The Asian American Studies (ASAM) Program proudly introduces the 2024-2025 fellows and their subsequent fellowship projects: Grace Edwards, Taryn Flaherty, Fariha Nawar, Maliha Rahman, Alana Yang, and Yeeun Yoo. This year’s theme, Towards Our Collective Liberation, explores how Asian American communities subvert stereotypes, transcend identity politics, and reimagine themselves outside the structures that have defined them. Identity politics in the Asian American community have reduced our struggles, resistance, and revolutionary history to the broad and apathetic language of “representation.” Our identity has been weaponized through the “model minority” myth and mislabeled by codified government documents and categories. Towards Our Collective Liberation calls us to reject identity politics and find solidarity in the stories the American empire has overgeneralized and forgotten. The efforts for liberation in the Asian American community include fighting alongside the coalitions galvanized by other communities of color and colonized folks of the world. Through this fellowship, we hope to achieve this by complicating identity, fostering coalition-building, and amplifying diverse narratives through storytelling.
We complicate identity through Yeeun’s interrogation of U.S. militarism and military conscription in Korea, Grace’s investigation of how Asian American medical professionals are racialized in clinical settings and understand racism, and Maliha’s exploration of the effects of social media on the dissemination of medical misinformation in the Bangladeshi community. We build coalitions through Fariha’s advocacy work with the civil rights organization OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates. We narrate stories through Alana’s exploration of Mississippian Chinese American schooling experiences and Taryn’s oral histories of Philadelphia Chinatown residents amidst potential cultural gentrification. We aim to embrace the imperfections, complications, and instability inherent in the fight towards our collective liberation.
Check the events and join the series of fellow' talks this Fall!