Global Perspectives on Anti-Asian Racism: Overcoming The Hate

APRU “Global Perspectives on Anti-Asian Racism: Overcoming The Hate” Webinar Series

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While anti-Asian racism has already existed globally, the reemergence of geopolitical tensions, inequities and even violence are now in sharp focus because of the Covid-19 crisis and has revealed the rising and rampant hate.

This is a critical time for understanding and serious dialogue. Bringing together university students, experts, and leaders, APRU universities are creating a space to share knowledge and experience to have difficult conversations across the Asia-Pacific region. This dialogue is designed to open the door for more understanding of racially targeted hate and the ways that these ideas circulate and have influence of our daily lives.

The APRU community reflects the tightness of social networks across a widespread geographic region and we offer these discussions as a space to come together in unity to pinpoint opportunities for universities to build a more inclusive future.

APRU is committed to enhancing social wellbeing by acting to combat inequality and racism, promote diversity and inclusion, and the empowerment of women and minorities. This event is hosted by APRU with the University of California Los Angeles in partnership with The Chinese University of Hong Kong, The University of Auckland, and The University of British Columbia.

Part II: Global Perspectives

The rise in anti-Asian hate crimes and acts of prejudice against people of Asian heritage during the COVID-19 era is not unique to the United States. Even during the earliest days of the outbreak, residents of Wuhan were victims of discrimination in other parts of China. Since that time, many countries around the globe have witnessed a rise in hate crimes and ethnic tension.

Featuring two panels, a faculty and student panel from four APRU universities (UCLA, The University of British Columbia, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, and The University of Auckland), this forum provides a space for reflection, analysis, solidarity, and activism to explore Anti-Asian Hate in a global context.

Speakers (Faculty Panel)

Ying-yi HONG (康螢儀), Choh-Ming Li Professor of Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK)

Professor Hong received her bachelor’s degree from CUHK and her Ph.D. degree in Social and Personality Psychology from Columbia University in 1994. Before returning to CUHK, she was a faculty member at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the US, and the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Her research focuses on culture and cognition, multicultural identity and intergroup relations. She received the Otto Klineberg Intercultural and International Relations Award, the International Society for Self and Identity Outstanding Early Career Award, the Nanyang Award for Research Excellence, Outstanding Contributions to Cultural Psychology Award, and was elected a fellow of Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University. She is also a founding Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology published by SAGE.

Dr. Changzoo Song, Senior Lecturer, Asian/Korean Studies, University of Auckland, New Zealand

Dr. Song received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. He has been working on nationalism and national identity of Korea, Korean diaspora (particularly Soviet Koreans and Korean Chinese), Diasporic identity, Ethnic return migrations, and Diasporic engagement policy. Currently, Dr. Song is working on two projects: The Acculturation Patterns of the 1.5 and second generation Korean New Zealander youth; and Asian Experiences of the Covid-19-related Racism and Discrimination with his research team. His research has been published in international journals including European Journal of Korean Studies, Journal of Chinese Overseas, Journal of Ethnic Food, IZA World of Labor, International Journal of Korean History, Acta Koreana, and New Zealand Asian Studies Journal. He also published numerous book chapters and edited volumes. He has Director of the Core Program in Korean Studies (Academy of Korean Studies grant) of his institute since 2013.

Sunera Thobani, Associate Professor, Department of Asian Studies and the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice, The University of British Columbia

Prof. Thobani’s research and scholarship focus on critical race, postcolonial and feminist theory; globalization, citizenship and migration; and violence, media, Muslim women and the War on Terror. Dr. Thobani has served as Director of the RAGA (Race, Autobiography, Gender and Age) Centre at UBC, and as the Ruth Wynn Woodward Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University. Dr. Thobani is the author of Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2007), and co-editor of Asian Women: Interconnections (Canadian Scholars' Press, 2005) and States of Race: Critical Race Feminist Theory for the 21st Century (Between the Lines, 2010). Her research is published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including Borderlands, Feminist Theory, The Supreme Court Review, Canadian Woman Studies, International Journal of Communication and Race & Class, among others.

