is both reproduced and reorganized in dancesport. As an Asian American ballroom dancer and scholar-practitioner, I consider how the industry’s aesthetic and pedagogical sensibilities reinforce conditions of racialized non-belonging, amplifying the sense of “perpetual nearfailure” Mimi Khúc defines as endemic to model minority life (2023, 71). My dissertation also attends to the vital forms of solidarity and critique dancers enact through collaborative movement, ultimately advancing embodied performance and relation as strategies for surviving and remaking white supremacist spaces.
Clara Voong, graduate student, Public Health, “Ethnic Enclaves and Gestational Diabetes Mellitus Risk Among Asian Americans and Subpopulations: A Population-Based Study”
Gestational diabetes mellitus (GDM), hyperglycemia first diagnosed during pregnancy, significantly impacts maternal and child morbidity and mortality. In the US, the prevalence of GDM increased from 6% to 7.8% from 2016 to 2020, with Asian Americans experiencing the highest rates (14.9%), which is more than double that of non-Hispanic Whites (7%). The risk of GDM is heterogeneous across Asian American subpopulations with the highest prevalence among Indians (16.7%) and lowest in Japanese (9.3%). Despite these disparities, the social determinants of health (SDOH) contributing to racial and ethnic differences for GDM risk among Asian Americans and subpopulations remain unclear. Moreover, Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial group in the US but are largely underrepresented in research, calling for more focused studies on this population. Ethnic enclaves, defined as neighborhoods predominantly populated by individuals of the same ethnic group, reflect various social influences on health outcomes. This study aims to examine the association between ethnic enclaves and GDM risk among Asian American individuals, compared to other racial and ethnic groups, and across Asian American subpopulations, using a large-scale population-based cohort of ~450,000 pregnant individuals at Kaiser Permanente Northern California from 2011 to 2022 in the Gestational Diabetes in Asians study. Multivariable modified Poisson regression models will be used among all and by race and ethnicity. Findings from this study may provide insights to how ethnic enclaves contribute to GDM risk and inform culturally tailored interventions addressing SDOH to reduce health disparities among Asian Americans and other high-risk groups. (Funding provided by AAPI Data Project.)
Derek Wu, graduate student, Ethnic Studies, “Globalizing Asian American and Black Community Activism in East Oakland”
For the past two years I have been spending time with two partnered groups: a Black Pentecostal church that has served Black communities in East Oakland since the 1940s, and a multiracial evangelical church that was organized next door to the Black Pentecostal church as a result of housing activism in the early 2000s. These two churches have enlisted my support as an action researcher and ethnographer to bolster engagement between the two communities through food distribution and urban beautification projects in the neighborhood. Against urban ethnography’s reputation as a hyperlocal practice, I intend to investigate the transnational dimensions of community activism in East Oakland. While the Black Christians in this study have deep roots in East Oakland, a significant portion of congregants at the multiracial church (including its pastor) are second generation Taiwanese immigrants who grew up in neighboring ethnoburbs. Using AARC funding, I will conduct oral histories in California and Taiwan to investigate how Taiwanese immigrant families are shaping and being shaped by the East Oakland context that the second generation has committed itself to.
Chun-Chi Yang, graduate student, School of Education, “The Interplay of Stress, Digital Media Use, and Confucianism in Chinese American Adolescent Mental Health Problems”
This study aims to investigate the associations between various stressors and mental health among Chinese American adolescents (CAAs), focusing on how cultural influences and digital media use (DMU) interact with stress. CAAs face unique stressors, including academic pressure rooted in Confucian values that prioritize educational achievement, acculturative stress from navigating interdependent and independent cultural expectations, and increased racial discrimination, particularly following the rise in antiAsian hate crimes. Adolescence is marked by heightened vulnerability to stress, which is linked to increased mental health problems and problematic DMU. Although prior research has examined the general relationship between stress and DMU, gaps remain in understanding how different types of stressors—academic, life-related, and perceived—specifically affect CAAs' mental health and DMU behaviors.
The study utilizes Wave 1 data from the ongoing “Chinese American Adolescent Stress and Sleep Project,” involving 150 first- and second-generation Chinese American rising high school seniors recruited over two years. Surveys assess various stress types, cultural identity, DMU (active and passive), sleep, and internalizing symptoms. Regression and dominance analyses will identify the most influential stressors on mental health outcomes, while network analysis will elucidate the mechanisms behind these associations. The study will also explore differential effects of stress on passive versus active DMU. Findings will contribute to a deeper understanding of stress and well-being among CAAs, informing intervention programs aimed at mitigating stress and enhancing resilience in this population, particularly during the post-pandemic era. (Funding provided by AAPI Data Project.)
