The Advantage of Family: Exploring Asian American kinship networks

In keeping with the AAAS conference theme of “Challenging Inequalities,” this panel explores the conformation and depiction of Asian American families and kinship networks. Often perceived as giving an unfair advantage —- paper sons, ggehs, Japanese American family land ownership -— it has just as often been circumscribed or recreated, as with the Chinese Exclusion Act or contemporary issues of intermarriage and adoption. This panel welcomes papers from a variety of disciplines that study some aspect of Asian American familial history and its intersections with the state, U.S. racial hierarchies and gender roles, war, or problems of mass labor and migration. Comparative ethnic approaches are also welcome.

This panel will be sponsored by East of California and submitted to the Association of Asian American Studies conference in Hawai’i, April 2009. Please email title, brief paper description, and CV/brief bio to heidikim@northwestern.edu by 10/24/08.