2026-2027 Seed Grant Sponsored Projects

Adela Wu, Clinical Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery

Palliative care focuses on comfort, coping, quality of life, and support for both patients and family caregivers. Timely palliative care is critical to managing symptoms, honoring patient goals, and assuring that treatments “first do no harm”. However, patients from Chinese and Chinese-American backgrounds are less aware of palliative care as a resource, less likely to use palliative care, and more likely to report poorer quality palliative care when received. Chinese patients with low acculturation also have limited knowledge of advance care planning.

Culture represents shared drives, values, and beliefs that characterize identity for group members. Cultural identity can color anything from a patient’s perception of serious illness and end-of-life care to their preferences for treatments. This project, supported by AARC at Stanford, involves co-designing a culturally-attuned palliative care program for and with Chinese patients and caregivers to solve a problem area identified in preliminary research conducted through individual interviews and focus groups.

Ban Wang, William Haas Professor in Chinese Studies. East Asian Languages and Cultures/Comparative Literature

A new generation of Asian American sci-fi writers has emerged in the age of rapid tech innovations, global markets, techno-capitalism, and technocracy. Departing from the ethno-racial narrative of identity and difference, Ted Chiang, Ken Liu, Alice Sola Kim, and others tackle trans-ethnic and global themes of climate change, social disintegration, environmental crisis, species extinction, and class inequality. The conventional sci-fi tropes--AI, robotics, cyborg, and genetic humanoids —are subject to critique as culprits behind the catastrophic Anthropocene present. This project will launch a workshop/seminar on Asian American science fiction and film. Deploying the perspective of critical dystopia that exposes dark scenes of oppression and violence while remaining committed to an utopian future. The workshop/seminar will critique the myth of technological progress through examining catastrophic narratives of dehumanization, exploitation of labor, social disintegration, racial inequality, techno-oligarchy, climate crisis, and dire posthuman conditions.

Kathryn Gin Lum, William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, Professor of Religious Studies

How do Americans treat their ancestors? That’s a question Hong Kong students posed to me upon learning that 19th-century Americans had denigrated Chinese ancestor practices as “superstition,” “idolatry,” and “heathenism.” China became a primary foil for Americans when it came to the ancestors. Flipping the mirror back on the U.S., this book project looks at how and why American culture has tended to treat the ancestors as distant forebears, longed-for relations, and/or nationalist heroes. With an AARCS seed grant, I will spend a month in Hong Kong and Guangdong to investigate changing ancestor traditions in the place of my own ancestry. My hope is to tell a story that denaturalizes the dominant American way of treating ancestors.

Roberta Wolfson, Lecturer in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric

Losing a loved one can be tragic for all people, regardless of their individual racial identity. But for mixed race people, who identify as belonging in two or more racial groups, mourning the loss of a beloved parent or grandparent is often experienced as not only tragic but also traumatic. This is because when mixed race people lose an ancestor who represents one of their racial communities, they can also suffer a perceived loss of access and belonging to said community, which can trigger an existential identity crisis. This phenomenon is the focus of Dr. Roberta Wolfson’s second scholarly book project, Mixed Race Mourning: Double Loss and the Search for Cultural Belonging in Multiracial Asian and Black American Literature, which argues that this double loss—first, the literal loss of one’s loved one and second, the symbolic loss of one’s claim to racial community—can be understood as a unique form of racial trauma for mixed race individuals characterized by a heightened desire to secure cultural belonging. The AARCS seed grant supports the early research and development of this manuscript, which uncovers how the unique racial trauma of double loss has been explored through a number of contemporary memoirs and novels authored by mixed race Asian and Black Americans. In surveying this recent literary movement, Mixed Race Mourning ultimately suggests that personal expression through art forms like writing might offer a pathway to healing from the racial trauma of doubly mourning for multiracial Asian and Black American individuals.

