My research is evidently and perceptibly interdisciplinary. It draws upon my formal training as a documentary filmmaker, as well as my academic education in ethnic studies, women's studies, and information technologies. And it uses methodologies of oral history, ethnography, fieldwork, documentary film, and working with text, images, and objects. It focuses on the strategic uses of memory practices among Asian communities in diasporas and includes analysis of gendered narratives about migration in a wide array of activities and sources: family letters, community-based cultural heritage projects, food practices at home and in restaurants, and art/craft-making of Japanese Americans during their incarceration in WWII and Asian American sororities in the twentieth century and contemporary society.
In addition to my written work, I am also the writer/director/editor of several documentary films, including the award-winning Homecoming about cross-generation memories of migration on the personal scale through my family's immigrant experiences in Malaysia and the United States and A Community of Friends about the founding of the Chinatown Branch Library in Downtown Los Angeles. These films address the creation and maintenance of enduring (memory) practices for transferring crucial knowledge between generations through what appear to be ephemeral activities in people's quotidian lives. Those practices are heterogeneous and multifaceted processes of visual, textual, and material productions within kinship groups that form and forge belonging, i.e., affiliations, associations, and closeness, through shared experiences, collective identities, and communal histories. I excavate and illuminate themes and patterns in those narratives about identity, labor, kinship, and solidarity, while also documenting those intimate and public practices through visual media.
My scholarship is especially attune to the genealogies of personhood in memory work that produce intimate archives of effects (objects, artifacts etc.) and affect (emotions, feelings etc.) that enable and animate belonging, kinship, solidarity, and camaraderie, within social groups. My dissertation, Asian Greek Sisterhoods: Archives, Affects, and Belongings in Asian American Sororities, examines the memory-keeping practices of Asian Greek sororities from 1929-2015, conceptualizing them as experiential, participatory acts and activities that transfer knowledge, traditional cultural practices, rites, and rituals from one generation of women to the next through time and space. It engages these matters theoretically through the contemporary debates found in ethnic, gender, feminist, and queer studies, information and archival science, and performance and affect studies.
I submit to the idea that artistic and academic endeavors are both equally and simultaneously creative, inventive, and expressive intellectual exercises of human imagination and effort - physical and mental exertion. Or speaking in the contemporary vernacular: mash-ups and remixes when done well, astutely with rigorous discipline, fine craft, and thoughtfulness can be interesting, remarkable and stirring exercises of art: intellect, creativity, and self-expression.
In addition to my written work, I am also the writer/director/editor of several documentary films, including the award-winning Homecoming about cross-generation memories of migration on the personal scale through my family's immigrant experiences in Malaysia and the United States and A Community of Friends about the founding of the Chinatown Branch Library in Downtown Los Angeles. These films address the creation and maintenance of enduring (memory) practices for transferring crucial knowledge between generations through what appear to be ephemeral activities in people's quotidian lives. Those practices are heterogeneous and multifaceted processes of visual, textual, and material productions within kinship groups that form and forge belonging, i.e., affiliations, associations, and closeness, through shared experiences, collective identities, and communal histories. I excavate and illuminate themes and patterns in those narratives about identity, labor, kinship, and solidarity, while also documenting those intimate and public practices through visual media.
My scholarship is especially attune to the genealogies of personhood in memory work that produce intimate archives of effects (objects, artifacts etc.) and affect (emotions, feelings etc.) that enable and animate belonging, kinship, solidarity, and camaraderie, within social groups. My dissertation, Asian Greek Sisterhoods: Archives, Affects, and Belongings in Asian American Sororities, examines the memory-keeping practices of Asian Greek sororities from 1929-2015, conceptualizing them as experiential, participatory acts and activities that transfer knowledge, traditional cultural practices, rites, and rituals from one generation of women to the next through time and space. It engages these matters theoretically through the contemporary debates found in ethnic, gender, feminist, and queer studies, information and archival science, and performance and affect studies.
I submit to the idea that artistic and academic endeavors are both equally and simultaneously creative, inventive, and expressive intellectual exercises of human imagination and effort - physical and mental exertion. Or speaking in the contemporary vernacular: mash-ups and remixes when done well, astutely with rigorous discipline, fine craft, and thoughtfulness can be interesting, remarkable and stirring exercises of art: intellect, creativity, and self-expression.
