Upcoming Semester

Spring 2027 courses

ASAM 022. Healing Justice.
E. Manalo-Pedro, PZ, T 2:45-5:30 p.m.
Using an integrative and socio-centric approach to learning, this student-centered course draws from student projects to examine healing justice through feminist, anti-racist pedagogies and contemplative practices. In addition to identifying community resilience, research shows the impact of adverse childhood experiences, historical trauma, and chronic stress on the body and executive functions. Through community engagement, students will explore the potential of destressing, somatic, and compassionate pedagogies in interrogating the relationship among individual, interpersonal, and inter-organizational anger with viable generative sustainable systemic change.

ASAM 085. Health Inequities.
K. Yep, PZ, T 9:35 a.m.-12:20 p.m.
The World Health Organization defines health as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. This participatory course will consider this whole-person definition across the human life course using a range of sociological, political science, and Asian American Studies principles and perspectives. In addition to drawing from Asian/American/Pacific Islander/Desi American (A/APIDA) communities, major topics will include the structure of health care systems in the United States and globally, doctor-patient interaction, social and cultural influences on health and disease, and social disparities in the distribution of health and quality health care. Includes community engagement project outside of class time.

*ASAM 086. Social Documentation and Asian Americans.
Staff, HM, F 1:15-4:00 p.m.
Viewing of films and other documentary forms by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) for critique and discussion. Basic instruction in use of digital video technology to document social issues relevant to Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. Community- project.

ASAM 089. Embodied Learning, Pedagogies of Belonging, and Qi Gong.
K. Yep, PZ, W 9:35 a.m.-12:20 p.m.
From policing bodies to productivity culture, scholarship examines subsequent distortions of bodies in educational institutions. Our bodies map the ways we are isolated, segmented, and dehumanized. And our bodies also narrate the ways we persist, repair, connect, foster solidarity, and radically reimagine ourselves and the world. The literature illuminates how bodies in classrooms are multi-layered and contested. Highlighting the possibility of social change through education, this course explores Roxana Ng’s framework of “embodied learning” as a potentially decolonizing pedagogical praxis. Through readings, dialogue, and practices, the class examines the hidden curriculum of different corporeal/mind dualisms in classrooms, the impact of (dis)embodiment on educational outcomes, and the transformative possibility of embodied education for critical consciousness and social action. This class investigates qi gong as an epistemological framework and an embodied practice related to liberatory pedagogies. Rooted in traditional Chinese medicine, qi gong involves breathing, awareness, and movement and centers interconnectedness as the basis for its knowledge system. Combining discussion of readings and experiential practice, we will engage in a community-engaged project that includes relational mindfulness, qi gong, and other contemplative practices.

*ASAM 101. Introduction to Asian American Studies (1/2 credit).
E. Manalo-Pedro, PZ, M 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Introduction to the field of Asian American Studies, with a particular focus on its institutional and interdisciplinary configuration at the Claremont Colleges. Topics will include Asian American racial formation, campus activism, faculty research, cultural and community politics.

ASAM 105B. Zines in the Asian Diaspora.
T. Honma, T 7:00-9:50 p.m.
This course explores self-published zines as a way to understand Asian diasporic experiences in various regions of the “Pacific World.” We will examine factors involved in transpacific movement and migration and how Asian diasporic communities choose to represent themselves through the medium of zines. By engaging in comparative analysis between creative narration and scholarly texts, we will investigate competing definitions of what it means to be “Asian.”

ASAM 115. Theory and Methods.
M.B. Nasir, PO, W 1:15-4:00 p.m.
As an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary field of study and knowledge production, Asian/American and Pacific Islander Studies uses a variety of research methods to address the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class in the realms of politics, representation, identity, and community formation, among others. The course will provide a critical examination of important themes in Asian American history; contemporary issues facing Asian American communities in a time of accelerated economic, social, and political changes; and the relation of textual and cultural production to epistemology and states of being and feeling that respond to structures of power.

*ASAM 125. Introduction to Asian American History, 1850-Present.
A. Flores, HM, TR 2:45-4:00 p.m.
This survey course examines the history of Asian immigrant groups and their American-born descendants as they have settled and adjusted to life in the United States since 1850. We will explore issues such as the experience of immigration, daily life in urban ethnic enclaves, and racist campaigns against Asian immigrants. In addition, this course utilizes an ethnic studies framework that requires students to critically explore other themes such as class, community, empire, gender, labor, race, sexuality, settler colonialism, and war from the perspective of Asian Americans.

*ASAM 127. Popular Culture and the Pacific Islands.
A. Flores, HMC, TR 1:15-2:30 p.m.
This seminar (discussion-based) course critically examines the relationship between popular culture and the Pacific Islands. Using concepts and theories in cultural studies, history, Indigenous studies, and media studies, students will learn how to analyze aesthetics, form, historical context, meaning, power, and representation embedded in popular culture. Some of the various forms of popular culture that will be explored include fashion, films, graphic novels, music, sports, and television. Additionally, emphasis will be placed on intersecting themes such as capitalism, gender, indigeneity, racism, and settler colonialism.

ASAM 144 PO. Islamophobia.
M.B. Nasir, PO, W 7:00-9:50 p.m.
This course explores the rise of Islamophobia to critically examine anti-Muslim racism and activist responses to it, with an emphasis on the United States. Through ethnographies, hip-hop, and fictional and documentary films, students will learn about the historical and enduring effects of Islamophobia on Muslim and non-Muslim South Asian American, Arab American, and African American communities. In addition, this course will consider emergent forms of antiracist protest forged in response to heightened policing, surveillance, and war in the current age of national security.

