2021 Theme: The Seen and Unseen
Our second annual conference, “The Seen and Unseen,” aims to continue the ongoing dialogue around the Asian, Pacific Islander, Asian American, and Pacific Islander American (API/A) identities. Tri-CASC 2021 serves as a forum in which we ask ourselves how API/A identities are both hyper visible and invisible. By examining how we perceive ourselves, how others perceive us, and how the broader structures in which we are placed influence us, we encourage attendees to reflect on the ways that our experiences and history influence our narratives. We hope to nurture the community healing that is essential to our liberation from histories of oppression and strive to create a framework that allows for multifaceted intersectional conversations that aim to dismantle social constructions so that we may redefine our own identities.
Meet the 2021 Team
IMPORTANT INFORMATION
ACCESSIBILITY
CONFERENCE AGENDA
Friday, April 16th
Introduction
8:00 pm - 8:15 pm ET
Keynote - Ryka Aoki
8:15 pm - 9:15 pm ET
​
​
Saturday, April 17th
Introduction
12:45 pm - 1:00 pm ET
​
​
Workshop Session 1
1:00 pm - 2:15 pm ET
Options
Lehua M. Taitano
Nimisha Ladva
Esther Hio-Tong Castillo
Sarah Zhang, Bhavya Shah, Macy Huang - Freesa Health
​
Lunch
2:15 pm - 3:00 pm ET
​
​
Workshop Session 2
3:00 pm - 4:15 pm ET
Options
Yellow Jackets Collective
Dorcas Tang
Celeste Rodero
Adrian Kyle Venzon & Pia Gorme
​
​
Break
4:15 pm - 4:30 pm ET
​
​
Discussion & Closing
4:30 pm - 5:45 pm ET
​
​
Breakout/Social Events
5:45 pm - 6:45 pm ET
Options
Conversation with Tri-Co Asian American Studies faculty group
Art workshop on mental health (taboo) in API/A communities
Movie
Games
Unwinding space
​
PROGRAM DETAILS
Friday Keynote
8:15 pm - 9:15 pm ET
with Ryka Aoki
When we are artists and scholars and thinkers, we spend so much time crafting theories, creating beauty… to be an artist or an academic or to work for a future is to believe in that future. How do we go forward from here? How do we build from here? How do we believe from here? How do we love from here? Ryka will be sharing some of her thoughts, and she hopes that they will add in some small way to your brilliance.
​
Open to: Everyone.
​
Saturday Workshops & Sessions
Workshop Session 1
1:00 pm - 2:15 pm ET
Workshop Session 2
with Lehua M. Taitano
The Language of Recognition: One Indigenous Approach to Pedagogy
Taitano will read and discuss her essay, "The Language of Recognition: One Indigenous Approach to Pedagogy," which investigates identity and collaboration across Indigenous communities. As Pacific Islands and Asian identified peoples living in diaspora, how do we recognize, connect and collaborate with Indigenous communities on whose land we are visitors? Workshop participants will be invited to discover their own ways of creating relationships of mutual support and solidarity within their own communities.
​
Open to: API/A and allied students.
​
with Nimisha Ladva
Storytelling Matters
Stories bring people together and build connections across individual experiences. In this interactive workshop, Nimisha Ladva will perform a story of her own, prove that everyone can tell a story, and then guide participants in activities to share their own stories with one another if they chose to. This workshop is designed to be fun!
​
Open to: API/A and allied students.
​
with Esther Hio-Tong Castillo
Exploring Intergenerational Trauma and Family Conflicts in Asian Immigrant Families
Recent research has begun to understand the impact of identity-based experience on family dynamics. Given the stressful and potentially traumatic circumstances that often motivate immigration, many Asian immigrant families transmit the damage of trauma throughout the years, resulting in family conflicts that are unique but common within the Asian community. In this workshop, we will explore immigration-related trauma, the ways in which trauma transmit across generations, and the impact of intergenerational trauma on parenting and family dynamics. We will also explore ways to break the cycle of unhealthy family relationships. This workshop will consist of a brief lecture, storytelling, and Q&A.
​
Open to: API/A and allied students. Allies are encouraged to take the role of listener to give space for API/A experiences.
