Welcome to Austin! the live music capital of the world, home to the Austin City Limits and South-by-Southwest music festivals, Willie Nelson, Lance Armstrong, and the Whole Foods flagship store.  Our conference convenes at the Omni Downtown Austin, a few blocks from the bar and music venues of Sixth Street and the Lady Bird Johnson Hike & Bike trail rimming Lake Travis.  It is in this venue that the Association for Asian American Studies will come together for our annual meeting and reflect on our past as well as the future of our field.

 

Below, you will find special events that will help you experience Austin. These events are open to those who register to the conference as well as their guests, partners, and family members.

 

Registration for these events can be submitted along with the conference registration form online at http://aaastudies.org/2010/registration/index.php. Don’t forget registration deadlines for the conference. Early bird registration ends ON March 1, 2010.  ALL PAPER PRESENTERS AND PANELISTS MUST REGISTER BY THEN IN ORDER TO PARTICIPATE IN THE CONFERENCE.

 

 

Tour of East Austin

 

It’s true enough that Austin is a progressive city; some describe it as a “little blue oasis in a big red state.” And yet when it comes to matters of urban displacement and segregation its history is as fraught and complex as any other. This is a guided tour of the Eastside — home to Austin’s largest concentration of Mexican American and African American residents. The Eastside offers lessons on community-resilience and the creation of alternative institutions despite legacies of segregation and displacement. This tour will cover many of the celebrated sites of the Eastside: churches, community and cultural centers, parks and the ethnic commercial strips. The tour will also include a presentation of the changing racial composition and geography of Austin in light of new immigration, rapid urban development and gentrification.

 

The tour will last 90 minutes and cost about $8 for transportation.  Scheduled for Friday afternoon, April 9, 2010.

 

 

Zilker Botanical Garden

2220 Barton Springs Rd

Austin, TX 78746

 

Located on 30 acres, the Zilker Botanical Garden is known as the “jewel in the heart of Austin.” With rose, herb, and Japanese gardens interspersed among waterfalls, streams, and Koi ponds, the Zilker Botanical Garden provides visitors a natural and nature-filled refuge. In particular, the Taniguchi Japanese Garden, which occupies three acres, features two ponds and a Togetsu-kyo bridge (”Bridge to Walk Over the Moon”). The garden is named after retired Stockton, California farmer Isamu Taniguchi who spent 18 months designing and transforming the rugged landscape. The garden opened to the public in 1969. This guided tour will take approximately 2 hours and is estimated to cost $6 per person, transportation by shared taxi included.  Scheduled for 1:30-3:30 Thursday, April 8, 2010.

 

http://www.zilkergarden.org/gardens/oriental.html

 

 

Harry Ransom Center / The University of Texas at Austin

 

The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin holds extensive collections of rare books, manuscripts, photography, film, art, and the performing arts.  Focused on advancing the study of arts and humanities through the acquisition and preservation of original cultural materials, the Harry Ransom Center houses the Gutenberg Bible, the first photograph, and a rich archive of first-edition manuscripts. The Center’s film holdings are the focus of an exhibition titled, “Making Movies” (February 2 - August 1, 2010), which features iconic Hollywood star photographs, Gone with the Wind costumes and storyboards (including Scarlett’s “curtain dress”), Gloria Swanson’s annotated script for Sunset Boulevard, and Robert De Niro’s costumes from past films. The Center’s film collection contains over 10,000 radio, television, and radio scripts, 15,000 posters and lobby cards, and over one million photographs.  This guided tour, which will include collection materials relevant to Asian Pacific American Studies, will take approximately 2 hours and requires only transport costs: $2 by bus or $3 by shared taxi.

 

Scheduled for 1:30-3:30 Friday, April 9, 2010.

 

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu

 

 

LBJ Library and Museum

2313 Red River Street

Austin, TX 78705

 

The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum houses forty five million pages of historical documents (inclusive of the former president’s entire public career). One of thirteen presidential libraries administered by the National Archives and Records Administration, the LBJ Library and Museum includes coins, stamps, Oval Office furniture, personal presidential items (owned by the former president and former First Lady), and a collection of four thousand editorial cartoons from all facets of LBJ’s presidency and political career. Additionally, the LBJ Library and Museum showcases over ten thousand items of political memorabilia from George Washington’s inauguration to the present day.

