Here are some more announcements, links, and job postings about academic-related jobs, fellowships, and other related opportunities for those interested in racial/ethnic/diversity issues. As always, the announcements and links are provided for informational purposes and do not necessarily imply an endorsement of the organization or college involved.

Call for Participants: BBC Documentary on Viet Nam War

Dear Sir,

I am a BBC journalist writing from London. I work on a history programme called “Witness”, which focuses on significant events in the recent past. The hundreds of subjects that we have looked at have included the trial of Nelson Mandela, the bombing of Hiroshima and the beginnings of the civil rights movement in America — to name just a few. Our programme is broadcast to a large audience around the world.

And in the weeks ahead we very much hope to focus on the stories of those who fled Vietnam by boat at the end of the war there in the 1970s. We are simply looking for interviewees who might be willing to tell us — in quite strong English — what they went through. I realise that, for some, remembering such traumatic events this will not be at all easy. But we would like to be able to remind our listeners around the world what the Vietnamese boat people endured. We want to record their story for our archive.

Would you, I wonder, be able to put me in touch figures in the Vietnamese refugee community who might be able to help in our search for interviewees? They can contact me through my email below.

Yours,
Alan Johnston
alan.johnston@bbc.co.uk

JACL Scholarships: Deadlines Approaching

The Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) is kicking off its Scholarship Program for the 2011 academic year. At the national level, JACL offers over 30 awards, with an annual total of over $60,000 in scholarships.

JACL Membership, which is required for applications, is open to anyone of any ethnic group. Membership dues can be paid online or with the application. The 2011 National JACL Scholarship Program informational brochure and applications are posted on the JACL website.

JACL Scholarship applications for Undergraduate, Graduate, Law, Creative & Performing Arts, and Financial Aid. The deadline for these applications is April 1, 2011. These are to be sent directly by the applicants to: National JACL Scholarship Program, c/o Portland JACL, P.O. Box 86310, Portland, OR 97286.

For additional information regarding the JACL National Scholarship Program, please contact Patty Wada at (415) 345-1075 or ncwnp@jacl.org.

Youth Justice Leadership Program

Youth Justice Leadership Institute Seeks Applicants for 2011-2012 Program Year

The National Juvenile Justice Network seeks applicants for the pilot year of its Youth Justice Leadership Institute. The Institute’s mission is to create the foundation for a more effective juvenile justice reform movement by developing a strong base of well prepared and well trained advocates and organizers who reflect the communities most affected by juvenile justice system practices and policies.

The Institute’s inaugural year will focus on cultivating and supporting professionals of color. The Institute is a robust, year long program that includes leadership development, training in juvenile justice system policies and practices, and advocacy skills development. The Institute will bring fellows together twice during the year, attach each fellow to a mentor and envelope fellows within the larger juvenile justice reform community.

If you are a professional of color and are interested in applying for the Institute, please visit our web site to download our application packet or contact the Institute’s Coordinator, Diana Onley-Campbell, at diana@juvjustice.org. Applications are due on April 26, 2011.

Call for Papers: ‘The Chinese Shop’ Conference

The “Chinese shop” in all its manifestations (laundry, bakery, restaurant, general store, etc.) has been integrally connected to Chinese migration and the experience of overseas Chinese. Indeed, the Chinese shop has been both a site of economic and symbolic exchange – a complex locus of power and performative societal tensions and identifications. As such, the consideration of Chinese shop space provides an intriguing staring point from which to investigate many key socio-political issues for Chinese diasporic communities.

Hosted at Ryerson University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, this conference aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to investigate how the space and place of the Chinese shop (broadly defined) has been conceived of and experienced for overseas Chinese. In particular, it seeks to explore the transformative socio-cultural, economic and political processes that create the space and place of the Chinese shop both within Chinese diasporic communities and in terms of encounters between the Chinese and their host societies.

