Impossible Desires: New Directions in Queer Diaspora Studies
2025-12-02 18:00 - 22:00 (America/New_York) | The Bowery Electric, 327 Bowery
Presented by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
REGISTER
The publication of Gayatri Gopinath’s Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke University Press) in 2005 heralded a new moment in transnational scholarship in gender and sexuality studies. The book theorized queer and feminist cultural practices in the context of South Asian diasporic migration, and served as a precursor to subsequent scholarship in queer diaspora studies that has radically reshaped the fields of queer and feminist studies in the past two decades.
We mark the twentieth anniversary of Impossible Desires by showcasing the work of a new generation of queer diaspora scholars whose work spans South Asia, the SWANA region, South Africa, and the Caribbean. Scholars Kareem Khubchandani, Suzanne Persard, Mehak Faisal Khan, and Jordache Ellapen will reflect on their own groundbreaking work in light of Gopinath’s book; and artists Al-An deSouza, Chitra Ganesh, Shahzia Sikander, and Felipe Baeza – all of whom have engaged in long-standing dialogues with Gopinath over the years—will reflect on the artist-critic relationship. The evening will conclude with a DJ set by Arshia Fatima Haq, artist and founder of Discostan.
6:00-7:00 p.m. Scholar Roundtable: Comparative Queer Diasporas
Mehak Faisal Khan
Jordache Ellapen
Suzanne Persard
Kareem Khubchandani
7:00-8:00 p.m. Artist Roundtable: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora
Chitra Ganesh
Shahzia Sikander
Felipe Baeza
Al-An DeSouza
8:00-10:00 p.m. DJ Set
Arshia Fatima Haq

Venue guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to the public. Registration is required. The Bowery Electric is a 21+ venue. If you are below 21 and wish to attend, please email csgs@nyu.edu.
Accessibility note: This venue is located down a flight of stairs and there is no elevator in the building. For questions or access needs, please email csgs@nyu.edu.
Image: This film still is featured on the cover of Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures (Duke University Press, 2005). It features Vasantsena (Rekha) and Aditi (Anuradha) in Ustav (The Festival, dir. Girish Karnad, 1984). Photo courtesy of the National Film Archive of India.

Closing Artist Talk: Hawai‘i is not the United States, but it is your Future
2025-12-03 18:00 - 20:00 | 20 Cooper Square, 3rd floor, New York, NY, 10003
Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. Co-sponsored by the Center for Collaborative Indigenous Research with Communities and Lands.
The artist Sean Connelly reflects on his year-long residency at the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and shares his curatorial process and vision for Hawai‘i is not the United States, but it is your Future. The installation, on view at 20 Cooper Square Gallery, invites viewers to consider the built environment as oceanic, an interconnected system requiring collective cultural efforts to sustain.
Doors open at 5:30 p.m. and selections of Connelly’s video work will screen before the talk begins.
NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to the public. Registration is required.
Accessibility note: This venue is accessible for wheelchair users. There are all gender restrooms. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu

About the Artist
Born and raised in Honolulu, Sean Connelly is an artist and building practitioner working collaboratively across sculpture, architecture, film, and cartography. Connelly’s practice engages deeply with grassroots interventions and supports Native liberation, food sovereignty, land justice, and cultural resurgence centering ‘āina (Land / That Which Feeds).
As founding director of After Oceanic Built Environments Lab and the nonprofit Hawai‘i Nonlinear, Connelly actively cultivates ancestral knowledge, ecological insight, and social justice to transform built environments into living archives of intergenerational healing. Collaborating closely with cultural bearers, creative practitioners, and Indigenous experts across Pae ‘Āina Hawai‘i (Hawaiian Islands), Connelly’s work contributes to a grassroots community of care, actively shaping liberated oceanic futures.

Photograph ©Creighton: Courtesy of NYU Photo Bureau.

"Cultural Appropriation, Cultural Authenticity and the Diasporic South Asian/Australian Experience(s) of Multiculturalism": Lauren Nilsson-Siu
2025-12-04 18:00 - 20:00 | 244 Greene St, 244 Greene Street, room 106, New York, NY, 10003, United States
Presented by the NYU Department of English. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU and Postcolonial, Race, and Diaspora Studies Colloquium.
REGISTER
Professor Lauren Nilsson-Siu delivers a lecture entitled, “Cultural Appropriation, Cultural Authenticity and the Diasporic South Asian/Australian Experience(s) of Multiculturalism.” Nilsson-Siu (NYU Sydney) specializes in critical race and ethnic studies. Her research broadly explores intersections of race, diaspora, affect and Australian multiculturalism. Her upcoming monograph Reclaiming the Bindi: Cultural Appropriation, Indo Chic, and the South Asian Diaspora is slated for release with Illinois University Press in 2027. The lecture will be followed by a Q&A and discussion.

NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to the public. Registration is required.
Accessibility note: This venue is accessible for via ramp and elevator. There are all gender restrooms. If you have any access needs, please email sa6724@nyu.edu.

A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group Meeting & Social
2025-12-05 13:00 - 14:30 | 20 Cooper Square, 3rd floor, New York, NY, 10003
Presented by the A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group. Hosted by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
REGISTER
This year, the A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group‘s annual symposium (to be hosted March 5-6, 2026) will be organized around the theme of “Grounds of Displacement,” alongside the A/P/A Institute’s continued theme of “Asian/Pacific/American Prospects.”
Join the group for their final meeting of the semester to plan for the annual symposium over food and drink.

NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to graduate students from NYU and nearby universities. 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 available. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu.

Palestine ABC: 2025 Edition
2025-12-11 17:30 - 19:30 | NYU Cantor Film Center, Theater 102, 36 E. 8th Street, New York, NY
Presented by NYU Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, Department of English, Department of Media, Culture and Communication, Gallatin Human Rights Initiative, NYU Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, Department of History, and Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.
This teach-in is part of NYU Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine’s educational programming. Keywords to be discussed by NYU faculty members include:
Gaza
Settlements
Israeli Politics
Palestinian Parties
International Law
Political Prisoners / Hostages
Project Esther & Campus Activism
NYU Campus Guidelines: Attendance is open to current NYU students, faculty, and staff only. IDs will be checked at the venue. RSVPs not required. This venue is located on the first-floor. Restrooms are gender segregated. If you have any access needs, please email nyufj4p@proton.me.

A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group Meeting: Elliott Jun
2026-02-06 13:00 - 14:30 | 20 Cooper Square, 3rd floor, room 372, New York, NY, 10003
Presented by the A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group. Hosted by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
REGISTER
Elliott Jun (PhD candidate, CUNY Graduate Center English Department with a certificate in American Studies) presents “‘The Wind Blows From All Directions’: Chinese Settler Labour, Indigenous Differences, and Transpacific Imperialisms in the Eighteenth Century” at this session of the A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group. This meeting is open to all graduate students working in and around the field of A/P/A Studies. Lunch will be served.

“‘The Wind Blows From All Directions’: Chinese Settler Labour, Indigenous Differences, and Transpacific Imperialisms in the Eighteenth Century”
On May 5th, 1789, an unfamiliar but worrying sight came into view when Esteban José Martinez sailed into the Surgidero de San Lorenzo inlet of the Northwest Las Indias Occidentales; two ships from the newly established United States and a British ship were moored in the sound. Martinez immediately occupied the inlet and arrested William Douglas and the crew of the Iphigenia Nubiana before ordering them to return to Guangzhou. Over the next two months, several more British ships arrived in short succession and were placed under arrest: the North West America, the Princess Royal, and the Argonaut. Each of these ships shared several common characteristics; they primarily bore Portuguese or British names, flags, and papers, had British captains, contained crews composed primarily of Europeans and Chinese labourers, and were connected by the same British merchant, John Meares. In negotiations with the captain of the Argonaut, James Colnett, Martinez discovered the British had already claimed the inlet as Nootka Sound in the preceding years with the intent to establish a more fortified settlement called Fort Pitt. Martinez imprisoned Colnett and the crew of the Argonaut and seized the Argonaut and the North West America along with their cargoes on the charge of violating Spanish territorial sovereignty. The competing colonial claims of British and Spanish empires across settler ownership and sovereignty over the unceded lands of the Mowachaht formed the core of the international incident known as the Nootka Crisis.
“‘The Wind Blows From All Directions’: Chinese Settler Labour, Indigenous Differences, and Transpacific Imperialisms in the Eighteenth Century” investigates how Yuquot, a seasonal fishing village of the Mowachaht, became a key transpacific site where the multiple scales of racial capitalism and competing empires converged. I show how crises in the royal monopoly system and plantation economy across the increasingly transhemispheric British empire in the late eighteenth century created the opportunity for private free traders like John Meares to look for their own solutions beyond the nation-state. I argue that Meares imagined and employed Chinese wage labour as a liberal solution to form a British settler transpacific that connected Yuquot, Hawai’i, Guangzhou, and Kolkata. While Meares’ experiment failed, I reflect on the ways in which studying the “failures” of colonial capitalism as method attunes us to pay attention to the fragility, contradictions, crisis, and reinvention that define colonialism, empire, and capital without foreclosing the relational possibilities of affinities organized around mutual struggle.

NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to graduate students from NYU and nearby universities. 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 available. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu.

