Enacting Inclusive Futures: A Symposium on APIDA/A Communities
Fri, March 18, 2022 at In-person and Zoom
The Asian Pacific Islander Desi American (APIDA) and Asian (A) panethnic communities have experienced a whirlwind of mixed emotions in the last eighteen months. For example, in the APIDA community, the electrifying joy of seeing Sunisa Lee’s three Olympic Medal-winning performances this year in the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics, came only six months after the tragic, racist murders of Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan, Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, and Soon Chung Park, and Yong Ae Yue in the Atlanta Metro Area in March 2021. COVID-19 has loomed in the background along with global vaccine inequity and inaccessibility, while coups in Myanmar, crackdowns in Hong Kong, and militaristic acts by the People’s Republic of China, Israel, and North Korea against Taiwan, Palestine, and South Korea, respectively, have exposed the divisions within our panethnic APIDA/A community. These acrimonious incidents occurred at the same time as we celebrated the second Asian musical group topped the Billboard 100 (BTS’ Dynamite in 2020) and as Asian Americans’ visibility increased in the ongoing civil rights work throughout the West with some winning seats in major public offices (e.g. Hon. Michelle Wu, Mayor of Boston). Out of these breathtaking events, we as APIDA/A community members have found many reasons to seek new ways of coming together.
The diverse APDIA/A community at Michigan State University, in America’s Midwest, is no exception. This symposium builds on the ongoing work of bringing APIDA/A communities together both across the United States and beyond the national borders. At Michigan State, much joy has been found in our coming together as a panethnic community, which included a recent summit Building Inclusive Futures: A Summit on APIDA & Asian Communities at MSU on 09 October 2021. At the summit, we sought to create a blueprint of building [an] anti-racist culture and climate specifically as they relate to the well-being of APIDA/A faculty, staff, and students. We also sought to make visible the unique role the APIDA/A panethnic community has in the broader civil rights coalition.
As we commemorate several key moments in 2021 and 2022—the 10th anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear incident, the 40th anniversary of the murder of Vincent Chin near Detroit, Michigan, and the 50th anniversary of the expulsion of Taiwan from the United Nations, to name a few—it is critical that we explore new ways of understanding our diverse pasts and presents, recognizing both ruin and renewal as part of our community-engaged scholarly practices, and making both disciplinary and interdisciplinary inquiries in order to envision and enact inclusive futures.