Scott Rozelle, Director of the Rural Education Action Program

Stanford’s Rural Education Action Program (REAP) has spent over two decades building one of the most detailed bodies of research on early childhood development (ECD), family dynamics, and parenting practices in rural China. This seed grant supports a targeted dissemination initiative to make this existing research expertise and data accessible and relevant to scholars and practitioners working with Asian American families, particularly Chinese American communities. We will: (1) translate key findings and contextual insights from REAP’s China ECD research for Asian American studies audiences; (2) present at key conferences to connect with scholars studying Asian American families; and (3) host a Stanford workshop bringing together local researchers and community practitioners. This project positions REAP’s decades of China-based ECD research as a foundational resource for understanding transnational family dynamics and informing culturally responsive services for Asian American communities.

Tairan Qiu, Assistant Professor of Education & Rita Kamani-Renedo, PhD Candidate in Education

In transnational research with Asian(American) and Asian diasporic communities in the U.S., one methodological shortcoming is that researchers often prioritize research questions, data generation, and data analysis in one nation-state, typically the U.S., which is the physical geography in which they interact with their transnational participants. This methodological unevenness imposes limits on the in-depth, multifaceted, dynamic, and relational nature of transnational ways of knowing and being for Asian diasporic communities. To challenge and (un)learn this U.S.-centered methodological unevenness, in this collaborative autoethnographic study, Tairan and Rita will collaborate with our graduate student co-researchers in a summer seminar focused on culturally situated and arts-based critical qualitative methodology at the Stanford Center at Peking University. This transnational methodological inquiry will provide insight into how transnational experiences for researchers might produce richer, more critical understandings of how data are culturally produced in their research processes.

Usha Iyer, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies

The Chinese-Trinidadian-Canadian filmmaker, Richard Fung, illustrates the particular complexities of double diasporic identity when he observes, “In Trinidad, I was Chinese. When I arrived in Toronto, Trinidadians did not recognize me as their own unless I opened my mouth. White Canadians, assuming that I came from Asia, commented on the baffling peculiarity of my accent. I felt a rupture develop in my identity between my look and my voice, my “race” and my “culture.””

The AARCS seed grant will support Dr. Iyer’s research on the Indo-Caribbean double diaspora in North America that constitutes a part of their book project, Jammin’: Black and Brown Media Intimacies between India and the Caribbean. Often referred to as “twice migrants” or members of a “double diaspora” that has experienced successive labor migrations across the 19th and 20th centuries, Indo-Caribbean communities scramble hyphenated identities that map on to “single diasporic” histories (e.g. Indian American, Chinese American etc.). Additionally, when we consider the Americas as a more expansive and connected geography, Asians in the Caribbean become a key and yet largely neglected diaspora for theorizing Asian Americanness. Through ethnographic engagement with creators and consumers of diasporic or post-indenture media, including local radio stations, digital networks, archives, and event management companies that organize concerts, film screenings, and religious and cultural celebrations, this research aims to parse the many iterations of racial and cultural identity that the Indo-Caribbean double diaspora in North America navigates through media.

Ally Heesu Kim, PhD Candidate in Genetics

CHIPAO (Communication Health Interactive for Parents of Adolescents and Others) is a community-based theatrical mental health intervention designed to reduce stigma and improve family communication in Asian American communities. Dr. Rona Hu first developed CHIPAO in direct response to two suicide clusters in the Palo Alto Unified School District (2009–2010 and 2014–2015), in which Asian American students were disproportionately represented—four of four completed suicides in 2015 were by Chinese American students. Recently, in February 2026, a transgender Asian American student died by suicide, marking a new and recent suicide cluster among the gender non-conforming and transgender Asian-American student population. Her death underscores the urgent and ongoing need for culturally tailored mental health interventions that address the intersecting vulnerabilities of Asian American and LGBTQ+ youth. Research shows that parental acceptance is the single strongest protective factor against suicide for transgender/gender non-conforming youths, reducing the odds of a past-year suicide attempt by 43% (Price & Green, 2023). Yet immigrant families—navigating cultural stigmas around gender, mental health, and sexuality—are often the least equipped to have these conversations, making community-based interventions like CHIPAO essential. CHIPAO uses interactive and lived experience-rooted theatrical vignettes performed by volunteer psychiatrists, trainees, and community members. These vignettes depict topics like conflicts over grades, parental responses to self-harm, queer identities, and intergenerational communication gaps. The AARCS Seed Grant will advance the development, dissemination, and scientific evaluation of new vignettes depicting lived experiences of the LGBTQ+ Asian American community to support diaspora families in conversing about these topics and to improve community understanding.