Image credit: Meares, John, and Giovacchino Pagani. “Carta del Mar Pacifico del nord che comprendela costa nord est d’Asia e la costa-nord ouest d’America riconosciute nel 1778 e79 del Cap. Cook e piu particolarmente ancora nel 1788. e. 89.” Map. Florence/Italy: Pagani, Giovacchino, 1796. Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center, https://collections.leventhalmap.org/search/commonwealth:vx0273587 (accessed January 06, 2026).

Trans Caribbean: Queer and Trans Arts, Rights, and Activism
2026-02-13 11:00 - 18:00 | Espacio de Culturas, 53 Washington Square South, New York, United States
Co-organized by the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) and The Latinx Project at NYU. Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality (CSGS), Hemispheric Institute, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and the Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora (CSAAD).
DETAILS & REGISTRATION
As trans rights and embodiment are under attack in the United States, trans activists and legal activists are advancing a broad trans rights agenda across the Caribbean. Colombia’s proposed Ley Integral Trans, for instance, aims to protect the rights of transgender and non-binary individuals, while ensuring their full equality and participation in all areas of society. Meanwhile, like millions of others, queer and trans people in the Caribbean have historically lived across and beyond national boundaries. Our invited guests discuss their experiences of advocating for trans rights, sustaining creative practice, and convening community while crossing gendered, legal, and geographic boundaries. The conversations will be accompanied by two performances that illustrate the complexity of living life across boundaries.
The first panel, focused on the struggle for rights, recognition, and equality in Colombia, stages a conversation between Liga de Salud Trans activists Juli Salamanca Cortés and Yoko Ruiz and their artistic collaborators, photographer Camila Falquez and author Cesar Vallejo. Moderated by Professor Bel Olid (University of Chicago).
The second panel examines the Trans Caribbean through its artistic, social, and legal movements through a conversation with advocate and program strategist Dane Lewis, interdisciplinary artist Edrimael Delgado Reyes (LaBoriVogue), installation and performance artist Carlos Martiel, and Black Trans Liberation activist Qween Jean. Moderated by Professor Leo Douglas (NYU Liberal Studies). This panel threads together experiences that cross Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and the United States.
The closing reception features performances by poet Suzanne Persard, poet Darrel Alejandro Holnes, and artist Edrimael Delgado Reyes. Persard is published in the poetry anthology I Will Not Go: Translations, Transformations, and Chutney Fractals (Kaya Press, 2024), and Holnes is published in When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent (University of Arizona Press, 2023).
Accessibility note: This event is free and open to the public with RSVP. The building has a wheelchair ramp and elevator. For any questions or to notify us of additional accommodation requests, please email clacs@nyu.edu at least a week prior to the event.
Photograph by Camila Falquez. Featuring Samantha Siagama, Trans-Indigenous Leader. Shot in Santuario, Risaralda, Colombia, May 2023, as a part of the Series ” Compañerx” created alongside Stylist Lorena Maza, writer César Vallejo and trans activists Juli Salamanca and Yoko Ruiz.

"Archival Interregnum: Caste, Sexuality, Indenture," A Lecture by Anjali Arondekar
2026-02-18 18:00 - 20:00 | 19 University Place, Great Room, 19 University Place, first floor, New York, NY
Presented by the Comparative Approaches to the Literatures of Africa, the Middle East, and the Global South (CALAMEGS) 2025-26 Lecture Series. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis, and Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at NYU.
RSVP
While Mauritius remains the place from which my questions emerge, it is also an area impossible, a geo-epistemology that confounds histories of sexuality and caste in/and South Asia and the broader Indian Ocean world. Indenture is the archival interregnum—especially in Mauritius—where our attachments to counter-archives, origin-stories, run amuck. If archives of indenture are flooded with markers of identification that suture presence to labor, what happens to the labor of caste and sexuality that lives unaccounted within economies of such enumeration? How do we think histories of indenture outside settled archival forms, outside technologies of historical recuperation, where we historicize not to materialize absence, but to speak to the weight of our historical anchors? How do we couple the abundance of historical reading with the oceanic voyages of indenture, caste and sexuality? Caste and sexuality here are not tracked through acts/practices that might return us to identitarian forms; rather I read archival records of caste and sexuality against the settlement and lure of reproductive futurities.
Anjali Arondekar is Peggy and Jack Baskin Foundation Presidential Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz. She was the founding director, Center for South Asian Studies, 2020-24. Her research engages the comparative poetics and politics of sexuality, caste, and historiography, with a focus on South Asia and the broader Indian Ocean world. She is the author of two award-winning monographs: For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India (Duke University Press, 2009, Orient Blackswan, India, 2010); and Abundance: Sexuality’s History (Duke University Press, 2023, Orient Blackswan, 2023). Arondekar’s third book-in progress, entitled, Oceanic Sex: Archives of Caste and Indenture, couples the archival forms of indenture with the oceanic voyages of caste and sexuality.

