Asian American Heritage Seeking: Toward a Critical and Conscious Study Abroad Curriculum

The author examines the connections between education abroad, race, and belonging through a framework that is critical of U.S. empire. Drawing on her experience as a Thai American heritage seeking study abroad student and a former study abroad advisor at two different public universities, the author shares stories about race and belonging from semi-structured interviews with fellow Asian American heritage-seekers. The author connects these stories with the politically- and militaristically-driven development of U.S. education abroad programs and demonstrates how these stories confront the ongoing and historical processes that racialize Asian Americans as “perpetually foreign,” as in belonging elsewhere—Asia. These stories illustrate a need for a critical and conscious education abroad curriculum that addresses issues of race for all students. The author suggests that education abroad curriculum ought to cover topics including U.S. empire, race, and belonging, and that this curriculum can be developed in collaboration with ethnic and transnational feminist programs and scholars, diversity and inclusion offices, mental and psychological health professionals, and other experts in these areas. The author concludes with a list of action items that can move us toward a more critical and conscious education abroad curriculum

Asian American Heritage Seeking: Personal Narrative Performances of Ancestral Return

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 constructed, disrupted, and transformed when Asian Americans traverse borders, time, and imaginaries. I use a performance ethnography and personal narrative performance methodology to center the memories and experiences of Asian American women who have practiced ancestral return. Personal narrative performances theorize Asian American belongings, migration patterns, and transnational identities within the context of complex and contradictory practices of ancestral return. This work contributes to the theorization of personal narrative performance as well as a growing literature on the return mobilities of the Asian American second-generation and beyond

I\u27m Sorry My Hair is Blocking Your Smile : A Performative Assemblage and Intercultural Dialogue on the Politics of Hair and Place

This performative essay is an instance of embodied writing, an assemblage by seven individuals responding to a shared moment from different perspectives on the politics of hair. In the process we engage the sociological imagination as we turn private troubles into public issues, or better yet, we collectively show how public issues are our private troubles

PLOY : An Immigrant Daughter\u27s Archival Survival Strategy

Transnational human migration is commonly conceptualized as the moment a person crosses national borders. In “PLOY : An Immigrant Daughter’s Archival Survival Strategy,” I advance a framework of migration in which migration is an ongoing embodied and relational process, one that continues after a person crosses national borders. This framework maintains that migration exists as a meaningful concept because of the social, political, cultural, and historical contexts that gives this type of mobility meaning. I use a performative novel methodology to construct and represent this argument; a performative novel methodology uses fiction and the novel as a performative text and as a mode of inquiry and critique. The performative novel component of the dissertation is titled PLOY and illustrates a mixed-documented Thai American family’s ongoing and uneven relationships to the U.S. immigration system. The dissertation is divided into three parts. Part I outlines a conceptual framework for the performative novel which draws upon the theories of performative writing as method and Asian American literary and cultural production. Part II is composed of the novel manuscript. The novel follows Ploy, a PhD student whose research about Southeast Asian migrants and life converge when her father reveals he may face deportation to Thailand. PLOY is a meditation on the effects of immigration on migrant families, and an emotional story of survival and kinship in the wake of loss and misfortune. It is a story-based argument that contextualizes migration and presents it as an ongoing embodied and relational process. Part III is a methodological afterword that describes and reflects upon the performative novel as scholarly practice. As a mode and product of research, this dissertation critiques the U.S. political and military involvement in Southeast Asia and the politics of storytelling, documentation, and archives by linking those histories with the present-day resettlement and livelihood of Southeast Asian refugees and migrants in the U.S. today and the ongoing precarity they experience in relation to the ever-changing immigration system. By presenting this argument in novel form, I draw and expand upon the embodied, aesthetic writing methodologies of queer and feminist scholars and writers of color

Inter and Enter: An Invitation to Collaboration Thru Autoethnography

This performative and collaborative autoethnography plays with the homophonic or maybe homiletics of “inter” and “enter” as the invitational aspect of collaborative autoethnography. The contribution of diverse collaborators from differing racial, ethnic, geo-spatial locations, and generational standpoints speak to/between experiences with the dialogic aspects of autoethnography; the speaking of self with and for others that is always a part of autoethnographic practice, now made salient in the intentional collaborative, thus exploring the interpersonal, interracial, international, intersectional, interstitial, and the symbolic interactional aspects of autoethnography.  </p

Collaborative Autoethnographic Writing as Communal Curative

This collaborative autoethnography reflects on how each author experienced COVID-19 and associated precarity. We explore the ways in which this experience relates to our identities (both particular and plural), and our positionalities in terms of privilege and marginality. As a collective of diverse collaborators, we confront dialectical questions of self and society. Our contributions reveal our advantage/disadvantage, mobility/immobility, and the borders and boundedness before/ during/after COVID-19. We show the power of curative writing in collaborative autoethnography and how the sharing of our experiences of vulnerability represents an invitation to human connection.  </p