Archiving Asian American Activism: The 1960s and After
Colleen Lye, Professor
Institute for the Study of Societal Issues
Closed. This professor is continuing with Fall 2024 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Spring 2025.
This project involves the production of a series of short educational videos on Professor Emeritus Ling-chi Wang and his contributions to Asian American civil rights history since the 1960s. The video topics are: the link between campus and community; immigrant advocacy and language rights; varieties of anti-Asian bias on local, regional and national levels; Asian American cultural representation in an evolving media landscape; Asian American political representation; the conscientious role of Ethnic Studies in American higher education.
Role: This project seeks 2-4 research apprentices who will assist with searching for, obtaining, labeling, and uploading relevant archival material to a master database. This material will include relevant images, video, and audio clips which will be incorporated into the videos. The material will be sourced from the Ethnic Studies library, the Bancroft, the nonprofit organization Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), online sources, and Professor Wang himself. The research apprentices will collaborate with and report back to a graduate student/professor team on these tasks, gaining experience with doing research in activist visual culture history.
Qualifications: Previous archival research experience is preferred but not required. Students should be precise and detail-oriented: they will be asked to organize source material, which must be consistently labeled across the master database and external drives. Students should have a sense for visual storytelling and ideally are interested in documentaries. Lastly, familiarity with topics and issues relating to Asian American history is a plus.
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Jessica Jiang, Graduate Student
Hours: 3-5 hrs
Off-Campus Research Site: Research site is both on and off campus. Off campus sites include Chinese for Affirmative Action, 17 Walter Lum Place in San Francisco, CA.