2025-2026 Seed Grant Sponsored Projects

anthony lising antonio, Professor of Education & Sonia X. Giebel, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Social Science Center Berlin

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (SFFA) ushered in a sea change in selective college admissions, banning race-conscious admissions but allowing letters of recommendation and essays that describe “how race affects a student's life.” This opening places Asian American applicants and those that advise them in a Catch-22: Should they or should they not attend to how their race has affected their lives? In disclosing their identity, do they fear being discriminated against, despite the absence of race-based affirmative action? Do they forego their one opportunity to communicate important racialized experiences valued by universities? And if they do describe the effects of race in their lives, how should they communicate these experiences? The AARCS Seed Grant supports a new study of how college counselors directly and indirectly communicate Asian American racialized experiences in the post SFFA era, as well as how admissions officers identify and interpret these experiences. While college counselors are tasked with helping to communicate applicants’ experiences of race, admissions officers are tasked with interpreting it. And in so doing, both parties construct the very meaning of Asian American identity – with the educational fates of Asian American applicants hanging in the balance.

Barbara L. Voss, Professor of Anthropology & Claudia Engel, Academic Technology Specialist

The AARCS Seed Grant supports Professor Voss and Dr. Engel in developing new digital media approaches for Chinese diaspora archaeology. Archaeological evidence is a critical source about the daily lives of nineteenth century Chinese migrants, documenting their contributions to United States culture and history and serving as a tangible record of community survival in the face of anti-Chinese racism. Through focus groups and interviews with migrants’ descendants and members of community organizations, this study will produce a “core priorities and best practices” white paper to guide the production of new digital media that effectively communicates Chinese diaspora archaeology to AAPI stakeholders and to the general public. Following principles of community-based participatory research, this study is being conducted in full partnership with Chinese Historical and Cultural Project and History San José.

Jeffrey Hancock, Professor of Communication & Angela Yuson Lee, PhD candidate in Communication

The AARCS Seed Grant supports this project in developing and rigorously evaluating the first Chinese-language digital media literacy intervention designed to support members of the Chinese American diaspora in building resilience to multilingual misinformation and disinformation. In this project, their team will build on our existing partnerships with MediaWise and local non-profit organizations serving the Chinese American diaspora to design and test a brief, scalable, online course focusing on learning to identify credible news and fact-check dubious claims. First, they will conduct in-depth interviews with Chinese journalists, educators, content creators, and organizers to co-develop and refine a Chinese-language digital media literacy intervention. Next, they will use a randomized controlled trial to test the impact of this intervention on participants’ 1) knowledge of digital media literacy skills, 2) ability to discern true from false claims online, and 3) knowledge of political and civic events. This study will be the first of its kind to develop scalable tools designed to support members of the Chinese American diaspora in building their resilience against misinformation and disinformation, to improve our collective community’s ability to make informed decisions in a rapidly changing digital world.

Jison Hong, Professor of Medicine- Immunology & Rheumatology

Idiopathic granulomatous mastitis (IGM) is a rare, debilitating inflammatory breast disease that primarily affects women of reproductive age, especially those from underserved and immigrant communities, including East Asian, Hispanic, and Arabic populations. Despite its significant morbidity and potential for misdiagnosis as breast cancer, IGM remains poorly understood, with no standardized treatment guidelines and limited patient education resources. In the U.S., Hispanic women are disproportionately affected, with a 12-fold higher prevalence. Delays in diagnosis and unnecessary surgical interventions often lead to disfigurement. This project proposes a systematic review of current non-surgical treatment options—including corticosteroids, immunosuppressants, antibiotics, and biologics—evaluating their efficacy, safety, and outcomes, particularly in studies involving Asian and Asian American patients. The goal is to inform evidence-based, equitable care for a disease that disproportionately impacts marginalized populations. Stanford Medicine is uniquely positioned to address this unmet need. Dr. Mark Genovese, Professor in the Division of Immunology & Rheumatology at Stanford, was the first to publish successfully treating IGM with methotrexate.

Marci Kwon, Professor of Art & Art History, Co-Director of the Asian American Art Initiative

The AARCS seed grant will support the first phase of the Asian American Art Initiative's (AAAI's) partnership with the Chinese Cultural Center (CCC) in San Francisco Chinatown.  The grant will support archival work into the history of the CCC.  Established in 1965, CCC was born from the civil rights movement with a clear mission: to challenge narrow perceptions of Chinese culture and create a space for the voices of marginalized communities. Over the years, the organization has grown into an innovative art center with a 500+ artist network, reaching over 300,000 people annually.

