The Security of Identity Politics: The 2025 A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group Symposium

Presented by the A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group. Hosted by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

This symposium will interrogate how different forms of Asian/Pacific/American identity politics both serve and challenge notions of security amid the intensification of the border crisis, chauvinist populism, and forever wars. On one hand, representation-based identity politics offer security and comfort by widening membership into positions of power and privilege based on liberal capitalist promises of diversity. Concepts such as the model minority, affirmative action, and intersectionality have thus often been instrumentalized in the pursuit of defending and securitizing the existing political order against political challenges from both left and right. Alternatively, “Asian/Pacific/American” is an illustrative example of how identity can both gather marginalized peoples and generate forms of solidarity, knowledge, and activism across different geographies and cultures beyond the pursuit of belonging and security.

NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to the public. Registration is required.

Accessibility note: This venue has an elevator and is accessible for wheelchair users. There are single-stall, all gender restrooms, and a lactation room available. If you have any access needs, please email [email protected]

11:00 a.m. Coffee and Registration

11:45 a.m. Opening remarks

• 
  
• Crystal Parikh, Director, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU
  
• Linda Luu, NYU
  

12:00 p.m. Place-Based Cultural Work
Chair: Ayami Hatanaka

• 
  
• Mariko Whitenack, NYU, “Growing Relations (in)to Place”
  
• Yee Thao, UCLA, “‘Belong, Believe, Become:’ Reimagining Refugeehood and Spaces through Hmong Femme Weavership”
  
• Jo Alvarado, UCLA, “BAHAYNIHAN: Reworlding the Philippine Spatial Imaginary”
  

1:15 p.m. Lunch

2:15 p.m. Securitizing Internationalism
Chair: Adi Kumar

• 
  
• Pasuth Thothaveesansuk, UNC, “One Policeman and Two Colonies: America and Postwar Asian Liberal Internationalism”
  
• Nidhi Satyagal, UCLA, “Privilege and Violence: The Indian Diaspora’s Complicity in Hindutva within Community Organizations”
  
• Mich Ling, Rutgers, “Keeping House: On Contradiction, Care, and the Institutionalization of Asian American Studies”
  

4:00 p.m. Keynote: “The student as terrorist: Identity in the command forms of colonial racial capitalist worldmaking” by Dr. Jodi Melamed, Professor of English and Race, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies at Marquette University

• 
  
• Response by Dang Weiyu, NYU
  

5:30-6:30 p.m.: Keynote reception

10:00 a.m.: Coffee

10:30 a.m. The Limits of DEI and Institutional Critique
Chair: Linda Luu

• 
  
• Edna Wan, Cornell, “Cultural Preservation and Carceral Development: The Museum of Chinese America’s Politics of Property”
  
• Christine Phan, UPenn, “Developing the Politics of Solidarity: The Nonprofit Neutralization of Asian American Political Identity”
  
• Mariam Rahyab LCSW, NYU, “Decolonized Mental Health for Asian Americans”
  
• Anou Vang, UCLA, “Mloog — How Hmong Students Reimagine Care”
  

12:00 p.m. Asian/Pacific/American Identity Politics after the Critical Ethnic Studies Turn
Chair: Rui Liu

• 
  
• Joey Song, UMich, “Rejecting a Cohesive Asian American Identity in the Plight toward Empathy”
  
• Daniel Jin, UMich, “Beyond the Trans-Pacific: LatinAsian Histories of Capitalism, Empire, Labor, and Migration”
  
• Caroline Hsu, UMich, “‘Very Distinctly Asian in its Identity:’ Simu Liu, Bubble Tea, and Asian American ‘Common Sense’”
  

1:15 p.m.: Lunch

2:15 p.m. Racial Liberalisms and Entangled Colonialisms
Chair: Violet Dong

• 
  
• Saomai Phuong Nguyen, Cornell, “Spectacular Journeys: From Vietnamese Boat Refugees Swimming to Astronauts Flying”
  
• James Gui, Columbia, “Anti-War Aurality in the ‘US Navy of Rock and Roll’”
  
• Nancy Billings, Yale, “I left my native village and drifted to the American continent”: The Hemispheric Potential of the Poetry on Angel Island”
  

3:30 p.m. Closing remarks

• 
  
• Ayami Hatanaka, NYU
  

3:45-4:30 p.m. Reception

Photograph by Emily Gerace.

Host or Publisher A/P/A Institute at NYU