FALL 2005

OCTOBER

Augusto Espiritu. Wenesday, October 5, 12:00 p.m., AAS/AACC Conference Room. "A 'Chino' Visits Boricua: Intersections of Asian American and Latino Studies." Co-sponsored with Latina/o Studies.

Vicente Diaz

• Tuesday, October 18, 4:30 p.m., GSLIS 126. Prof. Diaz will be presenting "Imua! Tamuning Eagles: Football, Masculinity and the Making of a New 'Multicultural Local' in the American Pacific," a film-in-progress that follows the making of new forms of gendered identities through indigenous appropriation of football in a heavily militarized and colonized setting. Reception to follow. Co-Sponsored with the Migration Studies Group.

• Wednesday, October 19, 10:00 a.m., AAS/AACC Conference Room. Prof. Diaz will offer "Moving Islands of Sovereignty," a multimedia presentation on traditional Pacific Island voyaging praxis as indigenous aesthetic and political critique of imperialist and nationalist discourse. Discussion and workshop to follow.

NOVEMBER

Wednesday, Nov. 2nd, 9:00 a.m.- 5:00 p.m., AAS/AACC Conference Room. Tenure and Promotion Workshop.

Thursday, Nov. 3rd, 3:00 p.m., AAS/AACC Conference Room. Yutian Wong, Assistant Professor of Dance and Asian American Studies. "It's So Moving': Studying Miss Saigon in the 21st Century." Co-sponsored with the Performance Studies Group.

Tuesday, Nov. 8th, 12:00 p.m., AAS/AACC conference room. Fiona Ngo, Postdoctoral Fellow of Asian American Studies. "Erotic Doubles: Wallace Thurman's Queering through Sites of Gender and Race."

Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2:00 p.m., AAS/AACC Conference Room. Diem-My Bui, Ph.D. Candidate, Institute of Communications Research. "Aesthetic Strategies: Vietnamese
American Interventions in Cultural Production."                  

DECEMBER

Thursday, December 1, 3:00 p.m., AAS/AACC Conference Room. Esther Kim Lee.

Sharmila Rudrappa

• Tuesday, Dec. 6th, 5:30 p.m., AACC Lounge. Sharmila Rudrappa, Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies and Sociology, University of Texas at Austin. "Reproducing Sameness Through Cultivating Difference: The Curious Case of Indian American Activism in Chicago, Illinois." This talk could just as easily have been cheesily titled "resistance is futile, prepare to be assimilated." The reason is because the specific question she addresses is this: How do community organizations, begun by activists who want to congregate as racialized people, to nurture a sense of community and foster racial self-worth, become spaces of governance, or governmentality? To answer this question, she look at one Asian American community organization in Chicago, Illinois, the Indo-American Center. She contextualizes the work of the Center in the larger sphere of neoliberal politics in the United States.
• Wednesday, Dec. 7th, 5:00 p.m., AAS/AACC Conference Room. "State and Civil Society: Conceptualizing Asian American Activism in the 21st Century." This workshop will methodically examine issues such as the exact separation between state and civil society -- how does one draw these boundaries, especially when racialized counter-publics depend on state funding?

Professor Rudrappa is attracting attention with her outstanding work on Gender and Political Sociology. Her research interests are race, feminist theory, and globalization of labor markets. Her book, Ethnic Routes to Becoming American: Indian Immigrants and the Cultures of Citizenship (Rutgers University Press, 2004), is an ethnography of a shelter for battered South Asian American women, and a cultural organization in Chicago.

SPRING 2006

JANUARY

Thursday, January 26, 2005: Yvonne M. Lau, DePaul University. Yvonne M. Lau is a nationally known educator and leading activist in the Asian American community in the Midwest. Currently, she is Director of both Asian and Asian American Opportunities programs and Supplemental Instruction at DePaul University. She was appointed as Director of Asian and Asian American Studies at Loyola University Chicago, the first program of its kind in the region in 1995. In recent years, she has focused her energies toward investigating the status and needs of Asian American students and personnel in K-12 education.
--12:00 p.m.-1:30 p.m. in the AAS/AACC Conference Room: Brown Bag session "Asian Americans and Asian ELLs in K-12: At the Top or Left Behind?"
--2:30 p.m.-4:00 p.m. in GSLIS 126 (with reception to follow): Presentation "Chicago's Chinese Americans: From Chinatown and Beyond."

MARCH

March 3-4: UIUC's Asian Pacific American Graduate Student Organization hosted its Emerging Critical Scholarship on Asian Pacific American Issues: A Graduate Students Conference. Keynote speakers included Professors
Shirley Hune and Kent A. Ono. To view the full conference schedule, visit http://leep.lis.uiuc.edu/publish/sypark2/APAGSO/index.html.

Monday, March 27. Keith Osajima, Professor of Race, University of Redlands. "Building Critical Consciousness among Asian American College Students: Challenges and Possibilities." Part of Higher Education Collaborative Seminar Series.

Wednesday, March 29, AAS/AACC Conference Room. John Blanco, Assisant Professor, University of California at San Diego. "What is a Tropical Gothic? Colonial Modernity and Revolution in 19th-century Phillipines." Co-sponsored with the Filipino and Filipino American Interest Groups.

Wednesday, March 29, Noon, AAS/AACC Conference Room. Manisha Desai, Associate Professor of Sociology.

APRIL

Friday, April 7. Kandice Chuh, Associate Professor of English, University of Maryland; and Karen Shimakawa, Associate Professor of Performance Studies, New York University.

• 4:00 p.m., Levis Faculty Center Reading Room (1st Floor). Lecture:  “Translating Asians."
• Noon, AAS/AACC Conference Room. Workshop: "to be an immigrant is to be marked by the border': racialization in contemporary U.S. law. "

Monday, April 10, 3:00 p.m., AAS/AACC Conference Room. Michael Masatsugu, Postdoctoral Fellow of Asian American Studies. “Japanese American Buddhism, Dharma Bums and the Politics of Authenticity during the Early Cold War Years."

Tuesday, April 11, Noon, AAS/AACC Conference Room. Christopher Lee, Postdoctoral Fellow of Asian American Studies.

SUMMER 2006

June 19-23, 2006: Asian American Experience Workshop for 8-12 teachers. Click here to download/view brochure.