 

Admission is free. Self-guided tours are about 90 minutes.  Shared taxis are about $6.60 per person and buses are also convenient.

 

http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/

 

 

Whole Foods Cooking Demo and Tour

 

Austin is home to the Whole Foods flagship store, centrally located at the intersection of Sixth St. and Lamar.  Enjoy a one-hour, three-course cooking demonstration of Tex-Mex cuisine at their cooking academy followed by a self-guided tour of this organic products paradise which includes a chocolate fountain, bars dedicated to cheese, beer, barbeque, and raw food dishes.

 

Estimated time for this demo and tour is 3 hours.  Estimated costs are $27 which includes a three-course meal and transportation by shared taxi.  This tour may be cancelled if NOT ENOUGH INDIVIDUALS ARE enrolled.  Scheduled for 11-2 Saturday April 10, 2010.

 

http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/stores/lamar/

 

http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/stores/lamar-culinarycenter/

 

 

 

Re-SEAing SouthEast Asian American Studies

Memories & Visions: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

 

San Francisco State University

March 10-11, 2011

Call for papers

The third tri-annual interdisciplinary Southeast Asians in the Diaspora conference will take place at San Francisco State University. The San Francisco Bay Area is home to sizable populations of Burmese, Cambodian, Filipino, Hmong, Indonesian, Lao, Malaysian, Singaporean, Thai, and Vietnamese Americans. This conference will foreground the large Southeast Asian American communities of the Bay Area, Silicon Valley, and the Pacific Northwest, as well as continue to build momentum and grow just as the Southeast Asian American demographics increase in size and visibility here in the U.S. and in particular, on the West Coast.

 

The main objectives of this conference are:

· to encourage the interdisciplinary and comparative study of Southeast Asian

American peoples and their communities;

· to promote national and international cooperation in the field;

· to establish partnerships between academia and the community.

 

This two-day conference explores memories (e.g., memories of homeland; memories of war; memories of childhood and growing up American; historical memories; embodied memories; intergenerational memories; technologies of memories; and imagined/created memories) and visions (actual sightings and sites of Southeast Asian Americans and their communities, both real and imaginary). Because this conference takes place after the constitutionally mandated 2010 census, the focus will be on locating/situating Southeast Asian American Studies for the 21^st century.

 

The conference invites proposals for panels, workshops, and individual papers from all disciplines and fields of study that explore the dialectical relationship between memories and visions related to the following topics:

· Southeast Asian American health and wellness;

· Southeast Asian American social justice;

· Southeast Asian American and critical pedagogy;

· Southeast Asian American youth cultures;

· Southeast Asian American folklore, folklife, and religions;

· Southeast Asian American families, relationships, and communities;

· Southeast Asian American queer cultures and spaces;

· Southeast Asian American sexualities;

· Southeast Asian Americans of mixed heritage/race;

· Southeast Asian American transnationality, transnationalization, and transnationalism;

· Sino-Southeast Asian Americans;

· Explorations of how artists (writers, filmmakers, visual artists) “see” and envision themselves and their communities as Southeast Asian Americans;

· the location and relationship of Southeast Asia to Southeast Asian America;

· the shifting demographics of Southeast Asian Americans vis-à-vis (in)visibility.

Papers will also be considered on any related topics in Southeast Asian American Studies.

250 word abstracts should be submitted by June 15, 2010 to Dr. Jonathan H. X. Lee at jlee@sfsu.edu with the following information: a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, and d) abstract with title.

All papers will go through an internal review process and decisions regarding acceptance of papers for the conference will be communicated by October 15, 2010.

 

Information on pervious conferences:

 

1^st 2005 at University of California, Riverside

http://www.international.ucla.edu/asia/events/showevent.asp?eventid=3062

 

2^nd 2008 at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

http://www.aasp.uiuc.edu/seasiandiaspora/2008/schedule.html

 

Jonathan H. X. Lee, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies
San Francisco State University
Department of Asian American Studies
1600 Holloway Ave, EP 103
San Francisco, CA 94132