Teaching
Students from the GLAS 300 course in Spring 2022 and the mural we produced
I am an interdisciplinary scholar whose teaching focuses on globalization, immigration, diaspora, transnationality, as it relates to labor, food, and racial and gender formations. My teaching pedagogy is anchored by social justice and intersectional frameworks, alongside experiential and field-based learning. I appreciate the histories and experiences that students bring to the classroom and view them as sources of knowledge and inspiration. I approach my teaching as an opportunity to share stories and build an archive of knowledge and praxis with students who come with a range of knowledge, lenses, and assumptions. My one fundamental goal is to have students see how their individual stories are connected to a larger tapestry and to each other.
Courses
Inaugural “Caldero” Cookbook -based on oral histories of chefs conducted by students
GLAS 230: Cultural Politics of Asian American Food
How do food and food stories serve as conduits for healing, resistance, collective historicizing, and community building? Using food as a storyteller to capture the heterogeneity and depth of Asian American’s lived experiences, this interdisciplinary course examines issues of Asian American identity and community formations as they are produced at the intersection of race, ethnicity, class, gender, and sexuality and are inextricably linked to global and transnational dynamics. The course turns to food to narrate stories about diaspora, home, empire, memory, and history, while grappling with the relations of power and structural forces that shape the social inequalities and inform Asian American lives.
Sample Excerpts of artwork from student food memoirs from GLAS 230
GLAS 300: Global Asia in Chicago
How do labor, capital, commodities, culture, and racialized/gendered bodies intersect to produce Chicago neighborhoods like Uptown? Focusing on the study of Chicago's Uptown neighborhood, this course seeks to present an alternative story of Uptown, by examining its multi-racial and multiethnic histories; gentrification/housing/ neighborhood transformations; and resistance and the arts. In this interdisciplinary course, students have a unique opportunity to engage with and learn from the Uptown community and contribute to the Dis/Placements public history project virtually documents a narrative of space, history, labor, and everyday resistance.
Course flyer, Spring 2022
“The Heart that Beats” - a mural project created by students in Spring 2022. Click on the image to learn more about the mural.
Student produced digital stories from the course
By Jane Minnelli Escarez, Spring 2019
By Michelle Guo, Spring 2019
GLAS/GWS 458: Asian America and Transnational Feminism
This interdisciplinary course explores the frameworks and radical possibilities emergent at the nexus of transnational feminisms, gendered activism, and the geopolitics of ‘Asian America.’
(No Space Mourn): Transnational Adoption as a Form of Capital Exchange by Sarah Whyte
“The artwork presented is a visual story that reveals how our society has socialized and institutionally promoted the acceptance of the savior narrative when it comes to transnational adoption and how that ideology leaves no space to mourn. The artwork is an abstract iteration of an outfit I wore in the orphanage. Transnational adoption is a transnational feminist issue because of the way it intersects with racialized, classed, and heteronormative logic within globalization and capitalist patriarchies. Through art, I question the complexities of transnational adoption as a transactional exchange that perpetuates a geopolitical structure of inequality.”
Where is She? What Has She Done? By Andrea Sy
I took on this creative project because there are parts of my mother’s life I do not know about. I only know what she chooses to share. This zine that I used to mimic the photo album she gave to me to start this project is where I started. Through this project I tried to grapple with my mother’s transnational identity as a woman of the “third world,” the Philippines, transferring over to the “first world,” America. This was mostly done with the pictures my mother gave me and my own materials that I acquired over the years…..Even after asking her whether she is satisfied. My mother always answers with “It’s better now.” I think I know what she means, but I also feel that this is where she stops sharing.”
THE(RE)INCARNATIONOFTHEEMBODIMENTOFCARE by Michael Oliveros
This project of creating the costume of a manananggal out of my PCT uniform is the product of dialogue in research surrounding the questions: in the context of healthcare and the Philippine diaspora, who has the power to articulate identity? How does the (dis)embodiment of care affect the ability to mobilize within systems of oppression? The purpose of constructing the manananggal from the patient care technician uniform is to further emphasize the alien construction of the body of the Filipina healthcare worker in the eyes of Western imagination, as well as to bring to light broader conversations about the commodification of bodies within mediations of care. My fascination with the manananggal does not come from its monstrous aspects, but the humane. After all, the manananggal is a creature that literally has its insides exposed to the outside, for everyone to see: what does it mean to be vulnerable, with your gut hanging out, exposed to air? After all, finding authenticity through vulnerability happens with death of the parts of self that no longer serve a function.
GLAS/ANTH 201: Asian Markets, Corporations, and Social Justice
What do Hello Kitty, Nike, and McDonalds have in common? How are investment bankers connected to garment sweatshop workers? What is the relationship between global capital accumulation and individual debt? This course offers a critical analysis of multinational corporations as social institutions and their commodification and representation of Asian and Asian American cultures and economies. Covering a range of topics like KPop, fair trade, sweatshops, and the beauty industry, this course examines how globalization and late capitalism have, and continue, to (re)shape what Asia and Asian American means.
Student Produced “Adbuster” Projects
from Left to Right: “Kill the Root” by Christian Alfaro, Crystal Gebre, Eric Hernandez, and Maria Borrero-Veaz, Spring 2013; “The Best Therapies Stem from Generations of the Poor and the Sick” by Christine Athamanh, Dawn Joy, Tolu Odueyungbo, Ravi Sinha, Fall 2018; “Saved Money, Lived Better” by Joy Magana and Lillian Xie, Fall 201
INDIA STUDY ABROAD COURSES
During the Summers of 2012 and 2013, I co-taught a six-week study abroad course in India (New Delhi and Udaipur) on the topic of “Food, Labor, and Justice” with Dr. Gayatri Reddy and local host, Rishi Chaturvedi.