Ariel Chan, PhD Student in Sociology

My research asks how tech workers in structurally similar roles experience, adapt to, and make meaning of AI integration differently across the US and China. I conduct comparative ethnographic observations and in-depth interviews with tech workers in the U.S., specifically Silicon Valley, and China while drawing on digital ethnography of professional social network platforms. By centering the Chinese diaspora across both scales of analysis, my study investigates how the experiences of labor displacement and identity negotiation transcend national borders, specifically within the Silicon Valley-China tech corridor. This research addresses a critical gap in existing literature, highlighting that the future of work is not a singular path toward technological inevitability, but a geographically contingent phenomenon shaped by the interplay of policy, power, and cultural norms.

Joanne Chan, Masters Student in Education

The AARCS Seed Grant will support Joanne's ethnographic study on how Asian American survivors of gender-based domestic violence acquire, apply, and transmit knowledge about safety, rights, and assistance in the San Francisco Bay Area. Gender-based domestic violence is a form of violence directed against an individual based on their gender, gender identity, or perceived gender, which occurs within the home, family, or between intimate partners. Situated at the intersection of the learning sciences, educational equity, and public health, this project asks how survivors learn in community with other survivors and support networks, and what educational and institutional environments enable or obstruct that learning.

Lillian Wolfe, PhD Candidate in Education

The aim of my current project is to expand understanding of the transracial adoptive family by examining how the relationships between individuals contribute to the overall dynamic. The project is unique in that the focus is on adoptive parents, adoptees, and their siblings. The project builds upon my previous AARCS seed grant supported work that catalogued the lived experiences of adult female transracial adoptees. Through this research, the goal is to eventually create educational materials that improve transracial parenting styles.

Monisha Dhingra, PhD Candidate in Psychology

Legal complaints concerning caste discrimination are rising across American workplaces, universities, and community spaces, prompting legislative responses in cities such as Seattle and, more recently in Bay Area, California. At the same time, Indian American elites increasingly occupy central positions in the U.S. technology sector and political life, while remaining embedded in transnational economic and political networks spanning the United States and India. These networks channel influence across borders, structuring social and professional interactions, access to opportunities, and pathways to advancement. Yet there is virtually no experimental evidence on whether and how these identities shape social evaluation and gatekeeping in everyday social life and in key gateway institutions in the United States. With support from the AARCS Seed Grant, this project uses lab-in-the-field experiments in the Bay Area and a national online sample to map the social psychological mechanisms that are likely contributing towards the cultural reproduction of caste-based social networks in the United States.

Rapha Felipe, Masters Student in Civil and Environmental Engineering & June Choi, PhD Student in Earth System and Science

The AARCS Seed Grant supports Rapha Felipe and June Choi’s research that asks, “How do Filipino-American remittance flows shape patterns of post-disaster recovery in the Philippines?” The project focuses on padala, or family remittance culture, as a critical but under-quantified form of informal disaster support, especially in an era when the warming climate may be increasing the intensity of tropical cyclones. Because traditional disaster-impact models often emphasize asset losses, they can fail to acknowledge the unevenly distributed impacts of tropical cyclones in rural regions across the Philippines. This project aims to develop a comprehensive regional dataset connecting tropical cyclone exposure, government disaster spending, foreign aid, and remittance flows to post-disaster recovery and other socioeconomic outcomes. By mapping how public funds, foreign aid, and diasporic family support interact before and after disasters, the project aims to clarify how transnational Filipino-American social ties contribute to and are impacted by climate resilience.