Accessibility note: This event is free and open to the public with RSVP. The venue is located on the ground level and is accessible with two sets of automatic doors. For any accommodation requests, please email amb10317@nyu.edu.

Grounds of Displacement: The 2026 A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group Symposium
2026-03-05 - 2026-03-06 | 20 Cooper Square, 3rd floor, New York, NY, 10003
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.

"Divas, Drag Queens, Aunties, and Other Academic Personas" with Kareem Khubchandani
2026-03-10 17:30 - 19:30 | NYU Silver Center, Room 405, 31 Washington Place, New York, NY
Presented by the NYU Program in XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, and NYU Department of Art & Public Policy.
RSVP (open to the NYU community)
Where the scholar’s body is often obscured in preference for their mind, evacuating the body from academic labor is a luxury rarely available to queer people of color. This talk explores the possibilities of self-fashioning in the academy for minoritarian subjects. Tracing his trajectory across various intellectual projects—queer South Asian nightlife, global drag, representations of the aunty—Kareem Khubchandani explores the co-constitutive relationships between research, teaching, and artistry, between ethnography, analysis, pedagogy, and performance.
Kareem Khubchandani is the author of the award-winning books Decolonize Drag and Ishtyle: Accenting Gay Indian Nightlife. He is also co-editor of the Lambda Literary-nominated Queer Nightlife, guest editor of Text and Performance Quarterly’s “Critical Aunty Studies,” and associate editor for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Kareem is Associate Professor of theater, dance, and performance studies at Tufts University and FO Matthiessen Visiting Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University. His new book, Lessons in Drag: A Queer Manual for Academics, Artists, and Aunties is now out from Brandeis University Press.
Hosted by XE Faculty Fellow Alisha Cherian.
NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to the NYU community only. Registration is required.
Accessibility note: This venue is located on the fourth floor and is accessible via elevator. For accommodation requests, we ask that you email xe@nyu.edu at least seven days before the event.

POSTPONED: The Health Impacts of Immigration Policy
2026-03-25 | To Be Announced
UPDATE: This event has been postponed, and will be rescheduled in Spring 2027.
Presented by the NYU Migration Network. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
Held monthly over the semester, these public conversations bring together scholars, artists, and practitioners for cross-disciplinary exchanges to develop and refine understandings of migration and mobility, its histories, and its political stakes. With migration so sensationalized by much of the media, these conversations are a rare opportunity to invite the public to engage with questions of migration and mobility in a nuanced, thoughtful, and analytical manner.
This conversation on “The Health Impacts of Immigration Policy” will feature Maria Elena de Trinidad Young (UCLA) and Laura Wherry (NYU).

NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to the public. Registration is required.
Accessibility note: If you have any access needs, please email migration-network@nyu.edu.

Maria Elena de Trinidad Young, PhD, MPH, is an affiliate at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research and an assistant professor at UC Merced. Young focuses on the impact of the US immigration system on the health of immigrant populations. Her research examines the relationship between health inequities and factors such as citizenship and legal status and state and local policies. Her current research seeks to understand the various structural, institutional, and individual mechanisms that link policy with health outcomes.
Young was formerly the project director of the NIH-funded Research on Immigrant Health and State Policy (RIGHTS) Study which seeks to understand the experiences of Latino and Asian immigrants in California in the areas of health care, social services, employment, education, and law enforcement and how these experiences have had an impact on their health and access to health care. Young was also the Chancellor’s postdoctoral fellow at UC Merced where she lead a study to examine how media coverage of immigration policy may influence immigrant well-being.
Laura Wherry is an associate professor at NYU Wagner and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the Economics of Health program. During the 2024-25 academic year, she served as the senior economist for health care on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Her research focuses on the role of public programs and policies on the health and economic well-being of individuals in the US. She has a particular interest in policies that affect access to health care for women and children in lower income families.
Image: U.S. Customs and Border Protection operations following the implementation of Title 42 USC 265 at the northern and southern land borders, March 22, 2020, photograph by Jerry Glaser. Dedicated to the Public Domain via CC0 1.0

