Navigating Identity/ies Webinar

Navigating Identity/ies: From Asian American, AAPI, to APIDA

Where do organizing terms/acronyms like “Asian American”, AAPI, and APIDA come from? How do they reflect specific historical and political realities associated with fighting back against oppression?

In the context of a resurgence in anti-Asian violence and OPAWL’s commitment to ongoing political education, this webinar explores these important questions. The event brings together four radical feminist scholar-activists to address how their indigenous, queer, and mixed-race transnational histories shape the ways they navigate these terms in distinct, contingent, and, at times, contradictory ways.

OPAWL’s own Suparna Bhaskaran and Antoinette CHarfauros McDaniel engage with 2 UCLA Asian American faculty, Evyn Le Espiritu and Loubna Qutami, as a way of opening up this important conversation. The webinar then features Evyn and Loubna sharing insights from their respective activism and transnational research with diasporic Vietnamese, indigenous CHamoru, and Palestinian communities.

Their scholarship brings the importance of understanding the ways in which history, culture, resistance, and the politics of place shape how diasporic and colonized communities organize to fight local and global systems of oppression. The goal of this webinar is to help OPAWL members and guests consider material, cultural, structural, and at times, life and death, factors inherent in “naming” and claiming spaces from which to affirm/fight for community identities in concrete, if often, shifting circumstances. As a site of political and popular education, the webinar also serves as the inaugural offering of the newly formed Radical AAPI Feminist Scholar-Organizers (in association with OPAWL).

Tuesday, March 30, 6:30-8:30pm via Zoom
Audience: Current and interest OPAWL members + AAPIs of all genders

We are committed to making our events accessible and can provide ASL interpretation when requested in advance. Please send any accessibility needs or other questions to info@opawl.org.

Note: We define “AAPI” as including those of South Asian, Southeast Asian, East Asian, Central Asian, Southwest/West Asian, Pacific Islander, and Native Hawaiian descent, regardless of immigration status and inclusive of mixed race individuals and transracial adoptees.