Katherine Agathon

Discovering Ourselves: A Symposium of Exploring, Challenging, and Negotiating Contemporary Asian American Identity

Abstract: In 2006, the Council on Asian American Studies (CAAS) was founded by Purdue University faculty and students who organized as a collective to support initiatives, programs and projects to advance issues relevant to the Asian American Community at Purdue University. There years later, with the approval of the College of Liberal Arts Faculty senate, the Asian American Studies program and minor has been incorporated into the Office of Interdisciplinary Studies. Much work, however, remains to be done to not only expand the program into a major, but to establish its presences as a permanent fixture of the campus multicultural community. The CAAS relies heavily on graduate students to counsel, organization and publicity of CAAS-sponsored events, and also as instructors for ASAM 240: Introduction to Asian American Studies. Graduate students are an integral component of the CAAS, but whose representation on the Council are small in number due to the departure of students upon graduation and the CAASs overall lack of visibility among graduate students on campus. In order to fortify the presences of the CAAS and foster interdisciplinary graduate education and cooperation, it is crucial to attract, involve, and retain graduate students from all disciplines whose research address Asian American topics to discover and define a common identity. For the Bilsland Strategic Initiatives Fellowship, I propose a year-long project that will culminate in a symposium whose overarching theme will be Asian American Identity Discourse (defined as a formal discussion of the subject of Asian American Identity in written, spoken, digital and artistic mediums) Entitled Discovering Ourselves: A Symposium of Exploring, Challenging, and Negotiating Contemporary Asian American Identity, the proposed symposium will initiate an overdue campus-wide, actionable discussion. Compressed of a plenary keynote address, panel discussions, digital storytelling session, reception and art display, the proposed symposium will directly respond to the fostering interdisciplinary graduate education strategies initiatives of the Purdue Graduate School.