We are thrilled to share the new cohort of ASAM Fellows 2022-2023!
The Asian American Studies (ASAM) Program offers a fellowship for up to 5 undergraduate Penn students from a variety of disciplines. The ASAM Fellows Program will provide the chance to enhance critical thinking skills, learn about new areas of research, and strengthen their knowledge of Asian American Studies. This is an excellent opportunity to build your resume while exploring your interests and learning valuable skills for your future career.
The ASAM Program will host a fall Colloquium and spring Speakers Series with the 2022 - 23 ASAM Fellows: Angela Ji, Jennifer Kang, Jean Paik, Vernon Wells, Ella Yang, and Yuting Zhu. This year, the Fellows conducted independent research projects on the aspirations for self-determination. We define self-determination as the ability for Asian American communities to have agency and power in addressing their unfulfilled demands to decide their own futures—a struggle intimately connected to land, political bodies, community, and history. Together, the Fellows will examine how self-determination is reclaimed and what this reveals about the relationship between Asian America and the U.S. global regime.
Each Fellow’s project explores articulations of self-determination across temporalities, from afterlives of war to civic engagement, and Indigenous sovereignty to community exercise and utopia. Angela’s project analyzes how contemporary queer Asian American women’s fiction can be read through a theory of utopia to challenge and reimagine our present world. Jennifer’s project investigates how civic engagement can connect communities and build power. Jean’s project explores how Korean American memoirs reconstruct memory in response to histories of war, U.S. militarism, and imperialism. Vernon’s project cultivates a dynamic understanding of Indigenous Filipino responses to their continued land dispossession with relation to multinational extraction. Ella’s project examines how Qigong exercise, a traditional Chinese medical practice, impacts the recognition of identity of Asian Americans as new immigrants. Yuting’s project probes how Qigong changes Chinese Americans’ perceptions of and interactions with traditional alternative therapies.
