Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Critical Analysis Of Anti-Asian Hate In The News, Benardo Douglas Relampagos

Dissertations and Theses

Since 2019, the United States has had an increase in violence against Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities along with an increase of mainstream anti-Asian racist rhetoric. Between 2021 and 2022, The Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism reported an overall 164% increase in anti-Asian hate crimes (Report to the Nation, 2021). While racism against black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) communities has been the topic of an ever-growing body of critical discourse, prior to 2019 few publications had addressed racism and injustice regarding language choices and discourse in the context of anti-Asian rhetoric in the US, specifically …

Sovereignty, Statehood, And Subjugation: Native Hawaiian And Japanese American Discourse Over Hawaiian Statehood, Nicole Saito

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Although discourse over Hawaiian statehood has increasingly been described by scholars as a racial conflict between Japanese Americans and Native Hawaiians, there existed a broad spectrum of interactions between the two groups. Both communities were forced to confront the prejudices they had against each other while recognizing their shared experiences with discrimination, creating a paradoxical political culture of competition and solidarity up until the conclusion of World War Two. From 1946 to 1950, however, the country’s collective understanding of Japanese American citizenship began to shift with recognition of the community’s military service record and an increased proportion of veterans elected …

“I Don’T Want To Hear Your Language!” White Social Imagination And The Demography Of Roman Corinth, Ekaputra Tupamahu

Faculty Publications - Portland Seminary

This article aims to deconstruct the hidden pervasive whiteness in biblical scholarship and to propose another way to reimagine the linguistic dynamic of Roman Corinth from an Asian American perspective. It highlights the legal and historical interconnectedness of whiteness and the dominance of English. English is a critical marker of whiteness in the United States. In this context, immigrants are expected to conform to and assimilate themselves with whiteness by performing English. This particular racialized context has influenced and resulted in a scholarly historical reconstruction of immigrants in Roman Corinth as “Greek speaking im/migrants.” Immigrants can come from many different …

Asian American Community College Presidents: An Asiancrit Analysis Of Their Approaches To Leadership, Johnny Hu

Ed.D. Dissertations in Practice

This study explores the experiences of five current and former Asian American community college presidents including their career transitions into executive leadership using an AsianCrit analysis for framing their narrative experiences. The literature review situates the experiences of Asian American community college presidents in various contexts by providing a brief summary of several historical moments and political movements that have shaped the realities they currently confront as higher education leaders. This study employed a Critical Race Theory (CRT) approach to counter storytelling to analyze the participants’ narratives both individually and thematically based on their social identities as Asian Americans and …

Asian American Heritage Seeking: Personal Narrative Performances Of Ancestral Return, Porntip Israsena Twishime

Masters Theses

Asian American belongings, migration patterns, and transnational identities are largely constructed in the United States as static, unidirectional, and invisible. Asian Americans complicate these constructions through the practice of ancestral return. In this thesis, “ancestral return” is constituted through one’s participation in a university study abroad program to a specific place to where one traces her heritage. I use “return” not necessarily to account for a form of reverse migration; rather “return” here names the multiple, sometimes contradictory kinds of return, including “return” to a place that one has not yet been. This project examines how Asian American identities are …

How To Be The Perfect Asian Wife!, Sophia Hill

Art and Art History Honors Projects

“How to be the Perfect Asian Wife” critiques exploitative power systems that assault female bodies of color in intersectional ways. This work explores strategies of healing and resistance through inserting one’s own narrative of flourishing rather than surviving, while reflecting violent realities. Three large drawings mimic pervasive advertisement language and presentation reflecting the oppressive strategies used to contain women of color. Created with charcoal, watercolor, and ink, these 'advertisements' contrast with an interactive rice bag filled with comics of my everyday experiences. These documentations compel viewers to reflect on their own participation in systems of power.

Cruising Borders, Unsettling Identities: Toward A Queer Diasporic Asian America, Wen Liu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I challenge the dominant conceptualization of Asian Americanness as a biological and cultural population and a cohesive racial category. Instead, I consider it as a form of flexible subjectivity and an affective emergence that occurs and materializes due to the multiple sites of convergence in the neoliberal assemblage of model minority ideology, imperialist geopolitical history, racialized queer politics, and criminal (in)justices. I examine the spatial and temporal configurations of Asian American subjectivity through a queer and postcolonial lens, first by conducting a critical historical review of the category of Asian American in the geopolitical history of psychological …

Coping With Acculturative Stress: Mdma Usage Among Asian American Young Adults In The Electronic Dance Music Scene, Michelle Stephanie Chan

