Asian American Mental Health and Disability Studies

Who This Is For

All with interest are welcome!

Course Description

This course asks both what the lens of mental health tells us about Asian American life and what Asian American life tells us about how we should understand mental health. It offers Asian American studies and disability studies approaches to mental health, locating issues of mental health within social, cultural, and historical contexts, including racism, ableism, model minoritization, sexual violence, immigration. And it takes an arts-based approach: course texts will focus on Asian American literary and artistic interventions, and course assignments will ask you to use humanistic and creative-critical methods. You will read and do cool shit. Ultimately we will use our study of mental health to figure out together how to survive the increasingly disabling environment we are living (and dying) in. This really should be the goal of any course you take--to give you skills for navigating your social world ethically and meaningfully--but this particular moment makes that project even more necessary and urgent.

Welcome to the Asian American abyss.

What Enrollment Includes

• Six live sessions conducted over Zoom
• Course readings on the enrolled course site
• Access to session recordings up to 1 month after the course
• Access to the Asian American Literary Archive community on Heartbeat up to 1 month after the course

Schedule Adjustments

Instructor(s)

• Mimi Khúc

  Mimi Khúc, PhD, is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is the Co-Editor of The Asian American Literary Review and an adjunct professor in Asian American studies and disability studies. Her work includes Open in Emergency, the Asian American Tarot, and dear elia: letters from the Asian American Abyss. She loves cats more than you can probably imagine.