The Asian America Otherwise Conference served as the culmination to a year-long project to raise awareness of issues impacting Asian Americans and was funded by the Chancellor’s Call to Action to Address Racism and Social Injustice Research Program.

Professor Soo Ah Kwon, Asian American Studies, Professor Susan Koshy, Asian American Studies and Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and Professor Junaid Rana, Asian American Studies received almost $75,000 to co-organize a year-long public speaker series culminating in a symposium to address the problem of racism against Asian Americans. The year-long series was titled “In Plain Sight.”

The conference took place May 6 and May 7, 2022 and provided new frameworks and created goals for understanding Asian American racial injustice in America and in higher education.

“This conference takes stock of how Asian America is being imagined otherwise in the face of multi-layered political crises and an acute experience of vulnerability, precarity, and exposure exacerbated by the upsurge of anti-Asian violence during the pandemic,” according to the conference website.

The events and conference mobilized a range of testimony, dialogue, artistic expression, activism, and scholarship, to examine the distinctiveness of anti-Asian racism, to build cross-racial coalitions, and to expand knowledge of contemporary racial politics. The project was broadly constructed to include the range of Asian American communities that have been historically and currently racialized.

More information about the events and programs is available on the Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory website.