Our Secretariat, currently based at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recently informed your officers that our association has reached a membership roster that now exceeds 1,000.  I am extremely pleased to share that news with you.  Just two years ago, we had a membership count of less than 760, but because of the hardworking and proactive efforts of our officers, secretariat staff and volunteers, conference organizers, and the Johns Hopkins University Press administration, our community is now, more than ever, expansive and robust in terms of our reach and character.  On behalf of your officers, I would like to thank you for the remarkable energy you invest in the sustenance of our collective and I encourage you to stay connected and engaged in the activities of our association.

The growth of our collective coincides ironically with and despite the significant downturns of local and global economies. These conditions are now considerably affecting the larger and deeper contexts of our academic lives, ranging from tuition hikes that will definitely reduce access to schools for many of us and our allies, to programmatic budget cuts that will erode at the ways we nurture our field.  Many of us are already struggling with salary deductions, and for those of us who hold unsecure positions, a bleak future looms.

It is not surprising that our association, organized around and through intersecting race-based struggles, is profoundly entangled in this challenging set of events.  We are, after all, fundamentally a set of communities of color whose historical formation as well as contemporary labors simultaneously constitute and resist our society’s political, economic, and social arrangements.  In this spirit, therefore, and in this moment of our collective’s growth and struggle, I would like to enlist your help in expressing our solidarity with and support of those who are taking action against policies that will threaten access to and retention within public higher education, particularly those who are on the campuses of the University of California system.  Their fortunes and struggles are intimately tied to us, and I think it is this moment that they need our community’s increasing strength to address the forces that threaten our schools’ commitments to access and social justice.

In solidarity,

Rick Bonus

President

Association for Asian American Studies

Dear Colleagues,

Thank you to all of our members who accepted nominations to run AAAS board positions.  It speaks well for our Association to have many answer the call to help lead out organization and members into the future.  I am pleased to announce that the following individuals have won elected positions:

Northern California: Kieu Linh Valverde
Midwest: Anita Mannur
N. England/Central Eastern Canada: Cathy Schlund-Vials
Interior West/South: Rudy Guevarra
Please join me in congratulating the newest members of our board!

Rick Bonus
President

As part of the festivities for our upcoming annual conference, we would like to request participants if they could submit a photo or a few photos of a memorable AAAS conference they attended in the past. The EARLIEST photo of an AAAS conference submitted will win aprize! Please send your pix to rbonus@u.washington.edu as soon as you can. Deadline for submitting: April 10, 2009.

Rick Bonus
President

——————————————–
Rick Bonus
Associate Professor
Dept. of American Ethnic Studies
Univ. of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-4380
(206) 543-3929

PLEASE SEND IN YOUR NOMINATIONS FOR THIS INAUGURAL AWARD

Engaged Scholarship Award Guidelines
Association for Asian American Studies

The Engaged Scholarship award recognizes scholars who have applied or used their scholarship for the “public good” by addressing inequalities in our society and improving the AAPI community. This award will recognize scholars for their body of work and contributions, not individual projects, collaborations, or publications.

Examples of potential nominees include an individual, group, or organization that demonstrate a record of publications (i.e. books, journal articles, policy reports, websites), sustained civic engagement projects, collaboration with community-based organizations, engaging students in community-based research/projects, and conducting applied research that has shaped public policies or benefits the community. These projects should educate the broader community and engage AAPI communities, for example, through public health, educational, or urban planning policies or through public art or historical preservation forums. Individuals may self nominate or be nominated for their record of engaged scholarship.

Nominations for publications other than books must include electronic versions of supporting materials, including but not limited to, any publications, project materials, and related products such as syllabi, websites, media coverage/press releases, etc. In addition, please include a CV (5 page maximum) and a statement (2 page maximum) explaining the relevancy and impact of their engaged scholarship.

One award will be given for the inaugural year of the award in 2009 at the Association for Asian American Studies meeting held in Hawaii.

Committee Members 2009:

Linda Trinh Vo, University of California, Irvine – Chair
Stacey Lee, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Larry Shinagawa, University of Maryland, College Park

PLEASE SEND MATERIALS BY SEPTEMBER 30, 2008 TO:

Email:
Stephanie Hsu: ssh13@cornell.edu

Address:
Association for Asian American Studies
Secretariat
420 Rockefeller Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853-2502

Email nominations are strongly preferred. Please mail any non-electronic supporting material (publications) to the address above.