Asian Americans and STEM Conference 2026: Science in a De-Globalizing World
2026-03-27 10:00 - 17:00 | 370 Jay St, New York University, Brooklyn, NY 11201, 370 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY, 11201, United States
Presented by Yale University Asian Americans and STEM. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, NYU Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, NYU Computer Science Department, and NYU Tandon School of Engineering; The City University of New York; Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science (SEAS), Asian Faculty Association at Yale, and Yale Global Data Justice at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies.
REGISTER
Asian American scientists simultaneously occupy the precarious and contradictory position of the successful “model minority” to be celebrated and the grave “security threat” to be contained and expelled from the nation. Our project led by a cross-disciplinary team of scholars in the fields of Asian American studies, physics, and computer science aim to bring a humanities-driven inquiry into understanding the historical and current experience of Asian American scientists as shaped by the histories of US and European imperialism, Asian exclusion and racial formation, as well as global geopolitics of war and economic disruption. We see our work creating a new model of cross-disciplinary scholarship which addresses the scientific research undertaken by Asian American scholars in their respective fields and institutions as well as examines the ways in which their work has been remembered, obfuscated, or erased in standard histories of discovery and invention.
The stakes of our research could not be higher as we continue to see news headlines of Asian American science educators, researchers, and technical workers detained and deported and a lack of recognition of Asian American scientists as crucial to the successes of their respective fields. Our project also contributes to the fields of Asian American studies, history, history of science, and science and technology studies which have generated little scholarship to understand the ways in which US and global scientific cultures and knowledge production have been shaped by Asian American scientists as knowledge workers. Instead, Asian American subjects largely appear in these fields as the objects of scientific research rather than agents of inquiry.
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: For accommodation requests, please email AsianAmSTEM@yale.edu at least seven days before the event.

Photograph by David Baillot/UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

A/P/A Institute at the 2026 AAAS Annual Conference
2026-04-02 - 2026-04-04 | Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki Beach Resort, 2005 Kālia Road, Honolulu, HI
Are you attending the 2026 Association for Asian American Studies Annual Conference from April 2-4, 2026? Join the A/P/A Institute at NYU at our sponsored conference activities:
25th Anniversary of Asian Settler Colonial Critique: Transnational Asian-Indigenous Relationaties
Friday, April 3, 2026, 10:00-11:30 a.m.
Honolulu III
This panel will feature Hady A. Elrafei (NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis), recipient of the 2026 AAAS Conference Award granted by the C.V. Starr Fund for A/P/A Research and administered by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU. Elrafei will present “Gaza 2035: AI (de)generation and visual cultures of dispossession” in From the Rivers to the Seas: On the Politics of Inter/Nationalism and Solidarity with Palestine, Amerasia Journal 51 (2026).

SWANA Sponsored Panel: Southwest Asias, Minor Geographies, and the Transpacific
Friday, April 3, 2026, 2:45-4:15 p.m.
Iolani V
Hady A. Elrafei (NYU Department of Social & Cultural Analysis) will chair this panel. Elrafei is the recipient of the 2026 AAAS Conference Award granted by the C.V. Starr Fund for A/P/A Research and administered by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.

‘ĀINAVIS: A Mapping Workshop with Sean Connelly & Dawn Mahi. Sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
Friday, April 3, 2026, 4:30-6:00 p.m.
Lehua Room
Sean Connelly (After Oceanic) & Dawn Mahi (Consuelo Zobel Alger Foundation) lead a workshop on their collaborative project ʻĀINAVIS. An interactive map, currently indexing nearly 300 nonprofit ‘āina organizations across the Hawaiian Islands, ʻĀINAVIS highlights network connections between these groups. The map uses GIS data layers to map place, risk, and wellbeing.
Created by After Oceanic and Consuelo Foundation, with support from Pu’uhonua Society/Andy Warhol, Mellon Foundation, KUA, DOFA/Kaulunani, UH Mānoa, and Hauʻoli Mau Loa Foundation, this effort has brought together artists, students, researchers, culture bearers, and community leaders to visualize the living systems of land and care across Hawaiʻi since 2019.

Mixer Hosted by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU
Friday, April 3, 2026, 6:15-7:15 p.m.
Exhibitor Hall
Following the ‘ĀINAVIS: A Mapping Workshop with Sean Connelly & Dawn Mahi, join A/P/A Institute at NYU in the exhibitor hall to connect with friends and colleagues. Light refreshments will be served.
Accessibility note: These sessions are open to registered conference attendees. No RSVP required. Please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu with any access needs.

Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America
2026-04-09 18:00 - 20:00 | 20 Cooper Square, 3rd floor, New York, NY, 10003
Presented by the NYU Center for Black Visual Culture. Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
REGISTER
Jeff Chang and cultural critic Bakari Kitwana discuss Chang’s new publication Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America (Mariner, 2025). This conversation will be followed by a book signing, during which copies will be available for purchase.
As the best-known martial artist and one of the most celebrated action stars ever, Bruce Lee is a global icon. He symbolizes swagger, strength, and the unbeatable spirit of the underdog. But in more than fifty years since his untimely death at age thirty-two, the legend has eclipsed the real man. During his lifetime, Lee fought to be seen—from Hong Kong to Hollywood, Asian tenements to American ghettos, the lonely garret to the international screen. He emerged as a star in an era when Asian Americans were fighting against exclusion and invisibility. Now, drawing on private letters, rare documents and photos, and interviews with his closest confidants, Water Mirror Echo reveals the Bruce many never saw and places his complicated life within a revolution from which it cannot be separated: the emergence of Asian America.