​
with Sarah Zhang, Bhavya Shah, Macy Huang - Freesa Health
Mental Health Care in Asian Communities—Barriers and Culturally Sensitive Treatment
Asians face culturally specific barriers to seeking and receiving mental health care. Since Freesa’s founding last year, we’ve surveyed 150+ members of the Asian community and interviewed 50+ culturally sensitive therapists about these barriers and the unique impact of COVID-19. In our workshop, we hope to share some of our findings about how mental health is unique for Asians and discuss the importance of finding care that caters to one’s unique background and experiences.
​
Open to: API/A and allied students.
​
3:00 pm - 4:15 pm ET
with Yellow Jackets Collective
Entangled Struggles: Legacies of Care, Complicity, and Containment
A year into the pandemic, we’ve witnessed the increase in violence against Asian diasporic community as well as a slowing of mainstream and political attention to black liberation. How do we remember all our struggles are intertwined and how do we enact material change? Asian American diaspora has struggled publicly with questions of invisibility and visibility. We will look at the ways that AAPI, originally intended as a framework to organize horizontally and across differences, is also fraught with inconsistencies and tensions. What are the reasons we reach for visibility? Can we look to our history of containment, erasure, assimilation, and resistance in order to move away from a politics of exception towards a politics that builds toward the liberation of all people?
​
Open to: API/A and allied students.
​
with Dorcas Tang
Los Paisanos: La Diáspora China de Costa Rica
Paisano means “countryman”, a term of endearment used between the Chinese community in Costa Rica to refer to one another. In this workshop, Dorcas will explore Los Paisanos del Puerto (2018 – ongoing), which focuses on the living narratives of the Chinese diaspora in Puntarenas, Costa Rica. Through oral histories, archival photos, and portraits, they assert their stories that have been shaped and shifted by a violent legacy of anti-Chinese legislation and the strengthening of Mainland China’s economic influence on the region today. This work highlights a largely forgotten intersection of Chinese and Latinx identity while seeking to understand and redefine our definitions of both. As an extension of this project, she also explored Senorita China Costa Rica (2019 – ongoing) an Chinese diaspora beauty pageant in San José, Costa Rica. How is “Chineseness” shaped by the beauty pageant and who can be authentically “Chinese” enough? How do performances of culture, gender, and diasporic identity intersect? What does it mean to be considered beautiful and to belong in a country that grants you the privilege of neither?
​
The workshop will consist of audiovisual storytelling and Q&A. Participants will also be encouraged to build their own archives as well as question what it means to render visible these narratives, particularly in using the camera (a medium deeply intertwined with legacies of colonialism and imperialism).
​
Open to: API/A and allied students.
​
with Celeste Emiko Kamaha’o Rodero
Like Water: Mirror, Reflect, Witness, Share
Through the practice of Kilo (key-low) - the Hawaiian practice of observing or as I like to call - witnessing - my surroundings, emotions, thoughts, and behaviors of self and other - I see the unseen. Through Kilo - we see the unseen. In this workshop, I will share the process behind #digdogdigreflection in relation to 'ÅŒlelo (Hawaiian language), life’s source - wai (water) and how they see me through healing, collective healing.
I am anti-authority, anti-superority, anti-ableism and anti-racist - decolonizing until the day I die. This workshop welcomes sharing in and building up, for this experience is for us all, because of all of us. Through playful writing exercises, body movement and the willingness to interact - may this be an experience we all learn, heal, and grow through.
NATURE AS OUR MIRROR
GRATITUDE FIRST + LAST
HEAL YOUR SELF
HEAL OUR EARTH
Please be prepared with the following:
Water to drink + a snack
Pencil or pen + paper
​
Open to: only API/A students. The recording will be available for allies.
​
with Adrian Kyle Venzon and Pia Gorme
Filipinx American Politics - American Imperialism and Internalized Colonialism
Through a presentation and follow-up small group discussions, this workshop aims to contextualize the prominent Trump-supporting Filipinx community in the history of American colonization of the Philippines. Drawing form our own and participant’s personal experiences, ranging from politically charged conversations with family to social activism, we hope to promote critical conversations about the ways that white supremacy and anti-Blackness bubble up in our communities under the guise of protecting conservative traditions. Together, we will develop strategies that we as young Asian Americans can use to bring these conversations to our own homes in a respectful and meaningful way.