REMINDER: Letters of interest due FEBRUARY 15, 2008

JAAS Executive Editor
Tony Peffer’s term as JAAS executive editor comes to a close in June 2009. To effect a smooth transition, we would like to have an editor-elect in place by April 2008. This individual will work alongside Tony Peffer for the final year of his term. Therefore, at this time, we invite letters of interest for editor-elect, in preparation for assuming the position of executive editor. The executive editor must be a tenured faculty member and an active scholar in the field of Asian American studies. Responsibilities include building and expanding a substantial cadre of qualified manuscript evaluators; managing the submission/evaluation process; making the final publication decision for issues, in keeping with the journal’s mission; collaborating with the reviews editor(s) in planning both volumes and individual issues; serving as the journal’s representative to the AAAS executive board; functioning as the AAAS executive board’s primary liaison to The Johns Hopkins University Press; leading the JAAS editorial board and organizing its work; maintaining all of the journal’s records; and keeping abreast of developments in all disciplinary and group-specific branches of scholarship in Asian American Studies as well as in the field more generally. In the letter of interest, explain your perception of the field’s principal issues in the present and what you see as emerging themes and concerns in the next five years. Describe specific strengths you could bring to the job of executive editor. The deadline for submission is February 15, 2008. The board will review the applications and announce its decision at the Chicago conference in April 2008.

Clarifying and Redrawing the AAAS Regions

At the October meeting, the board took a careful look at existing regions and the corresponding membership numbers (see below).

Mid-Atlantic/South 93 members (22%)

Pacific NW 21 members (5%)

Midwest/Mountain 72 members (17%)

S. California 89 members (21%)

N. Cailfornia 63 members (15%)

New England/Canada 52 members (12%)

Hawai’i 14 members (3%)

International 24 members (5%)

Total: 428 members (100%)
(as of February 2007)

In addition, it considered the arguments put forward at the 2007 annual conference for representation of the “Interior West” and Canada. To reflect the current membership distribution and to respond to the changing realities of Asian American population distributions, the board proposes a redrawing of the regional map. The new regional demarcations will be voted on at the 2008 Chicago conference at the general business meeting.

The proposed regions are:

- New England and Eastern Canada (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Vermont, Ontario and Quebec provinces)

- Mid-Atlantic (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Washington, D.C.)

- Mid-West (Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Minnesota, Michigan, Wisconsin, Indiana)

- Interior West and the South (W. Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky, N. Carolina, S. Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, S. Dakota, N. Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona, Utah, Idaho)

- Northern California (Zip codes >94xxx)

- Southern California (Zip codes <94xxx)

- Pacific Northwest, Hawaii, and Western Canada (Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, Pacific Islands, Alaska, W. Canada)

Seeking JAAS Executive Editor

Tony Peffer’s term as JAAS executive editor comes to a close in June 2009. To effect a smooth transition, we would like to have an editor-elect in place by April 2008. This individual will work alongside Tony Peffer for the final year of his term. Therefore, at this time, we invite letters of interest for editor-elect, in preparation for assuming the position of executive editor. The executive editor must be a tenured faculty member and an active scholar in the field of Asian American studies. Responsibilities include building and expanding a substantial cadre of qualified manuscript evaluators; managing the submission/evaluation process; making the final publication decision for issues, in keeping with the journal’s mission; collaborating with the reviews editor(s) in planning both volumes and individual issues; serving as the journal’s representative to the AAAS executive board; functioning as the AAAS executive board’s primary liaison to The Johns Hopkins University Press; leading the JAAS editorial board and organizing its work; maintaining all of the journal’s records; and keeping abreast of developments in all disciplinary and group-specific branches of scholarship in Asian American Studies as well as in the field more generally. In the letter of interest, explain your perception of the field’s principal issues in the present and what you see as emerging themes and concerns in the next five years. Describe specific strengths you could bring to the job of executive editor. The deadline for submission is February 15, 2008. Please send your letters of interest to: AAAS Secretariat, Cornell University, 420 Rockefeller Hall, Ithaca, NY 14853-2502. The board will review the applications and announce its decision at the Chicago conference in April 2008.