Pomona Senior Theses

The intersection of Asian American identity and illicit substance use is greatly understudied in psychological literature, especially with matters of mental health and drug use being stigmatized by Asian cultural norms. However, with an increasingly alarming number of fatal drug overdoses by Asian Americans at electronic dance music (EDM) events, attention must be drawn to the needs of this unique population. The present study characterizes this community by drawing from data of 1,290 Asian American young adults who participate in the EDM scene. This study also hypothesizes the impact of acculturative stress and feelings of social belonging on MDMA usage …

The Model Minority Myth: (Benevolent) Racism Against (Asian) Americans, Angel Leung

2016 Undergraduate Awards

Asians and Asian Americans are considered the most well-to-do racialized groups in twenty-first century U.S. Their identity and ontology are incontrovertibly influenced by the model minority myth, a stereotype that envelops them as successful and as overcoming racial discrimination. This paper argues that the model minority myth exemplifies how putatively benevolent racial tropes are nonetheless racist against all communities of colour. Thus, Asian Americans are positioned as the ‘model minority’, as opposed to certain ‘problem minorities’, in order to further subjugate Black and Brown bodies. The myth is also problematic for Asian Americans themselves, demonstrating that to exist as an …

Own Your Experience, Stephen Lin

SURGE

This is a computer-generated message from the Campus Navigation Portal (CNAV), which can be accessed via the URL: Campus Navigation Portal (CNAV). It was sent to you to inform you of a significant event.

I received this email when I was a young, nervous First Year student. I took advantage of the clean slate I got from attending a new school and was scrolling through the Digest in search of a new identity. Maybe I could be one of those quirky unicycle riding, juggling, circus kids—it was all up in the air. I wasn’t going to let the past …

Transnational Gestures: Rethinking Trauma In U.S. War Fiction, Ruth A.H. Lahti

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation addresses the need to "world" our literary histories of U.S. war fiction, arguing that a transnational approach to this genre remaps on an enlarged scale the ethical implications of 20th and 21st century war writing. This study turns to representations of the human body to differently apprehend the ethical struggles of war fiction, thereby rethinking psychological and nationalist models of war trauma and developing a new method of reading the literature of war. To lay the ground for this analysis, I argue that the dominance of trauma theory in critical work on U.S. war fiction privileges the "authentic" …

Breaking The Mold: Four Asian American Women Define Beauty, Detail Identity, And Deconstruct Stereotypes, Allison Ginwala

Honors Theses and Capstones

The experiences of four women reveal how notions of outer beauty touch ideas of personal ethnic identity, racism, media-imposed pressure, and social stereotypes; shaping the lives of Chinese, Chinese American, and Asian American women.

Fearless: Eric Lee, Eric J. Lee

SURGE

Snapping pictures of his fellow Gettysburgians around campus as the visual communications intern, and fearlessly working with other students to create, organize, and lead the new Asian Student Alliance (ASA) group on campus, Eric Lee ’15 finds himself at the crossroads of art and activism.

New to campus this year after two years in the making, the ASA is a student-led, -run, and -organized group focused on celebrating different Asian cultures and heritages, closing the gap between international and domestic students, and creating a social, cultural, and political forum for students to dialogue, specifically about issues facing Asian communities. [ …

What Kind Of Asian Are You?, Uyen T. Le

SURGE

You don’t know anything about me. You’ve never been to my country; you don’t know my native language; you may not even be able to locate Vietnam on a map.

And that’s ok. What matters isn’t that you already know about my country and my culture. What matters is your attitude toward learning about it. [excerpt]

Mapping Community Mindscapes: Visualizing Social Autobiography As Political Transformation And Mobilization, Emily C. Bluck

Scripps Senior Theses

Historically, autobiography has been used to perpetuate neo-liberal ideologies. Yet, when autobiography becomes social and is used to engage political communities of color, political transformation is possible. This project, through the collaborative visualization of Asian American social biography using pedagogical and relational methods as a means for engagement, seeks to destabilize dominant notions of time and space, and provide a mechanism for the retention of and documentation of institutional, and social histories using the Asian American Student Union at Scripps College as the site for political praxis.

The Effects Of Racial Discrimination, Ethnic Identity, And Generational Status On Situation Well-Being Of Asian Americans, Li-Ling Lin

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

A randomized three-group, experimental online study was conducted to investigate the degree to which ethnic identity and generational status moderated the relationship between racial discrimination and situational well-being in a sample of Asian Americans. Replicating and extending Yoo and Lee's (2008) study, the current sample of 194 Asian American participants were randomly assigned to one of three vignettes: without racial discrimination (control group), a single incident of racial discrimination, or multiple incidents of racial discrimination. Results indicated that participants in the two experimental conditions reported more negative affect than participants in the control group, and participants in the multiple incidents …