​
Open to: API/A and allied students, but Q&A will only be for API/A students.
​
Discussion & Closing
4:30 pm - 5:45 pm ET
Join a facilitated discussion in which we hope to dive a little deeper into the theme of this year’s conference, “The Seen and Unseen”. We will be focusing on the ways in which our identities are perceived in the communities that we are in, particularly in predominantly white academic spaces. The format of this section will involve a breakout activity and participants are encouraged to contribute to the conversation through both speaking and typing in the chat. This discussion is open to API/A conference attendees only.
​
Open to: only API/A students.
Breakouts & Social Events
5:45 pm - 6:45 pm ET
Conversation with Tri-Co Asian American Studies faculty group
TriCo Asian American Studies
The discussion focuses on the history and process of formalizing the TriCo Asian American Studies program, what is envisioned for the future of the program to get the word out to students about the program, and help students to think through how Asian American Studies can fit into their broader education and personal identity exploration. This is particularly timely given some of the issues raised about identity, race, and inter-group relations during the Tri-Co student strikes.
​
Open to: API/A and allied students.
​
Art workshop on mental health (taboo) in API/A communities
Color Therapy with Husnal: Destigmatizing Mental Health through Arts
For the breakout session, bring colors (any medium you like). We will be talking about the taboo -ness surrounding mental health while expressing ourselves by using colors/ through art. Sometimes it is not the end result that matters but the process.
​
Open to: API/A and allied students.
​
Movie Session
Title: Call Her Ganda
Time: 1hr 37 min
Movie Summary: When Jennifer Laude, a Filipina trans woman, is brutally murdered by a U.S. Marine, three women intimately invested in the case–an activist attorney (Virgie Suarez), a transgender journalist (Meredith Talusan) and Jennifer’s mother (Julita “Nanay” Laude)–galvanize a political uprising, pursuing justice and taking on hardened histories of US imperialism.
​
Filmmaker Bio: PJ Raval is more recently known as an award-winning filmmaker than he is an ex-scientist born on Tax Day. Growing up as a queer, first-generation Filipino American in a small, white, conservative town in California’s central valley, PJ’s outsider experience greatly shaped his filmmaking practice. PJ’s work explores the overlooked subcultures and identities within the already marginalized LGBTQ+ community.
​
Open to: API/A and allied students.
​
Game Session
Bond with your fellow conference attendees through some fun games! It may be hard to get to know people through the constant Zoom meetings but we are hoping this space will be able to provide you with some much-needed social bonding in these virtual times. Game options are subject to change but will most likely be pandemic popular games such as Among Us, skribbl.io, etc.
​
Open to: API/A and allied students.
​
Unwinding Space
The purpose of this space is for conference attendees to process with each other any emotions, thoughts, or concerns that they may have developed throughout the conference. This space will be a confidential space where fellow attendees can share their experiences and support each other. This space is open to API/A conference attendees only.
​
Open to: only API/A students.
​
​
SPEAKERS
LEHUA M. TAITANO
Lehua M. Taitano is a queer CHamoru writer and interdisciplinary artist from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam) and co-founder of Art 25: Art in the Twenty-fifth Century. She is the author of two volumes of poetry—Inside Me an Island and A Bell Made of Stones. Her chapbook, appalachiapacific, won the Merriam-Frontier Award for short fiction. She has two recent chapbooks of poetry and visual art: Sonoma and Capacity. She has served as an APAture Featured Literary Artist via Kearny Street Workshop, a Kuwentuhan poet via The Poetry Center at SFSU, and as a Culture Lab visual artist and curatorial advisor for the Smithsonian Institute’s Asian Pacific American Center. Taitano’s work investigates modern indigeneity, decolonization, and cultural identity in the context of diaspora.
ESTHER HIO-TONG CASTILLO
Dr. Esther Hio-Tong Castillo is a sociologist, educator and social justice & mental health advocate. She has nearly two decades of working experience in education as a teacher, counselor, community advocate and faculty in various educational settings, including early childhood education, youth programs, adult education and higher education. Born and raised in Macau, China, she is a proud first-generation immigrant and first-generation college student. Dr. Castillo has a MA in Humanities and Social Thoughts from NYU and she obtained her PhD in Sociology from Temple University in 2017. Currently, she is the Program Manager of the Chinese Immigrant Families Wellness Initiative (CIFWI) at the Philadelphia Chinatown Development Corporation. At CIFWI, she implements and organizes all programming and offers wellness workshops to immigrant parents and their children.