We encourage panels and papers with diverse disciplinary approaches to this theme, including those that consider the Chinese shop within transnational, hemispheric and/or comparative contexts. Topics might include, but are not limited to the following:

• The representation and imagination of shop space
• The political contestations and designations of shop space
• Theoretical deliberations on the spatial dimensions of the Chinese shop
• The shop as gendered space
• The shop as racialized space
• The historical, social and economic implications of the Chinese shop
• The impact of nationalism, globalization, colonialism, and/or imperialism on Chinese shop space

The deadline for abstracts is Friday, April 29th, 2011. Abstracts and CVs can be submitted online by clicking on the “Submit Abstracts” link in the menu on the right-hand side of the page. Additional questions can be addressed to Dr. Anne-Marie Lee-Loy at: aleeloy@ryerson.ca.

Scholarship, ICPSR Quantitative Methods Summer Program

A scholarship fund has been established in honor of Warren E. Miller for participation in the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) 2011 Summer Program in Quantitative Methods of Social Research. Professor Miller was not only one of the most prominent figures in modern social science research. He was also the founder of both ICPSR and the ICPSR Summer Program.

The Warren E. Miller Scholarship Fund will provide financial support to outstanding pre-tenure scholars (assistant professors and advanced graduate students) in the social and behavioral sciences so they may attend one or both of the four-week sessions in the 2011 ICPSR Summer Program. Recipients of the Miller Scholarship will receive a fee waiver to cover Program enrollment and a stipend to help with expenses while staying in Ann Arbor. Applicants to the Warren E. Miller Scholarship should have professional interests in one or more of the following areas of research (or in related fields):

• Developing a common approach to understanding electoral behavior within or across nations
• Understanding the process of democratization in electoral systems
• Understanding the link between global politics and local electoral behavior
• Understanding how context influences political behavior
• Understanding how globalization causes change in political behavior

Application materials for the Miller Scholarship should be submitted electronically, through the ICPSR Summer Program’s online Portal on the Summer Program’s website. Applicants should register for the 2011 Summer Program using the online form and select classes in one or both of the four-week sessions. Note that course selections may be modified and changed later. But, the Miller Scholarship Committee may use an applicant’s preferred courses as a criterion in the selection process for the scholarship. Along with a completed registration, an application must include:

1. A current vita
2. A cover letter from the student, explaining how participation in the ICPSR Summer Program will contribute toward completion of the Ph.D.
3. Two letters of recommendation. For applicants who are faculty members, one of these letters should come from his or her Department Chair. For graduate student applicants, one of the letters should come from his or her faculty advisor or dissertation chairperson. Letters of recommendation should be e-mailed directly to sumprog@icpsr.umich.edu. Letter writers should include “MILLER SCHOLARSHIP RECOMMENDATION” and the applicant’s name in the subject line of the e-mail message.

The application deadline for the Warren E. Miller Scholarship is April 29, 2011. Further information about the ICPSR Summer Program, including course descriptions and the 2011 schedule, is available on the Program website. Also, you should feel free to contact the ICPSR Summer Program by e-mail (sumprog@icpsr.umich.edu) or by telephone (734-763-7400) if you have any questions.

Call for Papers: Critical Refugee Studies

Conference on Critical Refugee Studies
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
November 3-4, 2011

Displacement of populations affects the uprooted as well as communities that receive them. Recognized by international proxy after World War II, the identity category of refugee has a history as long as the incidence of warfare and other crises that result in displacement. This conference uses the 20th century invention of the category of refugee as a means to compare the experiences of displaced persons across time and space.

We invite papers that chronicle and reflect on the experiences and representations of refugee populations. In particular, we are interested in work that expands the idea of the refugee to create comparisons and parallels with the experiences of other groups. Papers that define the term refugee broadly and creatively are most welcome. Among the questions we invite:

• How do refugee identities compare to those of other migrants?
• As local and global political contexts change, how do refugees conceptualize notions of citizenship and home?
• How are refugee identities in dialogue with concepts of place/displacement?
• What is the role of memory and the creation of refugee texts?
• How is the refugee experience mediated/mass mediated?

