Seed Grant Sponsored Projects

Center for South Asia

The AARCS Seed Grant supports the Center for South Asia’s (CSA) multilayered initiative on South Asian American art and artists, particularly focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area. The initiative will include the production of a Working Paper entitled “Where is South Asia in Asian American Arts?” A concurrent focus will involve building local networks through the CSA’s collaboration with the South Asian Literature and Arts Festival (SALA). Part of the grant will be used to sponsor a panel on the same topic at SALA, to be hosted at Stanford on September 28-29, 2024.

Eujin Park, Assistant Professor of Education 

The AARCS Seed Grant supports Professor Park’s research in how Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) teacher candidates within a Bay Area-located teacher education program consider their racial identities as they prepare to become classroom teachers with social justice commitments. Under-examination and underrepresentation of AAPI experiences in education perpetuates AAPI invisibility in both teacher education and in classrooms and discussions of race and racism. Previous, though preliminary, research has suggested that teacher education programs may not sufficiently address AAPI teachers’ racial positionality when preparing them to teach with a social justice lens. Professor Park’s study will provide insight into how preparing for a profession with limited AAPI representation impacts AAPI candidates’ experiences in the program, how they are racialized, and how they are grappling with issues related to racial identity.

Hannah D'Apice, PhD candidate in Education

The AARCS Seed Grant supports Hannah’s research into how dominant narratives of a racialized ‘other’ may be either disrupted by or reconstituted through advocacy for and institutionalization of formal academic structures. She looks to Asian-American Studies as a less-examined case of how ‘racially triangulated’ knowledge might strategically secure resources and institutionalization in formal curricula. Her project will conduct a comparative case study of two Asian-American Studies programs — at UC Berkeley and Columbia University — using archival document analysis, over the time period of 1965–2015.

Jennifer Lee, PhD candidate in Modern Thought and Literature

The AARCS Seed Grant supports Jennifer’s research about early Korean-language American writings housed in LA archives. She hopes to understand the political, historical, literary, and cultural context of writing by early Korean migrants to the United States and how these texts might offer new ways of thinking about Korean American literary exchange and translation.

Lillian Wolfe, PhD candidate in Education

The AARCS Seed Grant supports Lillian’s research revolving around the central question: how are Asian American female transracial adoptees and their connections to their birth cultures affected by their adoptive parents’ cultural engagement styles? Due to the uprooting intrinsic to adoption, especially in transracial cases, adoptees may experience a greater sense of identity imbalance, or a dissonance between their personal identity versus their group identity, than other non-adoptive individuals of color. Studies show that post-adoption protective factors, such as positive ethnic socialization with parents and the community, can mitigate the difficulties of adoptees. Lillian’s project will shed more light on adoptive parents’ cultural engagement styles in the hopes that adoptive families and other support systems can better serve adoptees in understanding their identities.

Christine Xiong, PhD candidate in English

The AARCS Seed Grant supports Christine to do archival research at the National Archives at San Francisco and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa for her doctoral dissertation-in-progress. The first chapter of her dissertation examines the early 20th century transpacific passages of a group of Japanese, Korean, and Okinawan women now known as “picture brides.” Bridging Asian American literature with critical ocean studies, Christine's work broadly challenges the prevalent divide between studies of ethnic literature and studies of the environment. Surveying how the Pacific Ocean is figured and reshaped within a cluster of contemporary Asian and Asian American literature, she argues that minoritarian literary aesthetics of the ocean have both responded to and challenged the call to represent the environmentally and climatically unrepresentable. These oceanic forms yield alternative social imaginaries and visions for collective life in an age of climate precarity.

Alexandra Huynh, Undergraduate in American Studies

The AARCS Seed Grant supports Alexandra’s research about how Vietnamese experiences of refugeehood contributed to the Vietnamese American community’s relationship with the U.S. criminal legal system. She plans to weave together two chronologies as they relate to the development of Vietnamese American carcerality: 1) the incarceration of political prisoners in Vietnamese reeducation camps (Vietnam War era) and 2) the ongoing detention and deportation of Vietnamese immigrants in the United States. By incorporating archival research, legal history, critical refugee studies, and creative writing, she seeks to answer the question: How do we make sense of transnational histories of incarceration, and how do they inform the conceptions of punishment and personhood latent in the Vietnamese American community?

Kaelyn Wei-Min Ong, Undergraduate in Urban Studies

The AARCS Seed Grant supports Kaelyn’s research for her senior capstone project in Urban Studies. She aims to interview community development coordinators in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles to document and describe how their conceptions of Asian American identity affect how they approach community development work. At the end of the project, Kaelyn will write a paper on her findings and create a zine of collages to supplement those findings.