Methodologies | Now What?

Archives

To establish a contextual understanding of student activists’ interactions with faculty and administration during the early push for Asian American Studies at Duke, we examined archival materials from the following:

Asian Students Association, 1995-2005
Diya
Office of Intercultural Affairs (Central for Multicultural Affairs)
Spectrum
Asian American Studies Working Group
Duke Chronicle

Specifically, we examined student interactions with faculty (and administration, to a lesser degree) and student-driven movements for Ethnic Studies/Asian American Studies. So far, we’ve seen these student/faculty/administrator interactions through both formal and informal correspondence, mentoring or sponsorship relationships between student organizations/organizers and faculty, comprehensive reports presented at the CMA’s Unity Through Diversity events, and even demands or documentation of rallies or teach-ins. Through this research, we’ve seen certain faculty members emerge as apparent collaborators, even as they’ve faded into the background of present-day Asian/American student organizing. In these archival records, we’ve uncovered valuable insights into the administration’s approaches to communication with student organizers, particularly their eagerness to rely on a small subset of students (or even a singular student, at times!) of color as their informants. Throughout these analyses, we’ve seen the messiness of the coalition between faculty, administrators, and students, whose goals and positionalities flow in and out of alignment.

Oral history

The backbone of our project consists of four oral histories conducted with Asian American Diaspora Studies (AADS) faculty members: Dr. Calvin Cheung-Miaw, Dr. Susan Thananopavarn, Dr. Esther Lee, and Dr. Anna Storti. During our foray into the archives, we uncovered an enormity of student oral histories but pinpointed a dearth of oral histories from faculty. We believe this “gap” in the history of the struggle for AADS demands to be filled and narrated. Firstly, incorporating oral histories within our archival project is necessary because it provides an entry point to tap into the genealogy of activism, wisdom, care, and histories preserved within faculty. Undergirded by Indigenous understandings of oral history, we theorize people as living “archives” containing multitudes of histories, worlds that we intend to engage with to uncover crucial perspectives and thoughts about AADS. Oral history provides a gateway to understanding our memories alongside the institution’s memories.

Framed by a “what now” perspective, we endeavor to uncover AADS’ current state and the faculty’s future aspirations and visions for AADS. However, we understand that hegemonic conceptions of research methodologies seeped within white, colonial, and capitalist understandings cannot fully capture the genealogy we are tapping into. Thus, we seek an alternative that dislocates white power and disrupts the ways power moves in the academy. By utilizing Nēpia Mahuika’s seminal work Rethinking Oral History and Tradition: An Indigenous Perspective (2019), we situate our oral histories in Indigenous and feminist theories and praxes. We recognize and acknowledge our connection to Duke University, the same university Asian/American students (and others who formed powerful coalitions) from the early 2000s struggled and mobilized against. This “past” bleeds into the present as students contend with what it means to have a program, asking important questions about how we move beyond: what now?

Furthermore, as we engage with the archives, we understand how they have historically been weapons with which white colonial powers waged intellectual wars against Indigenous communities and other people of color. With this in mind, we turn to an alternative: approaching and engaging with the archives through the praxis of care, celebration, and repair as posited in “Wholeness is No Trifling Matter" by Holly A. Smith. By tapping into Black feminist theories about the archives, we conduct our oral histories with ethics grounded in transparency, inclusivity, and community. Additionally, our goal is to fill the gaps through a reparative process that dislodges and disrupts white supremacy and hierarchies that historically characterized knowledge production and academia. This aligns with the mission of the student activists and organizers who found, saw, and shaped themselves within the radical politics of the movement for the liberation of the Third World. These understandings will also shape how we approach and conduct transcription in which the narrators possess the agency to edit, redact, and/or destroy oral histories. Although the destruction of the material may seem antithetical to the aims of the archives, it is a mandatory practice for our ethics.

Finally, how we conduct our oral history interviews will be informed by Valerie Yow’s Recording Oral History (1994) work which provides detailed “mentoring” on how one should conduct interviews with care and reciprocity.

Our oral history project intends to ultimately find itself where we began: the struggle for majority white institutions to teach us about us in the ways we demand. By complicating the narrative with the addition of faculty voices, we hope to uncover histories that may serve to illustrate what the future of AADS may look, feel, and sound like.