Asian American Studies for Right Now

Who This Is For

Anyone interested in thinking through current events, anti-Blackness, and Palestine through the lens of Asian American studies.

Course Description

This is a course for anyone who wants to think aloud about some of the things that are happening right now in the world. This is also a course for folks who are interested in thinking about, in our case, anti-Blackness and Palestine, through the lens of Asian American Studies. That is to say, we’re asking: how can the ideas from Asian American Studies help us think about the conditions of our current world?

We’ll start off the first week learning some foundational and key concepts of Asian American Studies that will help us with our conversations in the coming weeks. Then, we turn to the subject of anti-Blackness in the United States and among Asian American communities more specifically. Our final week concludes with conversations on Palestine, and why it is an Asian American Studies issue.

Instructor(s)

• Ida Yalzadeh

  Ida Yalzadeh is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. She is an interdisciplinary historian who thinks about the relationship between race and empire and who engages in the fields of diplomatic history, Asian American Studies, and Critical Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) Studies, and more specifically, Iranian Diaspora Studies. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies at Brown University and was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University and an assistant professor of history at Lehigh University.