A symposium on Asian American Activism will take place Jan. 24-25 at UCSB, launching a series of events at the university on the 50th anniversary of the field of Asian American Studies. The events are free to attend.

The events are a collaboration among three UC campuses: the Department of Asian American Studies at UCSB, the Department of Asian American Studies at UC Davis, and the Asian American Studies Center at UCLA.

They are supported by grants from the UC Humanities Research Institute and UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. The symposium is convened by Professors Diane Fujino of UCSB and Robyn Rodriguez of UC Davis.

The idea for the symposium emerged from a simple idea: In this moment of Black Lives Matter, Latinx immigrant rights, Standing Rock Indigenous water rights, #MeToo struggles, and other protest movements, Asian American organizing remains invisible.

Yet, a number of Asian American community groups and activists are organizing around issues of immigrant rights, housing, community development, education, labor, environmental justice, state violence, intersectional racialized gender and heteropatriarchy, and international solidarity work.

Through the symposium, the organizers hope to make visible some of the most vibrant Asian American community organizing and political activism taking place in California and beyond.

The symposium seeks to address: What kinds of activism is taking place in Asian American communities today? What creates successful campaigns and what are obstacles to organizing?

How have short-term successes led to longer run problems, and inversely, how have short-run losses led to greater capacities for social movement organizing? What shifts when Asian American activism becomes visible?

The organizing taking place in Asian American communities today is rooted in the student and community activism that led to the establishment of the field of Asian American Studies in the late 1960s.

In particular, the Third World strikes at San Francisco State College and UC Berkeley, and elsewhere as well, in 1968 and 1969 produced the academic fields of ethnic studies and Asian American studies.

Asian American Studies and Ethnic studies are interdisciplinary fields that examine how differences of race, ethnicity and nation, as well as gender, class, sexuality, shape individual experiences and U.S. and world societies, and how modes of power shape our understanding of race and the production of knowledge itself.

The symposium is further designed as an activist-scholar project, one that engages both activists and scholars in the process of knowledge production and does so utilizing egalitarian, horizontal, and reciprocal models of community engaged research.

Based on the public symposium and internal discussions, the organizers are developing an edited volume that examines Asian American activism with symposium speakers contributing chapters on Asian American activism and the struggle to:

Abolish environmental racism, undocumented immigration rights in Korean American communities, Filipina women’s rights in the U.S. and internationally, Asian American prisoners and juvenile justice reform, and organizing for educational transformation, housing against the pressures of gentrification, and community development and social movement building.

For more, visit http://www.asamst.ucsb.edu/ or http://tinyurl.com/APIActivism2019.

— Diane C. Fujino for UCSB Department of Asian American Studies.