4/28 Challenges of the Past, Present, and Future: Addressing Asian and Asian American Inclusivity in Academia, Policy, and the Media

Ben de Guzman is the Director of the Mayor’s Office on Asian and  Pacific Islander Affairs (MOAPIA). He has been a leading voice at the local and national level on issues of racial equity, immigrants’ rights, veterans’ affairs, and LGBT justice for twenty years. He comes to MOAPIA from the Mayor’s Office of LGBTQ Affairs, where he served as the Community Outreach Specialist. During his tenure there, he helped execute two major first time events for the Office- the “District of Pride” LGBTQ cultural performance event and the 32nd Annual 17th Street High Heel Race, presented by the Mayor’s Office as lead organizer. He also served as both the Public Information Officer and the Americans with Disabilities Act Compliance Officer for the agency.

Patricia Chu is a professor of English and the Deputy Chair of the Department of English at the George Washington University. She studies Asian American and diasporic literature and film, Asian American Studies, and Women’s writing and autobiography. Her two most recent research projects have been informed by her own family’s history of migration, loss and assimilation, and questions about understanding the past. She has released several publications, including Where I Have Never Been: Asian American Narratives of Return, and In My Grandmother’s House which have been supported by a Columbian College Facilitating Grant and by a Robert H. Smith Research Fellowship.

Pawan Dhingra is an author, professor, and former curator and senior advisor of the Smithsonian Institution exhibition, Beyond Bollywood: Asian Indian Americans Shape the Nation. His byline includes The New York Times, CNN, The Conversation, Indian Express, and many other venues, and he and his work have been profiled in The Washington Post, NPR, The Guardian, Times of India, and elsewhere. His most recent book Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough (New York University Press 2020) has been profiled in these and other venues, and which author Min Jin Lee has said, “gets to the root of education obsessions.” He speaks from this work in the Netflix documentary, Spelling the Dream. He is the author of the award-winning Life Behind the Lobby: Indian American Motel Owners and the American Dream (Stanford University Press, 2012), which also has been profiled nationwide and internationally. He also authored the award-winning Managing Multicultural Lives: Asian American Professionals and the Challenge of Multiple Identities (Stanford University Press, 2007). Professor Dhingra co-authored the review text, Asian America: Sociological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, which is in its second edition (Polity Press, 2014 and 2021). He has served as president of the board of the South Asian American Digital Archive.

 

Audrey Pan is a Community Organizer and Programs Associates at OCA-GH where she works to strengthen the infrastructure of our youth programming and instill a culture of year-round civic engagement, political consciousness raising and arts & culture programming four our larger AAPI communities. In doing so, the hope is that the AAPI community will have the capacity to exert an influential voice in the public policy arena and in the social, racial and economic justice movement. Born and raised in NYC, she is also on the young professionals board of Chinatown Youth Initiatives whose power is to empower New York City youth with the knowledge and skills necessary to address the needs of Chinatown, Asian Americans, and other underrepresented communities. She grew up in NYC’s Chinatown and as the daughter of Chinese immigrants and former garment workers, she has always been a fierce advocate for fair and humane immigration policies and labor conditions. She holds a BA from Middlebury College in Sociology with minors in Education and Spanish and will begin law school this incoming fall to pursue community lawyering.

 

Jisoo M. Kim is Korea Foundation Associate Professor of History, International Affairs, and East Asian Languages and Literatures. She currently serves as the Director of the Institute for Korean Studies and the Co-Director of the East Asia National Resource Center at GW. She also serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Korean Studies. She is a specialist in gender, law, and emotions in Korean history. Her broader research interests include gender and sexuality, crime and justice, forensic medicine, literary representations of the law, history of emotions, vernacular, and gender writing. She is the author of The Emotions of Justice: Gender, Status, and Legal Performance in Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2015), which was awarded the 2017 James Palais Prize of the Association for Asian Studies. She is also the co-editor of The Great East Asian War and the Birth of the Korean Nation by JaHyun Kim Haboush (Columbia University Press, 2016). She is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled Sexual Desire, Crime, and Gendered Subjects: A History of Adultery Law in Korea. She received her M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University.