Abstracts by May 15, 2011 to: criticalrefugee-studies@uwm.edu.

Speakers:

• Michael Rios, Director, Sacramento Diasporas Project, University of California-Davis
• Romola Sanyal, Lecturer in Global Urbanism, Newcastle University
• Ghita Schwarz, New York Legal Aid, Author, Displaced Persons
• Shirley Tang, Asian American/American Studies University of Massachusetts, Boston
• Dinaw Mengestu, Author, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears; How to Read the Air (To Be Confirmed)

Call for Papers: Disability in Asian America

Amerasia Journal Special Issue Call for Papers: The State of Illness and Disability in Asian America
Guest Editors: Professor Jennifer Ho (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) and Professor James Kyung-Jin Lee (University of California, Irvine)

We seek critical essays and articles as well as creative non-fiction and first-person accounts that engage with the intersections of Asian American discourse and illness/disability studies, for a special issue of Amerasia Journal, scheduled for publication in 2012.

Since, as scholar Michael Berube observes, “the definition of disability, like the definition of illness, is inevitably a matter of social debate and social construction,” we are interested in how these social constructions of disability and illness coincide, collide, and converge with those of ethnicity and race, along with other axes of intersectionality such as gender, sexuality, class, region, religion, age, and education.

Critiquing the narrow perspective of the discipline, scholar Chris Bell has noted “the failure of Disability Studies to engage issues of race and ethnicity in a substantive capacity, thereby entrenching whiteness as its constitutive underpinning.” One goal of this special issue is to provide another forum in which to challenge entrenched whiteness within Disability and Illness Studies as well as to bring to the foreground the state of illness and disability within the Asian American community. Contributors to this special issue may consider the following questions:

• What is the role of illness and disability within Asian American narratives—be they in fiction, non-fiction, or cinematic form—and/or how is the ill or disabled Asian American body represented within these narratives?
• How are illness and disability regarded within Asian American communities and cultural productions?
• What are the special needs of Asian Americans who face life threatening and chronic illnesses?
• What kinds of accommodations do Asian Americans with disabilities find most challenging in light of their ethnic and cultural backgrounds and/or as a result of their racialization as non-white Americans?
• How might Asian American experiences of disability and/or illness invite a reimagination of what constitutes a “good” life practice or way of living, and what kinds of social transformations would be necessary to make this so?

Submission Guidelines and Deadlines:
Due Date for one-page abstracts: June 15, 2011. Due Date for solicited final papers: January 2012. Publication Date: Fall 2012. The editorial procedure involves a three-step process: The guest editors, in consultation with the Amerasia Journal editors and peer reviewers, make decisions on the final essays:

1. Approval of abstracts
2. Submission of papers solicited from accepted abstracts
3. Revision of accepted peer-reviewed papers and final submission

Please send correspondence regarding the special issue on illness and disabilities studies in Asian American Studies to the following addresses. All correspondence should refer to “Amerasia Journal Disabilities Studies Issue” in the subject line.

Professor Jennifer Ho: jho@email.unc.edu
Professor James Kyung-Jin Lee: jkl@uci.edu
Arnold Pan, Amerasia Journal: arnoldpan@ucla.edu

Call for Papers: Mixed-Status Immigrant Families

“In Between the Shadows of Citizenship: Mixed Status Families”

Guest Editors: Mary Romero, Professor, Arizona State University, Justice and Social Inquiry and Jodie Lawston, Assistant Professor, California State University San Marcos, Women’s Studies

Despite the fact that immigration stories are increasingly featured in U.S. popular media discourse and an immigrant justice movement continues to strengthen, little scholarship has focused on the experiences of immigrants and their families, and especially, families who are mixed status in that they are comprised of both citizens and noncitizens. This edited volume aims to examine the experiences of immigrants and mixed status families in terms of work and education, raids, deportations, and detention, and resistance toward anti-immigrant sentiment. We welcome and encourage work that examines not just the experiences of immigrants in the U.S., but the experiences of immigrants around the globe.