Nguyễn-võ Thu-hương, Associate Professor in Asian Languages and Cultures and Asian American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

Prof. Nguyễn-võ is completing a book project exploring relational methods in critical refugee studies for inquiries into the human, drawing the thread that connects refugees to others not designated as such, but who nevertheless share the perilous conditions of not being counted as fully human in Enlightenment humanist sovereignty and progressive historiography. While thinking through the conditions that subjected them to the status of the expendable, disposable, killable, forgettable at particular moments in time, the book searches for ways to approach what they did to live and be in the world. Her other research projects explore the politics of time in futurist visions from the colonial moment to the present in cultural works by Indochinese, Vietnamese, African American, and other artists, writers, activists.

Moderator

Michael Berry, Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies and Director of the UCLA Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA

Prof. Berry has written and edited eight books on Chinese literature and cinema, including Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (2006) and A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (2008) and most recently An Accented Cinema: Jia Zhangke on Jia Zhangke (2021). He has served as a film consultant and a juror for numerous film festivals, including the Golden Horse (Taiwan) and the Fresh Wave (Hong Kong). A two-time National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow, Berry's book-length translations include The Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai (2008) by Wang Anyi, shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize, To Live (2004) by Yu Hua, a selection in the National Endowment for the Arts Big Read library, and Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City (2020) by Fang Fang.
Speakers (Student Panel)

Ka Wang (Kelvin) LAM, MPhil student, Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong

Ka Wang Kelvin Lam is a PhD student in Sociology at The University of Hong Kong. He completed his undergraduate and MPhil degrees at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on (forced) migration and immigrant incorporation, with regional expertise in East and Southeast Asia. Currently, Kelvin also collaborates with the Refugee Union and has organised a number of service projects consisting of language classes, guided tours, and other educational activities, for 300+ asylum seekers and refugees stranded in Hong Kong to help them better adjust to life.

Hye Ji (Erica) Lee, Postgraduate Student in Sociology, The University of Auckland

이혜지 Hye Ji (Erica) Lee, M.A., interpersonally known as Erica, is a graduate student and researcher from the Department of Sociology, Waipapa Taumata Rau (University of Auckland). Her principal research areas are in 'race', critical theory, decoloniality, psychoanalysis, and non-Western epistemologies.

Kiran Sunar, The University of British Columbia

Kiran Sunar is a Liu Scholar, a guest doctoral fellow at the Max Weber Kolleg for Advanced Social and Cultural Studies, and a PhD student in the Department of Asian Studies. Kiran received her BA (Jt. Hons) from McGill University in Religious Studies and Gender Studies, and an MA from UBC in English Literature focusing on literary representations of diasporic Sikh masculinity in Gautam Malkani’s Londonstani and Ranj Dhaliwal’s Daaku. Her PhD project attends to questions of gender, sexuality, and the fantastical in South Asian literatures with a focus on Punjabi literature in the early modern period (16th to 18th century). Kiran also holds an interest in cinema studies and in questions of identity including the intersections of race, class, sexuality, religion, and gender.

Suong Thai, PhD student in Cultural and Comparative Studies University of California, Los Angeles

Suong Thai is a PhD student in Cultural and Comparative Studies – Japan Focus in the department of Asian Languages and Cultures, UCLA. She received a BA in Literature from University of Social Sciences and Humanities, HCMC (Vietnam), and an MA in Asian Studies from Leiden University (the Netherlands). Her research focuses on exploring how traumatic memories of defeat are reflected in postwar Japanese literature and Vietnamese refugee literature. Her general interests also include (post/de)colonialism, psychoanalysis, memory studies, trauma studies, gender and sexuality studies.
Moderator

Yasmine Krings, University of California, Los Angeles

Yasmine Krings received a BA in East Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Chicago and an MA in Regional Studies – East Asia from Harvard University. Her research focuses on conceptions and portrayals of mixed-race-ness in Japan across visual and textual media from the postwar era to the present day. Her prior work and general interests include women’s literature, motherhood, gender and sexuality, blackness and postcolonial studies.

Sponsor(s): UCLA International Institute, Center for Chinese Studies, Asian American Studies Center, Association of Pacific Rim Universities