AARCS Announces 2025-2026 Seed Grant Recipients: 12 New Projects Advancing Asian American and Diaspora Scholarship at Stanford
Published on May 13, 2025.
The Asian American Research Center at Stanford (AARCS) is excited to announce the recipients of our 2025-2026 Seed Grants. This year, we are proud to support twelve new research projects that advance the study of Asian American and Asian diasporic communities. Seven projects are led by Stanford faculty and five are led by graduate students.
These Seed Grants are central to our mission to promote interdisciplinary research, cultivate an intellectual community, and raise the visibility of Asian American studies across Stanford’s seven schools. With the support of our donors, we continue to expand the possibilities for accessible and innovative research in the growing field of Asian American studies.
The 2025 cohort showcases a breadth of research that explores migration, geography, war, labor, language, identity, politics, and more. These projects draw from diverse disciplines and methods, including art and art history, archaeology, literature, political science, and medicine to name a few. Together, they highlight the richness and complexity of Asian American and diaspora scholarship and demonstrate how interdisciplinary approaches can deepen our understanding of these communities and issues across various fields.
A few projects from this year’s recipients include:
- A GIS-based archive documenting photographs, testimonies, and heritage stories of the Dalit diaspora in the Bay Area by Aatika Singh, PhD candidate in Art & Art History.
- A study on how college counselors and admissions officers interpret and communicate Asian American experiences in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard by Dr. anthony losing antonio, Associate Professor of Education, and Dr. Sonia X. Giebel, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Social Science Center Berlin.
- The first Chinese-language digital media literacy intervention designed to help Chinese American communities resist misinformation and disinformation by the Stanford Social Media Lab including Jeffrey Hancock, Professor of Communication, and Angela Yuson Lee, PhD candidate in Communication.
- Research on education inside the Minidoka incarceration camp during World War II and how schooling shaped racialized futures for Japanese American youth by Abigail Kahn, PhD candidate in Education.
We believe that investing in early-stage and ongoing Asian American research opens new pathways for the field and contributes to improving Asian American communities and lives. Projects from our inaugural 2024 cohort have already led to public events, creative works, and academic presentations. We are excited to see how this new cohort will build on that momentum and continue shaping the future of Asian American and diaspora scholarship at Stanford and beyond.
The full list of 2025 Seed Grant recipients and project descriptions is now available on our website. We are honored to support these researchers and look forward to sharing their work in the coming year. We had many more applications for funding than we, with a limited budget, could grant. We wish we could have replied positively to all our applicants, but we could not. Our decisions were difficult, but the robust and diverse research taking place on campus was inspiring. We look forward to a new round of grants next year.
Thank you to our donors and supporters for making this possible, and to our new Seed Grant recipients: Congratulations!