The questions we are interested in exploring include but are not restricted to the following: What forms of work do immigrant women engage in to support their families? What are the struggles of undocumented students? How do raids, deportations, and detention affect families? How do such phenomena affect mixed status families? What are the experiences of immigrants, particularly women and children, in detention? How have changes in laws affected undocumented immigrants and their children? What strategies have justice movements used to protect undocumented men, women, and children? How are countries around the world approaching immigration and undocumented immigration, and how does that compare to U.S. policies? We seek explorations and answers to these questions that engage notions of gender, race and ethnicity, place, and culture as well as documentation and analysis of leadership and activism.

The following topical areas broadly outline the subject matter that we see as most relevant to this volume. These can be used as starting points for papers, but authors are not restricted to them:

• The effects of detention on immigrant families, particularly in separating those families
• The impact of family reunification
• The intersection of work and immigration status
• The effects of immigration status on students
• The effects of raids and/or deportations on families
• Changes in laws and resulting effects on immigrants’ lives
• Immigrant justice work
• Comparative studies of issues related to immigration in different parts of the world
• The intersections of race, class, gender, and with immigration status

We are interested in both academic papers and testimonies from immigrant women on the above topics.

Submission Process: Proposals for academic papers or testimonies, no longer than three pages, should be emailed to Jodie Lawston at jlawston@csusm.edu by Wed. June 15, 2011. Author(s) must include all identifying information on the proposal, including name, title, institutional affiliation, address, phone numbers, and email. After the deadline, we will review proposals and contact authors as to which manuscripts we are interested in reviewing for the book. Proposals must include the subject matter of the paper, methods used for your analysis, and the argument you plan to make based on your data.

Here are some more links out that have come my way relating to Asians or Asian Americans. As always, links to other sites are provided for informational purposes and do not necessarily imply an endorsement of their contents:

• The Choosing America Project:
  Dear Dr. Le,

  The following is a description of a unique project relating to immigrants in America that I hope you will find close to your heart both personally and professionally. This project offers a special opportunity for immigrants in the United States – New and old – to tell their story.

  Our concept is to disseminate this information to as many immigrants as possible in search of the best material. Please help us convey this information to the Asian community living in the US and beyond: writers, educators, seniors, students, professors, colleagues and friends, community leaders and organizers as well as to community groups and organizations and to anyone who you believe can contribute to this project.

  Yours sincerely,
  Ricky Friesem (An award winning writer, screenwriter and filmmaker)
  Lia Friesem (Journalist, writer, screenwriter, and documentary filmmaker)

  The Choosing America Project

  America is a nation of immigrants. Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Kissinger, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Greta Garbo, Martina Navratilova, Hans Bethe, Madeleine Albright, Gloria Estefan, Michael J. Fox ,Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carlos Santana, Sammy Sosa, Hakeem Olajuwon.

  None of them was born in America. All chose America. Like you.

  Whether you came from Germany, England, Italy or the Czech Republic, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, China, or Cuba, whether you immigrated to America as a child, a young adult, or with your own children, whether it was your decision or your parents’, whether you immigrated in the 20’s, 50s’ the 80s’ or just yesterday, you must have one special story to tell. And we want to hear it!

  We are looking for authentic dramatic anecdotes, short stories (1500-4000 words) that epitomize your experience as immigrants who CHOSE to live in America.

  Think of something that has happened to you as an immigrant – We are looking for those special moments, encounters, surprises, experiences, disappointments, which vividly convey what it’s like to be an immigrant in America. The good, the bad, the sad, the miraculous, the joyful— every anecdote is welcome as long as it’s authentic and well told.