Suchismito Khatua, PhD Candidate in Modern Thought and Literature

The name Ifti Nasim (1946–2011) is not widely recognized today. Some remember his activist work among queer South Asian diasporic communities in Chicago during the 1990s and early 2000s; others know him as the founder of Sangat, one of the first organizations in the United States for queer immigrant life. Among readers of Urdu and Punjabi poetry, some may recall Narman (1994), his incendiary collection that circulated widely in Pakistan and became an underground classic. Yet although Nasim wrote extensively, performed at universities, festivals, and conferences, and published prolifically, his poetry, including his last collections Myrmecophile (2000) and Abdoz (2005), both published in the United States, has received almost no sustained scholarly attention. This project offers a comprehensive study of Nasim’s poetry, tracing how his work across Urdu, Punjabi, and English unsettles familiar narratives of arrival, assimilation, and identity, and opens novel ways of apprehending queer diasporas, multilingualism, and translation.

Yao Xu, PhD Candidate in Sociology

Treating Asian Americans as a single homogeneous group in quantitative analysis could lead to harmful consequences such as reduced resources for disadvantaged individuals and increased negative stereotypes at the group level. Consequently, characterizing population heterogeneity is a fundamental task in the study of Asian Americans and in sociology more broadly. Accurate and reproducible characterizations of within-group variation help resist both the reification of Asian Americans as an imagined monolithic category and the reification of typologies of Asian Americans that may be statistical artifacts. In this project, I will: 1) evaluate how researchers currently characterize Asian American heterogeneity using computational methods; 2) propose a new framework for finding theoretically meaningful and reproducible typologies; and 3) demonstrate the effectiveness of this framework by testing it in a statistically rigorous manner.

Yi-Ting Chung, PhD Student in History

The AARCS Seed Grant supports archival travels for Yi-Ting’s dissertation that examines how migration from the Japanese empire to the United States reshaped the boundaries of race, nationality, and imperial belonging. In particular, it focuses on colonial migrants who were caught in between the conflicting classifications of the two empires: classified as Chinese under U.S. exclusion law yet governed as Japanese colonial subjects. The primary focus of the project is thereby a small but revealing group of migrants from colonial Taiwan, the majority of whom classified as Japanese nationals of Chinese ancestry. It likewise examines other migrants from the Japanese empire who were similarly embroiled in the mechanisms of “Chinese exclusion,” including Korean migrants naturalized as Chinese citizens.

Yue Ma, PhD Student in Education

My prior research documented substantial variation in home language environments and a high prevalence of language delays across low-resource Chinese communities. Building on this foundation, this project analyzes existing day-long recording data (Language ENvironment Analysis, LENA) from multiple studies in rural and peri-urban China to: (1) validate LENA's automated metrics for the Chinese language against human annotation results; (2) generate cross-cultural comparisons with published Western LENA data; and (3) explore correlations between LENA metrics and child language development outcomes. Seed grant funds will support a student research assistant and open-access publication fees.

Alex Nguyen, Undergraduate in Computer Science and Asian American Studies

This project asks how computational methods can be used to visualize and analyze archival data in understanding legal violence enacted against Asian Americans in the 20th century. Using the Harvard Case Law Access Project, a publicly available corpus of digitized court decisions through the United States, this project serves as a digital visualization that maps federal and state-level case laws across the nation and their spatial relationships via legal citations. Ultimately, this project seeks to understand not only the histories of anti-Asian American violence in the early 20th century, but the ways by which we can visualize the connections between archival sources by engaging with the fields of digital history, data visualization, and information retrieval.