Grounds of Displacement: The 2026 A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group Symposium

UPDATE: Pre-registration for Thursday is now closed. Please feel free to attend and we will register you onsite. 

Presented by the A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group. Hosted by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
Keynote by Professor Mingwei Huang, Dartmouth College

The current administration of the United States has bombastically escalated two constitutive strategies of imperial expansion: extraction and displacement. Through trade and border wars, arms and chips races, US promises of power and prosperity have become inextricable from a hardened national security vocabulary of critical mineral resources, alien enemies, and unbounded technological progress.

To scholars of Asian/Pacific/American studies, these contemporary trends do not break new ground for US empire, but rather renew its foundational forms. The lust for rare earths extends the rapacity of westward expansion through the continued dispossession of Indigenous nations and exploitation of enslaved and racialized labor. The weaponization of artificial intelligence in border and citizenship regimes reiterates the modern security state’s emergence through the criminalization of migrant workers and radical political movements. Fortifying the boundaries of the nation and scouring the depths of the earth may produce new commodities and technological breakthroughs, but these processes remain rooted in enduring logics of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. 

The A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group’s 2026 symposium, “Grounds of Displacement,” highlights interdisciplinary scholarship that examines the structures of accumulation, removal, extraction, and dehumanization that have shaped Asian/Pacific/American worlds through the construction of global empires and superpowers. A series of panels featuring graduate students from across the US, and a keynote by Professor Mingwei Huang (Dartmouth College) will explore these topics.

The A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group is an interdepartmental and interdisciplinary working group for graduate students from local universities interested in and/or working on Asian/Pacific/American studies broadly defined.

NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to the public. Registration is required. Non-NYU guests may be asked to present a government-issued photo ID. NYU guests must present their NYU ID.

Accessibility note: This venue has an elevator and is accessible for wheelchair users. There are single-stall, all gender restrooms and a lactation room available. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu.

Symposium Schedule

Thursday, March 5, 2026

12:30 p.m. Coffee and Registration

1:00 p.m. Opening Remarks

Crystal Parikh, Director, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU
Ayami Ono-Hatanaka, NYU

1:15 p.m. Knowledge, Use, and Power Through Land

Chair: Aanchal Saraf, Assistant Professor of Social Science and Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute
May Wang, NYU, “American Volcanology, Aridity, and Settler Colonialism in Hawai‘i, 1882–83”
Malaya Caligtan-Tran, Harvard University, “Kasiyana, we will overcome: Indigenous Futures and the Workings of Slow Violence”
Dang Weiyu, NYU, “From the Yellow River to the Jordan Valley: The Moral Economy of Soil Erosion and Settler Stewardship in US Global Ambition During the Long WWII”

2:30 p.m. Break

3:30 p.m. Liberal Care and the Security State

Chair: Mich Ling, Rutgers University
Richard Lim, University of Minnesota, “‘Working Relationships’: The Anxieties Around Defining Community Autonomy Over Public Safety”
Kelsey Ichikawa, Harvard University, “Care of the Counterterror State: Configurations of ‘Health’ in Extremism Prevention Programs”
Linda Luu, NYU, “‘How Different Is Different?’: Militarized Refuge, Ethnic Psychology, and the Containment of Difference”

5:00 p.m. Keynote: “China and the Postcolony: Racial Extractivism, Then and Now” by Dr. Mingwei Huang, Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Dartmouth College

Moderator: Dang Weiyu 

6:15-7:15 p.m. Keynote reception

Friday, March 6, 2026

10:00 a.m. Coffee 

10:30 a.m. Revisiting Nineteenth Century Asian Migration

Chair: Elliott Jun, CUNY Graduate Center
Naomi Louie, NYU, “Exclusion Versus Restriction: The Legal Structure of Chinese Exclusion in Canada and the United States”
Nicholas (Nick) Liou, Yale University, “Captive Testimony: Carceral Photography, Dispossession, and Temporality in 1870s California”
K Yin, Brown University, “‘Laborers and Rocks’: Geologic Memory and the Asian American Archive”

12:00 p.m. Theorizing Hemispheric Claims to Land

Chair: Lou Cornum, Assistant Professor of Native American and Indigenous Studies in the Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, NYU
Eugenia Morales Viana, Brown University, “Navigating Impunity in States of Exception”
Itzél Delgado-Gonzalez, NYU, “Dying Abroad, Going Home: Indigenous Posthumous Repatriation as Land Reclamation”
Emelia Gold, Brown University, “Common(s) Struggles: Land, Labor, and U.S. Settler Colonialism”

1:15 p.m. Break

2:00 p.m. Commodities and Extraction

Chair: Tenn Joe Lim, CUNY Graduate Center
Isabelle A. Tan, Princeton University, “Alien Landings: Granite, Gold, and Coolie Labor”
Issay Matsumoto, University of Southern California, “Dole Philippines and the Transpacific Division of Labor in Statehood Hawaiʻi”
Lauren Casey Ribancos, UCLA, “Complicit Coffee Cultivation: Emergent Coffee Production Between the Philippines, US, and Diaspora”

3:15 p.m. Closing Remarks

Ayami Ono-Hatanaka, NYU

3:30-4:30 p.m. Closing Reception

Image: “Cargill’s Problems With Palm Oil” by Rainforest Action Network is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.