Current Semester

Spring 2024 Courses

AMST 113. Asian/American Geographies.
W. Cheng & A. Bahng, SC, T 1:15-4:00p.m.
What is the relationship between Asian and Asian/American racialization, space, and place? This course brings together questions and texts from Asian American studies, geography, and critical ethnic studies to examine the spatialization of race across multiple scales ranging from the local to the global (e.g., colony, territory, “Chinatown”) as well as placemaking, activism, and place-based worldviews. Specific areas of inquiry and discussion will include: Asian/American engagements with critical Asian and diaspora studies, relationships to Indigeneity and settler colonialism, U.S. militarism and empire, and questions of cultural and place-based memory.

ASAM 085. Health Inequities.
K. Yep & R. VanSickle-Ward, PZ, T 1:15-4:00p.m.
The World Health Organization defines health as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. This participatory course will consider this whole-person definition across the human life course using a range of sociological, political science, and Asian American Studies principles and perspectives. In addition to drawing from Asian/American/Pacific Islander/Desi American (A/APIDA) communities, major topics will include the structure of health care systems in the United States and globally, doctor-patient interaction, social and cultural influences on health and disease, and social disparities in the distribution of health and quality health care. Includes community engagement project outside of class time.

ASAM 089. Embodied Learning, Pedagogies of Belonging, and Qi Gong.
K. Yep & B. Junisbai, PZ, R 1:15-4:00p.m.
From policing bodies to productivity culture, scholarship examines subsequent distortions of bodies in educational institutions. Our bodies map the ways we are isolated, segmented, and dehumanized. And our bodies also narrate the ways we persist, repair, connect, foster solidarity, and radically reimagine ourselves and the world. The literature illuminates how bodies in classrooms are multi-layered and contested. Highlighting the possibility of social change through education, this course explores Roxana Ng’s framework of “embodied learning” as a potentially decolonizing pedagogical praxis. Through readings, dialogue, and practices, the class examines the hidden curriculum of different corporeal/mind dualisms in classrooms, the impact of (dis)embodiment on educational outcomes, and the transformative possibility of embodied education for critical consciousness and social action. This class investigates qi gong as an epistemological framework and an embodied practice related to liberatory pedagogies. Rooted in traditional Chinese medicine, qi gong involves breathing, awareness, and movement and centers interconnectedness as the basis for its knowledge system. Combining discussion of readings and experiential practice, we will engage in a community-engaged project that includes relational mindfulness, qi gong, and other contemplative practices.

ASAM 123. Pacific Islander History and Culture through Life Writing. (previously ASAM 179M)
A. Flores, HMC, TR 9:35-10:50a.m.
Life writing provides readers with an engaging opportunity to learn about history and its connection to the present. Utilizing the concept of Native survival, this course will examine the history and culture of Pacific Islanders through life writing that includes autobiography, biography, comics, graphic novels, and memoirs. Some of the main themes for this course includes colonialism, diaspora, gender, indigeneity, migration, race, trauma, violence, and war. Class discussions, lectures, film screenings, and readings constitute the interpretive lens for this course.

ASAM 124. New Directions in Pacific Islander Studies. (previously ASAM 179N)
A. Flores, HMC, TR 1:15-2:30p.m.
This interdisciplinary historical course will introduce students to a variety of concepts, methods, and theories in Pacific Islander Studies through recently published articles and books. Students will have the opportunity to engage these works and learn how they are shaping the field of Pacific Islander Studies. This course will stretch across a broad time period and include themes such as climate change, colonialism, diaspora, environmentalism, gender, indigeneity, labor, law, militarization, oral history, and war.

ASAM 130. Science, Technology, Asian America.
T. Honma, PZ, T 2:45-5:30p.m.
This course explores the implications of Western science and technology on the Asian American experience. By interrogating how science has been defined in the “West” in relation to “non-Western” peoples, we will explore questions related to epistemology, racialization, migration, education, professionalization, and research, and the political stakes therein.

ASAM 142 PO. South Asian American Studies. (previously ASAM 189C)
B. Nasir, PO, M 1:15-4:00p.m.
This course examines issues relevant to the South Asian diaspora in the United States. With a special emphasis on race and empire, the course will consider historical and contemporary forms of marginalization targeting South Asian American communities. It will also explore the possibilities and limits of emergent Desi social movements forged in contexts of Anti-Immigrant Racism, Anti-Muslim Racism, Anti-Black Racism, Hindutva, and Trumpism.