YELLOW JACKETS COLLECTIVE
YJC is a chosen family of yellow queers collaborating towards futures that center marginalized bodies.
​
We say Yellow explicitly because our family members are a part of the East Asian diaspora in the U.S. We want to be accountable for our privileges and the specific roles our communities have played in U.S. history, particularly the model minority myth, which perpetuates antiblackness and white supremacy. We are also reclaiming a political history of YELLOW PERIL that is invested in the collective liberation of all people, with emphasis on those who are most marginalized. We mobilize through collaboration, solidarity and affinity-based work. We only claim to speak for and represent our specific experiences as queer yellow folx who met through college. The rest of the work for us is collaborative and affinity based, because brown/non-yellow/non-US Asian folx and diasporic QTPOC folx, speak for themselves.
CELESTE EMIKO KAMAHA'O RODERO
Aloha, my name is Celeste Emiko Kamaha’o Rodero. I am an activist, artist, and future ancestor. I come from many people and we all meet in Hawai’i, my birth place and currently where I live. Like the names I come from, Kamahele + Waihe’e - I am the Traveler (of) Slippery Water. Growing up in a small plantation town in Hilo, Hawai’i and then outside of Washington D.C. - traveling has been my life and my experiences have informed me of the abundant, fluid, and non-binary reality we truly live in.
PIA GORME
Pia (she/her) is a first-generation Filipino American from Atmore, Alabama, originally from Dumaguete City, Philippines. She's a pre-med student at Yale double majoring in Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology & History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health. She is the co-president of Kasama: The Filipinx Club at Yale, an undergraduate student coordinator at Yale's Asian American Cultural Center on the center's 40th anniversary team, the co-communications chair of Yale's Asian American Students Alliance, and is an undergraduate student researcher in a cell biology and in a social gerontology & health lab. She enjoys photography as a hobby, especially taking sunset photos, is a boba aficionado, and loves discovering new music and making playlists on Spotify.
SHU-WEN WANG
Shu-wen Wang is a clinical and cultural psychologist whose research broadly examines stress, coping, health and well-being in the context of relationships and families with a focus on Asian American and Latinx health and social functioning. She is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Haverford College. The most recent branch of her research focuses on social class-based cultural norms in first-generation college students’ coping and help-seeking behaviors. Professor Wang is also a founding member of the Tri-Co Asian American Studies Group.
HUSNAL BHASIN
Husnal is an international student from New Delhi, India. Fine!, her community development project focuses on normalizing the discussion of mental health through art. “‘I’m fine’, what a paradoxical phrase,” says Husnal. “I’ve always been surprised as to why people in a civilized society like ours would hesitate to express their true state of mind. Why do we always feel this pressure to look happy, answering the often asked 'how are you?' with an automatic 'I’m fine’?”
​
As part of FINE, Husnal worked with people living in slums, old age homes, and underprivileged schools to help them express themselves through art. She created a public art installation: a massive figure shrouded in black—representing depression—surrounded by “happiness." The installation was placed in high-traffic areas such as shopping malls, and encouraged onlookers to color happiness/draw happiness with colors on paper to overshadow the darkness. Husnal believes that expressing yourself can be hard and colors can really help.
RYKA AOKI
Ryka Aoki is a poet, composer, and author. ”Ryka’s work has appeared or been recognized in publications including Vogue, Elle, Bustle, Autostraddle, PopSugar, and Buzzfeed. Her latest poetry has appeared at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. Ryka has been honored by the California State Senate for “extraordinary commitment to the visibility and well-being of Transgender people.”
​
Ryka’s first novel, He Mele a Hilo, was published by Topside Press in 2014. She is a two-time Lambda Literary Award finalist for her collections Seasonal Velocities, and Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul. She was the inaugural performer for the first ever Transgender Stage at San Francisco Pride, and has performed in venues including the San Francisco Pride Main Stage, the Columbus National Gay and Lesbian Theatre Festival, and the National Queer Arts Festival.
