Now in its second year, the Faculty Initiatives Fund was created by ACRE to support faculty members who do work broadly in the field of Asian Canadian, Asian Migration studies and/or with Asian Canadian communities.
The fund also seeks to support ACRE’s twin goals of enhancing capacity for research on, for and with Asian Canadian communities by Asian Canadian scholars and for work that critically examines and expands the scope of Asian Canadian studies, especially from equity and intersectional perspectives.
Below, faculty members who received the funds in 2024 share its impact on their research and collaborations with the larger Asian Canadian community.
Photo by Amanda Cheong
The ACRE Faculty Initiative Fund helped to lay the foundations for what will be an ongoing community-based research partnership with the Canadian International Dragon Boat Festival Society. Our collaboration this past year centered around our mutual interests in thinking about how Asian immigrant and local Indigenous communities can engage in intercultural dialogue through our shared use of Vancouver’s unceded waterways (in our case, the bodies of water colonially known as False Creek and English Bay).
By supporting immigrant- Indigenous community dialogues and consultations, our project informed the designing of Vancouver’s first public drone show, which was staged during the Concord Pacific Dragon Boat Festival in June 2024. This event was notable in that it featured a land acknowledgment that was made in multiple languages: English, Mandarin, Cantonese, and hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ , as well as the integration of Chinese and Indigenous imagery over the skies of False Creek. Our future research collaborations will focus on continuing to document these ongoing intercultural dialogues, and, in the long-term, the history of dragon boating in Vancouver.
ACRE funding has allowed us to mount an exhibition highlighting Asian Canadian history in the public area of Asian Library. The exhibition focuses on Korean and Chinese-language collections that are usually stored out of sight in Rare Books and Special Collections (RBSC) and University Archives, and also includes reproductions of collections from community groups outside of UBC.
The exhibition hopes to dispel the notion of communities as simple monoliths and instead, highlight the complex range of voices within a given community. How do we understand the categories “Asian Canadian,” “Chinese Canadian,” and “Korean Canadian”? Where do gaps exist in the voices of those communities? When do those voices become valuable, and who determines the value? Who is listening?
ACRE funding was used primarily to hire two Dual Master of Archival Studies and Library and Information Studies students. These students researched and planned the exhibit, and the project provided them with the opportunity to implement their learning on something that is both professionally and personally meaningful to them. The project also allowed librarians and archivists supervising the project to better understand what’s involved in such a venture, so that we can consider ways of doing similar projects in the future.
The ACRE Faculty Initiatives Fund allowed me to organize a research workshop for graduate and undergraduate students in the Department of Geography. Held in person in Term 2, 2024 on March 1st, 2024, this 2.5 hour roundtable focused centering Asian North American and Pacific Islander scholars with backgrounds in history, planning, geography and architecture. Each speaker centered on the spatial dimensions of their research and highlighted their approaches to working with their respective communities. The roundtable was titled: “Asian North American, Indigenous Asias and Pacific Islander Epistemologies”. Invited speakers from Georgetown University, University of Fraser Valley, University of Oregon, and University of Buffalo shared their research.
It was well attended by Geography graduate and undergraduate students in addition to some faculty members from the Geography Department and affiliated faculty from ACAM. The event, generously sponsored by ACRE, demonstrated the interest and desire for continued informal conversations such as roundtables on historical and spatial research methods and community-engaged research. A lively discussion with our speakers offered geography students new interdisciplinary possibilities for their research. The speakers’ adjacencies with the discipline of geography also resulted in a range of conversations about professionalization and community work among aspiring planners, designers and historically-minded Geography students. Each speaker was compensated $200 for sharing their time and expertise with the department. A total of $800.00 was spent on this roundtable. In 2024-25, Term 2, I plan to organize a second roundtable/ workshop with 3-4 speakers who will focus on translating their historical research into public outputs such as the Wing Sang building tour, Lost & Found curated exhibitions on Asian Canadian history and collage/sculpture ‘Tear Possibilities’ series.