Jeff Chang’s first book, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, was called one of the best nonfiction books of the last quarter century. His latest, Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America, was named one of 2025’s Best by Publisher’s Weekly, Alta, Vogue, Kirkus, and NPR. He authored the award-winning Who We Be: A Cultural History of Race in Post Civil Rights America, and We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes On Race and Resegregation. He has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The Guardian, the San Francisco Chronicle, and many more. He is the host of the Signal award-winning podcast, Edge of Reason, and of KALW Public Media’s podcast, Notes From the Edge.
Bakari Kitwana an internationally known cultural critic, journalist, activist, and thought leader in the area of hip-hop, youth culture, and Black political engagement. Kitwana is the executive director of Rap Sessions, which for the last fourteen years has conducted over 150 townhall meetings around the nation on difficult dialogues facing the hip-hop and millennial generations. Kitwana is the author of Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop and co-editor (with David Orr, Andrew Gumbel and William Becker) of Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government For the People (The New Press, 2020). His groundbreaking 2002 book The Hip-Hop Generation popularized the expression and has been adopted as a coursebook in classrooms at over 100 college and universities.

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 cbvc@nyu.edu.

A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group Meeting: Kinjal Dave
2026-04-10 13:00 - 14:30 | 20 Cooper Square, 3rd floor, room 372, New York, NY, 10003
Presented by the A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group. Hosted by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
REGISTER
Kinjal Dave (A/P/A Institute at NYU Visiting Academic and PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication) presents her dissertation chapter, “Bethak: Sitting Between Work and Life in the Diaspora” at this session of the A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group. Dave’s dissertation, tentatively titled “Gujarati Aunties on the Integrated Circuit: Women’s Manufacturing Labor in 1980s New Jersey,” is framed by broad theoretical questions such as: how does the West relate to the non-West in empirical terms, particularly in the creation of a political world order following the Second World War (Williams 1976)? What are the symbolic relations which reflect a situation of postmodernity (Harvey 1989, Trouillot 1991)? The tradition of global communication studies has argued that ethnographic perspectives are valuable resources with which to understand the arrangement of symbols and meanings of globalization as a post-structural process (Kraidy & Murphy, eds. 2003). How do Gujarati American technical workers in military subcontracting help tell the story of globalization?
This meeting is open to all graduate students working in and around the field of A/P/A Studies. Lunch will be served.

Bethak: Sitting Between Work and Life in the Diaspora
This methods chapter employs the bethak as an ethnographic and to an extent autoethnographic vignette from which to begin to delineate stories about a diaspora and the gendered social construction of their labor at the intersection of wage labor and social reproduction labor theories (Federici). The chapter sits as part of a broader dissertation project engaging immigrants from the nation-state of India, specifically from the state of Gujarat, who came to the United States in the 1980s as unskilled workers and established themselves into the manufacturing industry.
Specifically, many ended up working in military subcontracting facilities in New Jersey. Engaging an ethnographic encounter at an interviewee’s home, a bethak constructed in a peri-urban New Jersey home and the community members visiting the bethak are impacted by several different binaries: the United States as a different geographic and political territory from India, men and women as subjects socialized by their nation states and its cultural histories, and home with its relation to work. Since the project engages the author’s own family and family network, the chapter explores methodological distinction between autoethnography and reflexivity in the feminist ethnographic practices. Further, the chapter attempts to make a case for of collecting “boring stories” particularly from women who are not socialized to understand their own work history as important or worthy of storytelling practices as a feminist method with which to build working class immigrant women’s history.

NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to graduate students from NYU and nearby universities. 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.

Image courtesy Kinjal Dave.

Moving Objects: Modes of Conveyance & the Making of Global Asias
2026-04-24 10:00 - 17:30 | 20 Cooper Square, 3rd floor, New York, NY, 10003
Presented by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU and Pennsylvania State University’s Global Asias Initiative.
The Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU and Pennsylvania State University’s Global Asias Initiative are pleased to present “Moving Objects: Modes of Conveyance & the Making of Global Asias,” a one-day symposium at NYU and a Convergence feature for a special issue of the journal Verge: Studies in Global Asias. “Moving Objects” examines the varied modes of conveyance and the material infrastructures that facilitate the movements of people, cultural objects, and materials, by which Global Asias come into existence.
What are the objects, vehicles, and vessels of migration, circulation, and exchange that connect Asians to one another and to others? What are the platforms and material environments through which Global Asias are built? How do cultural and political representations of such moving objects serve to make diasporic passages possible? How are such passages re-routed with the arrival of new modes and technologies of travel and transit? How do moving objects shape the national, ethnic, racial, and religious subjectivities of those who inhabit Global Asias? What cultural and political meanings attach to the objects of movement and the paths they take?
Online registration will close at 9:00 a.m. on Friday, April 24. Guests will also be able to register onsite.
Symposium schedule
9:45 a.m. Registration
10:00-10:15 a.m. Opening Remarks

