Announcing the 2023 Conference Theme: Sustainable Publics

We are pleased to announce Sustainable Publics as the theme for our 2023 conference. This theme, which touches on some of the most pressing issues facing the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, will call on the field of Asian American Studies to advance and cultivate learning, development, and collective engagements in public scholarship for speculative possibilities of expansive and humanizing change/justice. Our annual gathering convenes scholars, students, and practitioners to celebrate meaningful research, impactful advocacy, and more.

Sustainable Publics will be held April 6-9, 2023 in Long Beach, California. The deadline for submissions is October 4, 2022 at midnight PDT.

Cultivating Sustainable Publics

As we navigate the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the latest rise of anti-Asian violence has opened up public discourses and policy windows for those outside of Asian American Studies to recognize the presence of anti-Asian racism. Across media, celebrities and others have sloganized “Stop Asian Hate” or “Stop AAPI Hate,” even though genuine engagements and pan-ethnic partnerships with Pacific Islanders remain missing. Some efforts under this banner have led to the fortification of the carceral state, which reinforces and reproduces anti-Black racism and the surveillance, imprisonment, and deportation of Pacific Islanders, South Asian Americans, Southeast Asian Americans, and other Asian Americans. However, sustaining intersectional movements to dismantle anti-Asian racism, settler colonialism, militarism, colorism, anti-Black racism, racial capitalism, xenophobia, cis-het patriarchy, and other oppressive systems need not be mutually exclusive.

Cultivating, expanding, and sustaining the public relevance and impacts of Asian American Studies requires reciprocal relationships and relational methodologies to public scholarship.

We invite Asian American Studies practitioners, scholars, teachers, artists, activists and beyond to share how they participate in, adapt to, explore, interrogate, ponder, and envision interactions with multiple publics and counterpublics:

• Activism
• Art
• Debates
• Discourses
• Education, Pedagogies, and Teaching
• Engagement
• Ethics
• Intellectualism
• Leadership
• Media
• Methodologies
• Narratives
• Policies
• Politics
• Praxis
• Research Partnerships
• Scholarship