ASAM 143 PO. Race and Policing.
B. Nasir, PO, W 7:00-9:50p.m.
This course explores historical and anthropological approaches to the study of policing in the United States. With a special emphasis on race and ethnicity, the course will examine several case studies on the policing of Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Muslim communities across American urban centers. In addition, it will probe contemporary abolitionist movements aimed at dismantling policing.

ASAM 160. Asian American Women’s Experiences.
Staff, SC, F 1:15-4:15p.m.
This course is an interdisciplinary examination of Asian and Pacific Islander American women.  It will examine the history and experiences of Asian American women in the United States.  The class will include both lecture and discussion and will cover various issues, such as gender roles, mass media stereotypes, Asian women’s feminism, and the impact of sexism and racism on the lives of Asian American women through education, work, and home life.

ASAM 172. Race and Visual Culture.
T. Honma, PZ, W 2:45-5:30p.m.
This course explores the field of visual culture to examine the complexities and contradictions of Asian American racial subjectivity. We will ask, what is the relationship between race and visual aesthetics? What is the work of creativity and how does it intervene in salient issues that continue to impact Asian American communities today? How is racialization (and its various intersections) connected to questions of space and place, particularly environmental, carceral, and settler colonial landscapes? Issues to be considered include: immigration, confinement, deportation, and other forms of cultural and political marginalization and social control. Previous coursework in Asian American Studies recommended.

ASAM 179P. Afro-Asian Politics and Expressive Culture.
Staff, HM, F 1:15-4:15p.m.
This interdisciplinary course explores various historical, political, and cultural intersections between African Americans and Asian Americans from the late nineteenth century to the present. How have Black and Asian communities formed new anti-racist and anti-imperialist coalitions? What are the potentials and limits of interracial solidarity in politics and art? We will answer these questions by engaging with key intellectual debates in Black Studies, Asian American Studies, Music Studies, and Comparative Literature, and cultural forms from film to music, literature, and visual art.

ASAM 179Q. Narrative Filmmaking.
Staff, HM, T 7:00-9:45p.m.
Viewing of films and other narrative forms by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) for critique and discussion. Advanced instruction in narrative filmmaking and screenwriting/directing to create short narrative films centered around social issues relevant to Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.

ASAM 191PO. Asian American Studies Senior Thesis.
Students will work with one or more faculty on original thesis research toward completion of senior thesis.

ENGL 019. Introduction to Asian American Literature.
s. torralba, PO, MW 11:00a.m.-12:15p.m.
This course is an introduction to major and recent texts in the field of Asian American literature. We will examine the ways that U.S.-based authors of Asian descent use the formal elements of literary genres to articulate political and/or social critiques and commentaries. In our analyses of poems, novels, short stories, memoirs, and plays, we will map the myriad historical and political trajectories which give rise to Asian American writing. While our investigation of Asian American literature entails paying close attention to the formal elements of distinct genres adopted by the writers under investigation, we will also situate these texts within an intersectional and comparative-relational sociocultural frame and foreground issues and topics related (but not limited) to family politics; im/migration, citizenship; labor politics; spatial politics; history; settler colonialism; community formation; cultural memory; trauma; race and racism; class consciousness; Indigeneity; intelligibility; and gender and sexuality. To help students practice refined, critical engagements with the literary techniques of Asian American writers––and to introduce them to the methods of literary studies––this class will have students practice their own writing. Students will be expected to produce both major assignments (like traditional academic papers) as well as smaller, more frequent, and low-stakes assignments, like discussion posts, in addition to participating in in-class discussions. By the end of this class, students will have developed their analytical writing and critical reading skills and will have developed an introductory knowledge of some major themes in Asian American literary and cultural studies.