The ACRE Faculty Initiative supported the Hong Kong Studies Forum, a two-day event held at the Choi Building, on August 9 and 10. Altogether, twelves papers were presented by scholars from Hong Kong, Taiwan, United Kingdom, USA and Canada who came from different disciplines, including sociology, cultural studies, religion studies, political science, social work and public health. Including members from different community groups and organizations serving immigrants from Hong Kong, a total of more than 40 people each day attended the event.
After the panel presentations, all presenters were invited to a close-door roundtable discussion in which they decided to organize an international network to further the conversation on the emerging phenomenon of Hong Kong diaspora. As a follow up of this Forum, all presenters were invited to submit their full papers to a special issue on Hong Kong Diaspora of the journal, Asian Ethnicity. Meanwhile, in June next year, a similar forum will be held at the University of Cardiff, UK, to continue the conversation.
The ACRE Faculty Initiatives Fund has allowed me to produce new content for my bilingual open educational resource, Sex and Migration in the Transpacific Underground, and create an online resource for students, researchers, and community members to engage with a lifestory of Kiyo Tanaka-Goto, a Japanese Canadian woman who operated a brothel in Vancouver between the early 1930s and 1942.
The financial support and the community that ACRE has provided not only made it possible for me to produce this content but also collaborate with another faculty member and a graduate student and build meaningful relationships with them through this project. This project has been an invaluable opportunity for me to be part of the community of local Asian Canadian scholars and enabled me to envision/define to whom and for what I am producing this content much more clearly.
The 2023/24 ACRE Faculty Initiatives Fund helped fund my research trips to China in 2024 to deepen my knowledge of the primary texts, general audience readings, and the scholarship about China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Africa in Chinese public libraries. Through this research, I have come to the conclusion that my previous focus on China and Western Europe’s involvement in East Africa is appropriate for a specialized research monograph intended for an academic audience.
However, this focus is not justified in terms of the overall plans China and Western Europe have for the African continent. I had this awareness when reading Western-language books available in Vancouver. But the China research trips strengthened my belief in the necessity of broadening the scope of my book to include case studies from countries from outside East Africa.
Accordingly, I have also begun deliberating whether to write a book that can appeal to the general reader, e.g., a trade book. Such a book can analyze the history and the current situations involving China-Africa-Western Europe with a coda that suggests future directions. The topics that I originally planned for the research monograph can still work for the new idea, including food, fashion, the environment, and economic development.
Mongoloids is a feature-length hybrid documentary film examining the concept of a Transpacific inherited trauma. Drawing on cultural theory and trauma studies, the film will reenact key memories of my parents during the Cultural Revolution and their immigration to the US in 1986. Based upon accumulation of archival documents, home footage, and testimonials from my family members, Mongoloids explores cinematic re-enactment and ritualistic performance through the lenses of therapeutic practices and trauma-informed care.
We have completed the first part of this research project, which included a research trip to St. Louis, Missouri in the summer of 2024 where I conducted interviews with my parents, my maternal aunt and uncle, as well as my paternal aunt as survivors of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. My parents’ memories of their experiences during the Cultural Revolution will be the primary material for our reenactment shoot.
As an essayistic hybrid documentary, the second half of the shooting will be crucial for Mongoloids. We plan to divide the reenactment shooting into two parts: as the first part, we will accompany my parents to Changchun, China in June 2025 to revisit the very sites where the locations, either demolished or refurbished, bear the scars of historical trauma. The lost past will then be envisaged and complemented visually by the second part of the reenactment shooting: we plan to use LED volumes for world building to recreate settings from the past.
The ACRE funding is crucial in helping me fund my travel to China, while also supporting my graduate research assistants with their flights, where they will accompany me during the shoot as production assistants. Without the ACRE fund, I would not be able to bring my research assistants to this important documentary shoot, and they would not be able to have the valuable and professionalizing experiences as on-set production assistants on a feature-length film project