L. Maria Bo, Professor of English

The AARCS Seed Grant supports the completion of Maria’s scholarly monograph, Writing on Water: How Literary Translation Turned the Tide of the Cold War. This book tells the little-known story of how both the U.S. and Chinese governments weaponized literature through translating it for propaganda purposes during the 1950s to 1980s, with unintended consequences for Chinese diasporic aesthetics. Rather than measure translation’s effectiveness as a weapon for one or the other side, Writing on Water examines how translating literature became an opening for unexpected points of cultural contention and conversation – despite and at times because of – its deliberate politicization.

Roland Hsu, Former Director of Research, CRRW

The AARCS Seed Grant supports the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project by funding website maintenance and upgrades to improve community outreach, usability, and overall impact. The Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford, accessible through its website, formulated, supported, and published the most comprehensive and highest impact research findings on the social, economic, anthropological, and cultural history, and contemporary literary, musical, and artistic response to the legacy of the Chinese laborers who built the Transcontinental Railroad from Sacramento, CA., to Promontory Summit, UT. The CRRW engages multiple scholarly disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. The content on the CRRW website provides new findings, as well as corrects pre-existing commonplace assumptions about the historical record.

Aatika Singh, PhD candidate in Art & Art History

The AARCS Seed Grant will support Aatika in building a GIS project with photographs, testimonies and heritage stories of the Dalit diaspora community in the Bay Area. As a first-of-its-kind engagement, this interdisciplinary project will bring together the fields of critical caste studies, visual arts, Dalit diaspora scholarship, and digital humanities. The Dalit community has remained relatively obscured in the scholarship on South Asian American diasporas. Aatika's vision for the project is to create a collaborative resource jointly helmed by the Bay Area anti-caste community as well as Stanford. The interactive digital platform will serve as an educational archive and a pedagogical tool at the intersection of arts and justice. Aatika's aim is to propel innovative research and community engagement by advancing Stanford as a center of scholarship on caste, the Dalit diaspora, and South Asia knowledge production.

Abigail Jean Kahn, PhD candidate in Education

The AARCS Seed Grant supports Abigail’s research into the education of Japanese Americans incarcerated at the Minidoka Concentration Camp during World War II. Her project examines how schooling in camp functioned as a tool to shape visions of acceptable futures for incarcerated youth, thereby contributing to broader efforts to racialize Japanese Americans and construct historical racial narratives. The grant will support archival research at University of Washington and the National Archives in Washington D.C.

Delaney Chieyen Holton, PhD candidate in Art & Art History

The AARCS Seed Grant will support research travel for Del’s dissertation in progress, "Delta Afterlives." Their dissertation is the first sustained study of Asian diaspora artists in the American South, focusing on artists working in the Mississippi Delta from the mid-20th century to the present. It explores how diasporic practices reshape southern cultural narratives while responding to regional histories of displacement, racial violence, and economic precarity.

Hye Jee Kim, PhD candidate in Sociology & Brian Wu, PhD candidate in Political Science

The AARCS Seed Grant supports Hye Jee Kim and Brian Wu’s research on the consequences of various forms of status threats on Asian identity. Folks disagree about the relative position of Asian individuals in the ethnoracial landscape of the United States. As a result of this ambiguity, Asian individuals are simultaneously framed in public discourse as being the victims of racism or the perpetrators of racism, as seen in debates about affirmative action. The consequences of these framings for ethnoracial identification are not well understood. In a series of survey experiments, we examine how priming self-identified Asian respondents to see Asian individuals as perpetrators or victims of racial discrimination influences their identification with various ethnoracial identity labels (e.g., Asian, American, People of Color) and understandings of ethnoracial boundaries in the United States. Our findings will advance theory about how ambiguous positioning in status hierarchies influences social identities, and especially in status hierarchies where occupying a powerful position is often morally suspect. They can also help us understand the conditions that facilitate or hinder solidarity building.

Jocelyn lee, PhD candidate in Archeology

The AARCS Seed Grant supports Jocelyn research to understanding how Chinese migrants moved across rural Oregonian landscape in the 19th and early 20th century. In addition, she is working with contemporary Chinese American communities in Oregon to understand their relationship to these remote historical places. Jocelyn’s work hopes to bridge the connection between contemporary Chinese American communities primarily residing in urban areas with the histories and archaeologies in the vast rural landscape of Oregon.