U of MN Asian American Studies

10/27/2026

The Approaching Global Asias Collaborative presents "Creative Methods in Dialogue" series workshop: "Counter-Mapping: Memory, Movement and Belonging" by Sa’dia Rehman, Visiting Assistant Professor in Art & CSCL.

Date & Time: November 5, 2026, 1 - 2:30 PM. Lunch will be served starting 12:30 PM.

Location: Liberal Arts Engagement Hub, Pillsbury Hall Room 120 (in-person only)

Workshop abstract: Counter-Mapping Memory is a 90 minute participatory art workshop led by Visiting Assistant Professor in Art & CSCL, Sa’dia Rehman. In the workshop, participants will explore counter-mapping as a creative practice for reimagining how we understand place and belonging. The group will challenge the dominant narratives that maps often reproduce: colonial, political, and national borders. Participants will use collage, drawing, text, and symbols to map the personal histories, ancestral connections, migrations, memories, and solidarities that shape their relationships to Asia and its diasporas.

Rehman invites participants to bring a personal family photograph, a memory, a story to be used as reference for the artmaking. And to wear clothes that may get dirty during the workshop. Materials provided. No prior art experience needed.

Speaker bio: Sa’dia Rehman is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work examines the entangled structures of race, empire, and labor. Drawing on familial histories rooted in South Asia and its diaspora, Rehman expands narratives of harm, survival, and inheritance through video, installation, and research-driven experimental practice. Rehman has exhibited work at venues including the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Fabric Workshop and Museum, National Museum of Norway, Queens Museum (NYC), and Pakistan National Council of the Arts. Rehman was awarded residencies at the ArtLab at Harvard University, Film/Video Studio at the Wexner Center for the Arts, and Art Omi. Her work was featured in Aperture, Bomb, The Brooklyn Rail, and The New York Times. Rehman is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Art & Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

10/20/2026

Come learn what AAS is all about, how to get involved, and how you can minor in AAS! This is a great opportunity to ask questions and discover what AAS has to offer.

📅 October 27th, 2026
📍 Appleby Hall 311
📚 Informational Presentation: 1–2 PM
💬 Informal Tabling & Q&A: 2–4 PM
🧋 Boba provided! RSVP with your boba order!

We hope to see you there 💛

10/12/2026

Friendly reminder that this online lecture by Dr. Ava Kim (UC, Davia) is happening this Wednesday, October 14 at 4PM CST!

RSVP at z.umn.edu/AvaKim

Join us for a webinar lecture by Dr. Ava L. J. Kim entitled "Trans Subterfuge: Toward an Archipelagic History of the Philippines"

Date: Wednesday, October 14
Time: 4 - 5:15PM CST
RSVP: z.umn.edu/AvaKim

*This event is free and open to the public.

Lecture Abstract: This talk analyzes the 2014-2016 trial of Joseph Pemberton, a U.S. serviceman who murdered trans Filipina s*x worker, Jennifer Laude, at Subic Bay Freeport. In the nationalist fervor surrounding Laude’s death, U.S. and Philippine parties alike aligned Laude’s disclosure as a person “born male,” with a repeated insistence on the Philippines’ “origin” as a U.S. colony. Novelists like Gina Apostol and Jessica Hagedorn, however, reject this connection by positing histories of gender nonconformity against narratives of Philippine transition from colony to nation. These reimagined histories exploit racist expectations of underdevelopment for undercover rebellion and demonstrate that refusals of a sovereign transition offer new, anti-national methods of resistance to violence in the present. Building on the archipelagic turn in American studies, I argue that this trans form of subterfuge offers new ways of conceptualizing the Philippines with other archipelagic regions of the global south.

Lecturer Bio: Ava L.J. Kim is an Assistant Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at the University of California, Davis. She previously held the 2022-2023 Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and completed her PhD in English at the University of Pennsylvania as well as her BA in Creative Writing at Macalester College. Her work has been published in GLQ, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, TSQ, American Studies, Radical History Review, and the edited collection, About Face: Stonewall, Revolt, and New Q***r Art.

10/05/2026

The Ridgs Umn and the Asian American Studies Program (AAS) cordially invite you to a hybrid talk by Dr. Yuichiro Onishi on his new book "Black Radical Thought in Japan: An Afro-Asian Intellectual History".

Date: Thursday, October 29
Time: 2:30 - 4PM
Location: The Liberal Arts Engagement Hub, Pillsbury Hall Room 120, 310 Pillsbury Dr SE, Minneapolis 55455

Book Description: This groundbreaking study traces the resonances of Black radicalism in postwar Japan, charting the surprising and consequential itineraries of Afro-Asian solidarity. In Black Radical Thought in Japan, Yuichiro Onishi follows the routes through which Japanese writers, activists, and intellectuals engaged with the revolutionary Marxism of C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and Grace Lee Boggs; the anticolonial internationalism of Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois; and the insurgent creativity of Black Left feminists from Esther Cooper Jackson to Paule Marshall. Attunement toward their commitment to Black struggle, which they cultivated through the study and translation of Black texts, is recast as a complex strand of Black thought found in Japan. At the heart of the story is translation, not as supplement but as method: a generative practice of refraction and reworking, often recursive and introspective, that forged solidarities across languages, geographies, and struggles. Drawing inspiration from Du Bois’s invocation of the Greek word for race, phylon, which he made in 1940 to rethink his own formulation “the problem of the color line” for the emerging new world order, Onishi names this conceptual sphere the “transpacific phylon,” a dense archive of Afro-Asian radicalism. Essential for scholars of American studies, Japanese studies, Black intellectual history, and Global Asias, Black Radical Thought in Japan is an inventive and revelatory account of freedom remade across the Pacific.

09/30/2026

Just a few more weeks left to submit to the Association for Asian American Studies' (AAAS) Annual Conference happening in Baltimore, MD from March 25-27, 2027!

"Harbors, Havens, & Hope: Charting Futures for Asian American Studies"

To harbor—to shelter from storms or darkness. To provide a safe place for respite, to cultivate a haven that affords hope. In perilous times, this 2027 conference invites us to strategize how Asian American Studies can fortify itself as an intellectual haven. How can we imagine our purpose from a place not of defensiveness, but enlivening possibility? How can we collectively bring into being the futures we desire? Conceiving of our field as a harbor means reevaluating and strengthening existing infrastructures while creating new ones that allow us to foster the transformative capacity of hope.

Hope entails a call to critical imagination and to collective action. If “to harbor” can also signify an internal act of furtively holding onto thoughts and feelings that might prompt disapprobation, this conference invites us to commit to the disruptive power of hope. Enacting hope as “a critical methodology,” José Esteban Muñoz reminds us, demands “a backward glance that enacts a future vision” (2009). Precisely because of this subversive potential, harboring hope demands not just individual commitment, but also communal effort. As we wait together for calmer waters, we imagine the “radical unfurling” of different horizons (Bahng 2018). Buoyed by the aspirational element of hope, this project envisions havens for those who are most vulnerable so that they, too, can dream of futures.

By constellating the terms of harbor, haven, and hope, this conference theme aims to calibrate the association’s compass as we chart riotous futures for Asian American Studies. We take these ideas from Baltimore itself, a city on the Eastern Seaboard whose history spans colonial trade to post-industrial neglect. Contra the logic of urban renewal that sanctions gentrification efforts decimating Black neighborhoods, we draw on activist legacies, exemplified by the Black Lives Matter protest after the murder of Freddie Gray in 2015, to envision “freedom dreams” (Kelley 2002) that reject the neoliberal imperative to “be more” and refuse to relegate communities to untimely death.

Taking inspiration from Baltimore’s nickname “Charm City,” how can we recapture the magic of, and reinstill a sense of wonder and joy in, Asian Americanist work? What approaches—such as comparative, creative/critical, and/or interdisciplinary frameworks—can activate new intellectual currents, while also remaining responsible to the insights of Black, Indigenous, postcolonial, and diaspora studies, among others? How can we be pushed to engage rigorously with the escalating crises of immigration enforcement, the carceral state, and racial capitalism? These questions call for conversations across the humanities, social, and physical sciences, as well as professional fields such as education, law, public health, public policy, and psychology.

We welcome scholarship, cultural work, as well as political activist submissions for the 2027 AAAS conference. Proposals for mentorship or professionalization roundtables, panels, or workshops are also welcome. All submissions and proposals are due [Monday, October 19, 2026]. Please note: Participants may only appear in the program twice and only in different roles.

Program Questions? For specific questions regarding type of sessions, submission guidelines, or other programmatic issues, please contact the Program Committee Co-Chairs: Chris A. Eng ([email protected]) and Michelle N. Huang ([email protected]).

https://aaastudies.org/conference/2027-cfp/

09/25/2026

We spy a Great Blue Heron at the Mississippi River! This is the bird on the new U of MN Asian American Studies Program emblem! If you spot one and post it, please tag us. Thank you and we hope you have a rad day!

09/24/2026

Sorry to share awful news, but I thought folks should know about this. Department Chairs and Program Directors are trying to organize a response (I attended an emergency zoom meeting with CLA Dean on Monday morning), but it's hard because the amounts they want colleges to cut are significant. Please make sure to voice your concerns and support for the Asian American Studies Program (there will probably be petitions and/or peaceful protests), as well as the other Ethnic Studies Departments on campus. We'll try to keep you posted! Also, all of the major news outlets are covering this, but I'm sharing the article from the UMN-TC student newspaper. Take care, Everyone!

The University of Minnesota’s Office of the President announced Thursday a $225 million reduction to the budget over the next two years on Sept. 24. The University said this cut equates to 12-15% of allocated operating revenue. The announcement follows a string of cuts, including a 2027 budget tha...

09/23/2026

The Asian American Studies Program is co-hosting the Open House for APARC (the Asian and Pacific American Resource Center) on campus. We’re serving “dirty sodas” made by “Sodaly.” Come by and hang out with us and get a FREE dirty soda. APARC is located on the 3rd Floor of Appleby Hall on the east bank. Open House closes at 4pm!

09/22/2026

A friendly reminder that the Approaching Global Asias Collaborative's 3rd Annual Lecture featuring Dr. Tina Chen is happening this Thursday, September 24 from 5-7PM CST at The Liberal Arts Engagement Hub! Chen will also facilitate a workshop on September 25 from 12:30-2PM CST at The Liberal Arts Engagement Hub. Both events are free, open to the public, and hybrid.

RSVP for lecture: z.umn.edu/TChen
RSVP for workshop: z.umn.edu/TChenWorkshop