Crystal Parikh, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU
Tina Chen, Penn State’s Global Asias Initiative
10:15 a.m.-12:05 p.m. Objects Moving People
Anel Rakhimzhanova, “Performing Transit: Mobility and the Spatial Imagination in Central Asia”
Ann Ngoc Tran, “Boat Materialities: The Maritime Objects of Vietnam’s Postwar Exodus”
Christopher Capozzola, “Trapik, or, How Manila Got Hooked on Cars”
Julia H. Lee, “Tracking Global Asias”
Moderated by Junyoung Verónica Kim, New York University

12:05-2:00 p.m. Break
2:00-3:40 p.m. People Moving Objects
Kyoungjin Bae, “The Crisis of Portable Infrastructure: Tea Chests between Nineteenth-Century China and India”
Eve Oishi, “Correspondences: Three Missing Letters, the Postal Service, and Global Asias”
Alisha Elizabeth Cherian, “Kavadis in Motion: Routes of Belonging across Tamil Singapore and Malaysia”
Moderated by Krishnendu Ray, New York University
3:45-4:00 p.m. Closing Remarks

Crystal Parikh, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU
Tina Chen, Penn State’s Global Asias Initiative
4:00 p.m. Reception

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.

Credit: “Kavadi Thaipusam” by hams37 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Data Storytelling in Practice with Visualizing Palestine
2026-04-30 18:00 - 20:00 | 20 Cooper Square, 3rd floor, New York, NY, 10003
Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Department of Art and Art Professions, Department of English, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, Gallatin Human Rights Initiative, Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, Middle East and Islamic Studies Department, NYU Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, and Program in International Relations.
REGISTRATION REQUIRED
Featuring Visualizing Palestine, practitioners who visualize systems of oppression while working in partnership with movements for justice and accountability, this event will focus on key questions about data, research, and visual communication as tools for narrative interventions and advocacy. Through a discussion of Visualizing Palestine’s production process—based on rigorous research, creative design strategies, and critical inquiry into visual language and representational politics—attendees will arrive at both a theoretical and practical understanding of data storytelling. Panelists will focus on the history, evolution, and placement of Visualizing Palestine, and its role in supporting the movement for Palestinian liberation.
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 kevorkian.center@nyu.edu.

Image credit: Photograph courtesy Visualizing Palestine.

Imagining Otherwise: Worldmaking in Progress
2026-05-07 09:00 - 16:00 | To Be Announced
Presented by the NYU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) and Center for Collaborative Indigenous Research with Communities and Lands (Center CIRCL). Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, Latinx Project at NYU, NYU Steinhardt Department of Applied Statistics, Social Science, and Humanities, and NYU Department of Media, Culture, and Communication.
REGISTER (by April 24)
Graduate Students from the NYU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS) and NYU’s Center for Collaborative Indigenous Research with Communities and Lands (Center CIRCL) invite students from the tri-state area to join us for our 2026 Student Conference, Imagining Otherwise: Worldmaking in Progress.
Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, urges us to work towards living and ‘imagining otherwise’ as a vital and creative, everyday act of resistance to colonialism (Sharpe, 2016). Our one-day student conference, Imagining Otherwise: Worldmaking in Progress, takes up this call, building upon the traditions of Black, Indigenous, and scholars who theorize and write into a future-oriented, radical imagination of other worlds and alternative formations of co-existence. The conference invites advanced undergraduate students, graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in any field or discipline to come together, re-imagine and re-orient our relations and existence in the world, while daring to Imagine Otherwise.
This conference will take place at NYU. Location details to be provided.

A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group Publishing Workshop & Social: Featuring Eric Schwartz (NYU Press) & Andy Hsiao (Haymarket Books)
2026-05-08 | 20 Cooper Square, 3rd floor, New York, NY, 10003
Presented by the A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group. Hosted by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
REGISTRATION (open to all graduate students)
Editors Eric Schwartz (NYU Press) and Andy Hsiao (Haymarket Books) join the A/P/A Graduate Student Working Group for a discussion on publishing from 1:00-2:30 p.m. Topics covered will include developing a book proposal, pitching editors, and editing a dissertation into a book. Come with questions on both academic and non-academic publishing. Lunch will be served.
A graduate student social (2:30-4:00 p.m.) will follow the meeting.
NYU campus access guidelines: This is an in-person event, open to graduate students from NYU and nearby universities. 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 available. If you have any access needs, please email apa.rsvp@nyu.edu.

Image by Lamai Prasitsuwan.

