Thursday, September 7 | 12:00pm – 2:00pm | The Graduate Center, CUNY, Room 9207
Description: This roundtable discussion, the first of a series of Thursday Dialogues organized by the Futures Initiative, looks forward to this year’s American Studies Association Conference: Pedagogies of Dissent (Nov. 9-12; Chicago, IL), by exploring the frictions, possibilities, and complex entanglements between “pedagogy” and “dissent” for Asian American studies. How might thinking through this particular field illuminate ways of re-approaching Chandra Mohanty’s use of “pedagogies of dissent” to refer to ongoing endeavors to foster opposition and unruly modes of thinking and being as public cultures within the academy? What would creating such public cultures of dissent look like for Asian American studies? And how would we implement these pedagogies through our research and in the classroom? How do we teach dissent in inhospitable institutional spaces and against prevailing stereotypes, like that of the model minority? What obstacles would we confront and what possibilities might be opened up in the process?
These and more questions will be under discussion for the day and we encourage you to add your thoughts and insights to the dialogue by joining us for this informal brownbag lunch. No RSVP necessary.
Panelist Bios:
Kandice Chuh is a Professor of English and American Studies as the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is also coordinator of the American Studies Certificate Program and Acting Associate Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. This year, Chuh also serves as the President of the American Studies Association. Her current research focuses on contemporary forms of Asian racialization.
Frances Tran is a Postdoctoral Fellow and the Interim Associate Director of the Futures Initiative at the CUNY Graduate Center. Her research focuses on Asian American and multiethnic cultural studies, with an emphasis on feminist and queer of color critique. She is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled, “Aleatory Entanglements: On Minoritized Knowledges, Speculative Aesthetics, and Other Humanities.”
Dorothy Wang is an Associate Professor in the American Studies Program and a Faculty Affiliate in the English Department at Williams College. Her book Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2013) won the Association for Asian American Studies’ 2016 award for best book of literary criticism. It also made The New Yorker‘s “Books We Loved in 2016” list and has inspired a conference on race and creative writing that has run annually since 2014. During academic year 2017-2018, she will be in residence at the CUNY Graduate Center on an ACLS Frederick Burkhardt Fellowship, working with Ammiel Alcalay.