  The goal of our project is to turn some of these stories into short films that will be shown in the movies and broadcast on TV. Send your story to: stories@choosingamerica.com

• Casting Call for Multi-Racial, Blended Family For Reality/Documentary Television Show

  Left/Right TV is a New York City-based production company currently seeking a blended family for a new reality television show. We are looking to find a ‘Brady Bunch’ style group; meaning kids from separate, previous marriages, now living in together as a whole new family but without the ‘Brady Bunch’ attitude!

  We are particularly interested in racially diverse unions. African-American father with African-American children married to White mother with white children, or any combination of different races in one household). But this is not all that we are looking for: we are truly looking for real families dealing with real issues: step-sibling adjustments, financial stresses brought on from the current economy, distribution of labor and any other issues that come up in a modern American home.

  We are looking for articulate, intelligent parents and children who live in suburban environments and live middle-to-upper-middle-class lives anywhere in the United States of America. We also would like to ideally find a family that has only lived this new and blended life for a year or less.

  If you and your family are interested in being a part of this timely project – please get in touch by sending a letter describing your family as well as a recent photo of everyone to: castingfamiliesnyc@gmail.com. And please feel free to send this notice to anyone you think may be interested in being a part of this opportunity.

  Please call Michael Sutton 212-695-1625 ext. 340 if you have any questions or advice on how to find a great family.

• Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology

  Pioneering Graphic Novel Collection Brings Together Top Comics Creators, Authors and Filmmakers to Tell Thrilling, Hilarious and Provocative Original Tales of Asian American Caped Crusaders and Masked Marvels

  Imagine, if you will, a young man — quiet, unassuming, with black hair and thick glasses. He’s doing his best to fit in, in a world far away from the land of his birth. He knows he’s different, and that his differences make him alien, an outsider—but they also make him special. Yet he finds himself unable to reveal his true self, his hidden self, to the world…

  For many Asian Americans, this chronicle is a familiar one, because many of us have lived it. But it also happens to be the tale of a mild-mannered reporter named Clark Kent — better known to the world as Superman. And the parallels between those stories help explain why Asian Americans have become such a driving force in the contemporary comics renaissance, as artists, writers — and fans.

  But there’s one place where Asians are still underrepresented in comics: Between the four-color covers themselves. That’s why, in Secret Identities, Jeff Yang, Parry Shen, Keith Chow and Jerry Ma have brought together 66 top Asian American writers, artists and comics professionals to create 26 original stories centered around Asian American superheroes—stories set in a shadow history of our country, from the opening of the West to the election of the first minority president, and exploring ordinary Asian American life from a decidedly extraordinary perspective.

  The anthology, from leading independent publisher The New Press, will be available in bookstores and comic book specialty retailers everywhere beginning April 15. A regularly updated website (secretidentities.org) and blog (secretidentitiesbook.blogspot.com) feature weekly video teasers and exclusive behind-the-scenes news, interviews and character art from the book.

  “We wanted to use the conventions of the superhero comic book to expose the real face of the Asian American experience, usually hidden behind the mask of misperception and stereotype,” says Parry Shen, managing editor of the anthology.

  “Our hope was to use this unique lens as a way to examine issues that all too often go overlooked or unspoken — things like the challenges faced by new immigrants, gender roles and race relations, and parental and peer pressure,” says Keith Chow, education and outreach editor, who is also developing a teacher’s guide to be used as a companion to the book.

  “We also saw it as an opportunity to showcase some of the amazing talent present in our community, and unleash that talent to create the kinds of heroes we always wanted to be when we were kids,” says the book’s art director, Jerry Ma.

  The book’s editors and contributors will be going on a nationwide tour in support of the anthology, currently planned to include stops in New York, NY; Boston, MA; Chicago, IL; Durham, NC; Austin, TX; Tacoma and Seattle, WA; Los Angeles, CA; Baltimore, MD; and San Diego, CA. Updated tour dates and details can be found on the Secret Identities website. Watch the official trailer: