Event

The Foreign Body: ASAM Fellows Spring 2021 Symposium presents:  "The Alien Asian / Asian Alien" in conversation with Esther Lin, Loan Thi Dao and Set Hernandez Rongkilyo.

"The Alien Asian / Asian Alien" will be a panel discussion with scholars, artists, and immigrant rights organizers to more critically examine the intersection of art and activism, specifically in relation to anti-carceral organizing in the vast Asian American community."

Panelists:

Esther Lin was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and lived in the United States as an undocumented immigrant for 21 years. She was a 2020 Writing Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, 2017–19 Wallace Stegner Fellow, and author of The Ghost Wife (Poetry Society of America 2017). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Hyperallergic, the New England Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Currently, she co-organizes for the Undocupoets, which promotes the work of undocumented poets and raises consciousness about the structural barriers they face in the literary community.

Loan Thi Dao is an Associate Professor and Director of Ethnic Studies at St. Mary’s College of California. She specializes in Southeast Asian refugee migration and community development, immigrant and refugee youth, social movements, and Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR). Dao has published on topics related to memory and war in cultural productions, Vietnamese American female leadership, undocumented AAPI activists, transnational activism, and Southeast Asian American deportation. Her recent publications include the book, Generation Rising: A New Politics of Southeast Asian American Activism (2020), “AAPIs and Immigrant Rights Today,” in Power of the People Won’t Stop: Legacy of the TWLB at UC Berkeley (2020),“Untold Stories, Unsung Heroes: Using Visual Narratives to Resist Historical Exclusion, Exoticization, and Gentrification in Boston Chinatown,” in Journal of Folklore and Education (2020), “Asian American Studies and the Fight for Worker Justice” in AAPI Nexus (2019), and co-editor of JSEAEA Special Issue: Voices from the Field: Centering Southeast Asian American through Policy, Practice, and Activism (2019). She teaches interdisciplinary ethnic studies courses, and her service has included leadership positions in student groups, cultural productions, diversity and inclusion initiatives, and training, immigrant rights and policy advocacy, and on boards of Southeast Asian American community organizations. She previously served on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Asian American Commission and as a Governor-appointed advisor to the Massachusetts Office of Refugees and Immigrants.

Set Hernandez Rongkilyo is an undocumented immigrant filmmaker and community organizer, whose roots come from Bicol, Philippines. They envisions a filmmaking landscape that centers equity and abundance, where all artists have the resources to thrive using the unique skill sets they embody. As part of the 2020 Disruptors Fellowship, Set is developing a TV pilot about the undocumented experience. They have directed/produced short documentaries, including the award-winning “COVER/AGE” (2019) about healthcare expansion for undocumented immigrants. They served as Impact Producer for "In Plain Sight" (2020) by renowned artists Cassils and rafa esparza, and for PJ Raval’s "Call Her Ganda" (Tribeca, 2018). Along with Rahi Hasan, they are the co-founder of the Undocumented Filmmakers Collective which advances equity for undocumented immigrants in the media industry.

Moderators:

Erin O'Malley, is a senior majoring in Comparative Literature and Gender, Sexuality, Women's Studies and minoring in Asian American Studies and Creative Writing. They serve as the Co-Chair of the Asian American Studies Undergraduate Advisory Board and the President of The Excelano Project. They are also a Mellon Mays Fellow, a Wolf Humanities Center Undergraduate Fellow, and an Andrea Mitchell Center for the Study of Democracy Undergraduate Fellow. In their free time, they enjoy eating fruit in parks.

Claire Nguyen: A second-generation Vietnamese American, Claire Nguyễn (she/her) views her role in social change as a storyteller. Firmly believing in the idea that knowledge is power, Claire hopes to illuminate her community's history in academic spaces, while also making Ethnic Studies more accessible to empower BIPOC youth across the country. She immerses herself in several Southeast Asian American spaces including the Penn Vietnamese Students’ Association, VietLead’s Civic Empowerment team, and UC Berkeley’s Southeast Asian Student Coalition, where she was the Curriculum Coordinator for its 2020 Summer Institute. A junior studying History with minors in Asian American Studies and English, she is also an APALI facilitator, a co-chair of the ASAM UAB, and a Fellow in the inaugural class of ASAM Fellows, with whom she is researching Asian American and Pacific Islander incarceration and deportation.