Cover Collage & Memory Mixtape Workshop
2026-06-28 13:00 - 15:00 | Queens Public Library at Hunters Point, 47-40 Center Blvd, Long Island City, NY
Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
REGISTER
​Inspired by COVERS BY MP3, this playful, hands-on workshop invites participants to create a mini CD keychain with a shareable memory playlist, paired with a self-designed album cover.
​COVERS BY MP3 is a multimedia community arts project that documents stories from the Korean diaspora through music, memory, and recreated album covers featuring participants in place of the original artists.
​In this workshop, participants will build a playlist of the music that has shaped their lives and collage an album cover inspired by the memories it evokes. Their design will then be transformed into a mini CD keychain that links to the playlist, allowing their personal soundtrack to be shared at the tap of a phone.
​This program is made possible in part with public funds from the Queens Arts Fund, a re-grant program supported by New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and administered by New York Foundation for the Arts.
​It is also made possible through the generous support of the Queens Public Library.

Accessibility note: This venue is accessible to wheelchair users. Please contact accessibility@queenslibrary.org with any access requests or questions.

A Celebration of Life: Christine Choy
2026-07-18 14:00 - 17:00 | The People’s Forum, 320 West 37th Street, New York, NY
Presented by Third World Newsreel in partnership with the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU and Asian CineVision.
REGISTER
Join us to remember Christine Choy, NYU professor, co-founder of Third World Newsreel, and prolific filmmaker and activist.

A selection of clips from Choy’s films will be screened. Guests will be invited to speak about Choy’s impact on them as filmmakers, colleagues, friends, and community members. Together, we hope to reflect on her contributions to Asian American filmmaking and the organizations she helped to build.
Accessibility note: This venue has an elevator, and wheelchair-accessible, all-gender restrooms. Please contact workshop@twn.org with any access requests or questions.

The 49th Asian American International Film Festival
2026-07-30 - 2026-08-09 | Multiple venues
Presented by Asian CineVision (ACV). Co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
FESTIVAL SCHEDULE & TICKETS
Join Asian CineVision (ACV) for the highly anticipated 49th Asian American International Film Festival (AAIFF) in New York City and virtually from Thursday, July 30-Sunday, August 9. This year’s festival features a diverse line-up of films that delve into themes of love, relationships, and grief. Festival highlights include:

OPENING NIGHT (Thursday, July 30) – The NYC premiere of Indonesian supernatural drama Levitating, a Sundance 2026 selection directed by Wregas Bhanuteja about spiritual possession and fighting against gentrification. The screening will be followed by an in-person Q&A with the director and the opening night reception.
CHRISTINE CHOY TRIBUTE + RETROSPECTIVE (Sunday, August 2) – The festival celebrates the life and work of Christine Choy, one of Asian CineVisions founders, with screenings of Fei Tan and Ha Ha Shanghai and a discussion featuring Choy’s friends, students, and collaborators.
CLOSING NIGHT (Sunday, August 9) – The festival closes with an uplifting sports documentary that rivals the uplifting sports summer New Yorkers have been experiencing. Hoop Like This directed by Shubhangi Shekhar, is a film that explores the emotional and physical demands placed on the world’s first professional Indian basketball team.

A/P/A subscribers can use promo code AAIFF49_NYUAPA for 20% off all tickets.
Accessibility, safety, and health: The festival’s community agreement is available on its website. For questions or access needs, please contact info@asiancinevision.org.

Image credit: Still from Wregas Bhanuteja’s Levitating, courtesy the filmmaker.

Hui Mo‘olelo | Lāhainā Think Space at NYU
2026-09-18 11:00 - 20:00 | 20 Cooper Square, 20 Cooper Square, New York, NY, 10003
Presented by Maui Public Art Corps & the County of Maui Public Art Program in partnership with the NYU Hawai‘i Club, Center for Collaborative Indigenous Research with Community and Lands, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU.
REGISTER
Join us in New York City for Hui Mo‘olelo | Lāhainā Think Space at NYU, a special two-part gathering presented by Maui Public Art Corps & the County of Maui Public Art Program in partnership with the NYU Hawaiʻi Club and campus partners. This program brings the community-centered storytelling and listening process of Hui Mo‘olelo: Lāhainā to a national audience, exploring how story, memory, place, and collective care inform the creation of meaningful memorials.
At 11:00 a.m., the day will begin with a panel discussion, Listening Across Oceans: Story, Memory, and the Making of Memorials, bringing together voices from Hawaiʻi and beyond to discuss community-led approaches to remembrance.
We will reconvene at 6:00 p.m. for a film and performance showcase featuring stories and creative works emerging from the Hui Mo‘olelo process, and a special performance by Leilani Patao.

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.

Image: Still from The Koa Bench directed by directed by Sasha Hercik.
