Dr. Min Yu and her colleagues from Colleage of Education at Wayne State UNiversity publised a paper in “Sociological Inquiry”, which addresses Asian Americans who have become targets of increasing hatred and violence since the COVID-19 pandemic. The two primary focus of this paper are: (1) to demarcate the epistemic erasure of societal knowledge and narratives of Asian Americans as braided with other forms of anti-Asian racism by tracing its historical roots in orientalism, colonialism, and imperialism; (2) to redress such erasure by foregrounding transnational perspectives and Asian American Critical Race Theory (AsianCrit). By attending to historical and ongoing experiences of migration and racialization, this paper highlights the transculturality of Asian American histories, epistemologies, and communities, along with the multi-stranded connections that they share with diasporic Asians in other countries. It expands the dominant framing of racialized minorities in the United States that indexes and limits their experiences within the geopolitical boundaries of the nation-state. By situating Asian Americans within critical historical and transnational contexts, this paper generates a fuller and more complex understanding of the past and present conditions of Asian Americans and anti-Asian racism. It also deliberately highlights the agency of Asian American youth and their strategies in contesting anti-Asian racism in schools and society at large. By amplifying Asian American youth voices and agency, this paper not only affirms their wealth of transnational funds of knowledge but also offers crucial interventions challenging the curricular violence that continues to marginalize and misrepresent Asian Americans. You can check out the full paper at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/soin.12572.

Dr. Min Yu is an Associate Professor of Comparative and International Education & Social Studies Education. Her webpage can be found here https://education.wayne.edu/profile/fy7865.