"Research & Justice: Stretching the Contours of Asian American Politics" with Diane Wong

How do we conceptualize Asian American politics beyond the electoral sphere and demographics? What neighborhood spaces encourage the development of Asian American consciousness as relevant identity for political organizing, particularly for youth and elders? How can we think more capaciously about academic and non-academic collaboration—to push boundaries and to explore new possibilities that honors the expertise of directly-impacted people? Professor Diane Wong draws from her own community rooted research on evictions, displacement, and cultural erasure in Manhattan Chinatown to emphasize how residents, small businesses, and tenants are creatively organizing to stay in their homes, shifting away from the dominant narrative of Asian immigrant communities as disengaged from politics. Her talk will also underscore the role of research justice in the social sciences and center the organizing work of intergenerational and grassroots cultural collectives in New York City including the Chinatown Art Brigade, The W.O.W. Project, and Asian/Pacific/American Voices: A COVID-19 Public Memory Project that breaks down binaries between academic scholarship and community practice.

Diane Wong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University, Newark. She holds a Ph.D. in American Politics and M.A. in Comparative Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration from the Department of Government at Cornell University. Her current book project, You Can’t Evict A Movement, focuses on intergenerational resistance to gentrification in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Her work draws from a combination of methods including ethnography, participatory mapping, archival research, augmented reality, and oral history interviews. Her second book project is a co-edited volume with Mark Tseng-Putterman titled Contemporary Asian American Politics: Movement Moments and New Visions for the 21st Century. The book brings together a diverse range of issues from sex work decriminalization to abolition, deportation to decolonization, ecological degradation to intergenerational memory. She is the recipient of the Bryan Jackson Research on Minority Politics Award, the Don T. Nakanishi Award for Distinguished Scholarship and Service in Asian Pacific American Politics, and grants from the Russell Sage Foundation, National Science Foundation, among many others. Her work has appeared in Women's Studies Quarterly, Amerasia Journal, Urban Affairs Review, Asian American Policy Review, and a variety of volumes, anthologies, podcasts, and exhibitions. She is a member of the Chinatown Art Brigade and co-founder of The W.O.W. Project, a youth-led anti-displacement initiative based out of Wing On Wo & Co. the oldest store in Manhattan Chinatown.

Co-sponsored by: the American Studies Program, Department of Government, the Politics of Race, Immigration, Class & Ethnicity (PRICE) Initiative at Cornell University, and Department of Sociology.