Ryka has also worked with the American Association of Hiroshima Nagasaki A-Bomb Survivors, and two of her compositions were adopted as the organization’s official “songs of peace. She has MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University and is the recipient of a University Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her next novel, Light from Uncommon Stars is forthcoming from Tor Books in Fall 2021.
NIMISHA LADVA
Nimisha Ladva's stories have been broadcast nationally on The Moth Radio Hour on NPR and on Stories from the Stage on PBS. She was a featured storyteller for the RISK! podcast at the London Podcast Festival in 2019. She is a Moth GrandSlam winner, a Moth Mainstage performer, and was dubbed the “Best of the Best Storytellers in Philadelphia” by First Person Arts in 2016 and again in 2020. Her play, Uninvited Girl, first staged in Philadelphia at the First Person Arts Festival in 2016 had it's New York city premier at the Women in Theater Festival in 2018. Her writing has been published in the U.S. and U.K. and can be found on The Guardian online. She teaches writing and public speaking at Haverford College.
FREESA HEALTH
Freesa Health is an online mental health platform that provides culturally sensitive and affirming therapy for members of the Asian community. The company was founded amidst the pandemic, when conflicts resulting from culture clash and generational gaps within households were amplified. Through connecting individuals with culturally sensitive therapy and counseling services to receive dedicated and convenient care, Freesa hopes to help remove the stigma surrounding mental health in Asian communities.
DORCAS TANG
Dorcas Tang 邓佳颖 is a third-generation Chinese-Malaysian artist and photographer currently working on unceded Gadigal land (Sydney, Australia). She seeks to question ideas of belonging, constructions of memory, and cultural identity. Her work explores these themes through visualizing the transnational Chinese diaspora spanning from Central America to Southeast Asia. Her most recent projects include Señorita China, an audiovisual project which examines a historical Chinese diaspora beauty pageant in Costa Rica as part of a global phenomenon. Looking towards the future, she aims to make a mark in history that has deemed her community as forgettable.
ADRIAN KYLE VENZON
Adrian Kyle Venzon - Adrian (he/him) is a first generation Filipino American from Las Vegas, Nevada, originally Angeles City, Philippines. At Yale, he studies English and Education Studies with the goal of becoming a secondary school English teacher. He is the co-president of Kasama: The Filipinx Club at Yale, as well as a singer in the Yale Spizzwinks(?), dancer in Yale Movement, and violinist in the Davenport Pops Orchestra. When he isn’t rehearsing, he enjoys collaborating with local Connecticut teachers through his Anti-Racist Curriculum and Pedagogy class and reading/writing essays for his humor class.
HEEJUNG PARK
Heejung Park is a cultural-developmental psychologist in the Psychology Department and a Co-Director of Child and Family Studies at Bryn Mawr College. She studies cultural values, identities, and lived experiences of children, youth, and families from diverse cultural backgrounds. Professor Park is particularly interested in identifying challenges and strengths associated with migration, social change, and adaptation experiences in an increasingly interconnected and multicultural world. Her courses include Asian American Psychology and Cross-Cultural Psychology. She is also a founding member of the Tri-Co Asian American Studies Group.
BAKIRATHI MANI
Bakirathi Mani is a Professor in the Department of English Literature, and Coordinator of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Swarthmore College. Born in Bombay (now Mumbai), raised in Tokyo, and educated in the United States and in India, professor Mani's research and teaching focus on Asian American studies, postcolonial theory and transnational feminist and queer of color studies. She earned her Ph.D. from Stanford University, her M.A. from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and her B.S.F.S. from Georgetown University. She is the author of Aspiring to Home: South Asians in America (Stanford University Press, 2012) and the newly released Unseeing Empire: Photography, Representation, South Asian America (Duke University Press, 2020). Professor Mani is a founding member of the Tri-Co Asian American Studies Group.
POST- CONFERENCE
INFORMATION
Thank you to those who were able to make it for our virtual conference, the Seen and Unseen! If you couldn't make it, or were wishing to rewatch different workshops, fret not! Below you will find recordings of the keynote and workshops with live transcription. Please contact us at tricasc@gmail.com if you have trouble viewing them. These were made available with the speakers' consent.
​
Additionally, it would be helpful for the Tri-CASC planning team if those who attended our virtual 2021 conference take a moment to give us feedback! And if you have a spare minute, please also check out the post-conference resources that our speakers kindly shared with us!