ENGL 170X. Asian American Literary and Cultural Studies.
s. torralba, PO, M 1:15-4:00p.m.
This course introduces students to major topics in foundational and recent Asian American literary and cultural studies. In particular, the theme of this specific version of ENGL 170X centers representations and cultural politics of Asian diasporic characters who appear in works by U.S.-based authors of Asian descent and who can broadly be characterized as mad, maladjusted, and/or maintaining “messy” relations with mainstream U.S. culture. In a word, they are “crazy.” This descriptor includes characters who are hysterical, clinically depressed, and other forms of being mentally ill or unwell. It also includes characters who are mentally disabled; traumatized; struggling with addiction; abnormally emotionally cold or affectless; amoral; excessive or disorderly; and/or socially deviant. We will examine how depictions of the complex psychic and social lives of these characters can provide insight into the broader lived realities of Asian American and Asian diasporic communities in the contexts of post/colonialism, structural racism, militarization, and globalization. More precisely, we will study the ways that these various “negative” and “nonnormative” modes of psychic and social being challenge dominant U.S. cultural imaginings of Asian Americans, which are frequently premised on problematic neoliberal politics of respectability (e.g., the trope of the industrious “model minority”). To this end, our analyses and discussions will take cues from an array of scholarly discourses: queer/trans of color critique, crip of color critique, disability studies, trauma studies, psychoanalysis, and critical mad studies, to name a few.

FGSS 188E. The Queer Transpacific: Sinophone Cultures and Race/Ethnicity in Asian America.
J. Cheng, SC, T 2:45-5:30p.m.
This course draws together emergent scholarship in transpacific studies and sinophone studies with Asian American studies and queer studies. It attends to how the hemispheric Americas and Asia Pacific regions have been shaped by the United States and China, respectively and concomitantly. We trace overlapping histories of U.S.-European interventions into Asia Pacific, Pacific militarizations, Chinese empire, and modern Chinese nation-state building led by Han ethnonationalisms. Focusing on transpacific crossings and the production of “sinophone cultures” in history, popular culture, science, and tourism, this course applies queer analyses to investigate how the U.S. and China produce one another as analogous “others.”

MUS 126. Music in East Asia and its American Diasporas.
Y. Kang, SC, TR 1:15-2:30p.m.
This course introduces the “traditional” music of China, Korea, and Japan and explores the ways in which traditional performing arts have been transformed, adapted, and given new meanings in these modern nation-states and the East Asian diasporic communities of the United States.  A survey of these musical traditions will be followed by a closer study of pungmul, kabuki, taiko, Chinese opera, and pansori.

POLI 118. Korea and Korean Americans.
T. Kim, SC, TR 1:15-2:30p.m.
This course is an intensive introduction to North and South Korea, with their interlocking histories and greatly divergent economic, political, and social realities. The course pays special attention to the impact of U.S. foreign policy on Korean national formation and Korean American identity and community formation.

PSYC 114. Asian American Child Development.
H. Park, SC, T 2:45-5:30p.m.
This course will provide a psychological perspective on the nature and meaning of growing up as Asian American in North America. We will examine the diverse experiences of Asian American children, youth, and families, drawing upon primarily psychological theory and research. Furthermore, students will be exposed to interdisciplinary ethnic studies scholarship, memoirs, news articles, and films. Integrating a range of course materials, we will evaluate scientific claims, personal narratives, and everyday portrayals of Asian American children, youth, families, and communities. We will compare and contrast these multiple sources of information to gain a holistic view and identity gaps and future research directions in the field of psychological science. Course topics will include ethnic and racial socialization, ethnic identity development, peer relations, acculturations, biculturalism, model minority myth, parenting, family relationship, and transracial adoption.

PSYC 153AA. Asian American Psychology.
S. Goto, PO, TR 1:15-2:30p.m.
Introduces students to the salient psychological issues of Asian Americans. Taking into account the social, cultural, and historical context of the Asian American experience, this course addresses values and cultural conflict development, acculturation, marriage and gender roles, vocational development, psychopathology, and delivery of mental health services.

SOC 150AA. Contemporary Asian American Issues.
H. Thai, PO, W 1:15-4:00p.m.
Survey of contemporary empirical studies focusing on Asian American experiences in the U.S. and globally; major themes include race, class, gender, sexuality, marriage/family, education, consumption, childhoods, aging, demography, and the rise of transmigration. Readings and other course materials will primarily focus on the period since 1965.

THEA 001G. Acting for Social Change.
J. Lu, PO, MW 1:15-3:45p.m.
Acting for Social Change is an introduction to the fundamentals of acting, drawing upon different techniques such as psychological realism and physical theatre. Students will perform a self-written monologue, a documentary monologue transcribed from a live interview, and a two or three person scene from a play. They will also be introduced to Playback Theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed, two forms of theater that are applied commonly today to create dialogue, heal conflict and trauma, and build community.