*ASAM 160. Asian American Women’s Experiences.
Staff, SC, R 7:00-9:45 p.m.
This course is an interdisciplinary examination of Asian and Pacific Islander American women. It will examine the history and experiences of Asian American women in the United States. The class will include both lecture and discussion and will cover various issues, such as gender roles, mass media stereotypes, Asian women’s feminism, and the impact of sexism and racism on the lives of Asian American women through education, work, and home life.

ASAM 172. Race and Visual Culture.
T. Honma, PZ, W 2:45-5:30 p.m.
This course explores the field of visual culture to examine the complexities and contradictions of Asian American racial subjectivity. We will ask, what is the relationship between race and visual aesthetics? What is the work of creativity and how does it intervene in salient issues that continue to impact Asian American communities today? How is racialization (and its various intersections) connected to questions of space and place, particularly environmental, carceral, and settler colonial landscapes? Issues to be considered include: immigration, confinement, deportation, and other forms of cultural and political marginalization and social control. Previous coursework in Asian American Studies recommended.

ASAM 175. Asian American Comics: Racial Politics.
T. Honma, PZ, T 7:00-9:50 p.m.
This seminar focuses on comics as a form of storytelling within Asian American communities and the politics of racial representation. How do Asian American comic writers situate themselves (and their narratives) within a US settler society structured by capitalism, heteropatriarchy and white supremacy? Readings will include comics and graphic novels by and about Asian Americans from a variety of ethnic and gendered subject positions, as well as works distributed by both mainstream, independent, and do -it-yourself publishers. Theoretical work that examines race and visuality, political economy, positionality and intersectionality, transnationalism, aesthetics, and affect will also be required.

ASAM 189D. Public Health Praxis.
E. Manalo-Pedro, PZ, MW 9:35-10:50 a.m.
This course takes a multi-disciplinary approach to examine educational and professional pathways as a sociopolitical determinant of racial health equity. The course introduces students to theoretical frameworks, extant public health research, and community-driven actions that challenge conventional approaches to public health in the United States. By interrogating historical and contemporary conditions affecting people with Asian and Pasifika ancestry, students will critique academic, labor, and health care structures that maintain barriers to collective liberation. Students will explore diverse pathways to working toward healthy futures for all by centering the perspectives of community organizers, scholar-activists, artists, and health professionals serving Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities.

ASAM 191 PO. Asian American Studies Senior Thesis.
Students will work with one or more faculty on original thesis research toward completion of senior thesis.

ENGL 148. Writing SWANA America.
L. Mansouri, SC, MW 1:15-2:30 p.m.
This course explores the writing and lives of Southwest Asians and North Africans living in North America, as well as those racialized as SWANA within North America even if they were of different origins. It begins with the continent’s first Arabic-language writers, most of whom were enslaved Muslim West Africans, then moves to writing by and about nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrants from Lebanon, Armenia, and other parts of West Asia. The final section of the course explores SWANA-American literature of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, with a particular focus on the complexities of how SWANA-Americans are racialized and on how the Iranian Revolution, 9/11, and the “War on Terror” have reshaped the material realities and Orientalist stereotypes that SWANA-American writers negotiate.

ENGL 170X. Asian American Literary and Cultural Studies.
O. Lafferty, PO, TR 9:35-10:50 a.m.
ENGL 170X introduces students to major topics in foundational and recent Asian American literary and cultural studies. In particular, the theme of this specific version of ENGL 170X centers representations and cultural politics of Asian diasporic characters who appear in works by U.S.-based authors of Asian descent and who can broadly be characterized as mad, maladjusted, and/or maintaining “messy” relations with mainstream U.S. culture. In a word, they are “crazy.” This descriptor includes characters who are hysterical, clinically depressed, and other forms of being mentally ill or unwell. It also includes characters who are mentally disabled; traumatized; struggling with addiction; abnormally emotionally cold or affectless; amoral; excessive or disorderly; and/or socially deviant. We will examine how depictions of the complex psychic and social lives of these characters can provide insight into the broader lived realities of Asian American and Asian diasporic communities in the contexts of post/colonialism, structural racism, militarization, and globalization. More precisely, we will study the ways that these various “negative” and “nonnormative” modes of psychic and social being challenge dominant U.S. cultural imaginings of Asian Americans, which are frequently premised on problematic neoliberal politics of respectability (e.g., the trope of the industrious “model minority”). To this end, our analyses and discussions will take cues from an array of scholarly discourses: queer/trans of color critique, crip of color critique, disability studies, trauma studies, psychoanalysis, and critical mad studies, to name a few.

GWS 162. Decolonizing Gender and Sexuality in Asian/America.
A. Bahng, PO, M 1:15-4:00 p.m.
Through an analysis of historical and contemporary Asian American and Pacific Islander literature, film, performance, art, and popular culture, this course emphasizes a wide range of engagements with gender and sexuality that disrupts binary thinking on the topic. Students will examine the formation of Asian American genders and sexualities alongside histories of racialization, migration, and labor that span East, South, and Southeast Asian, as well as Pacific contexts. In our engagement with transpacific movements of people and culture, we will foreground settler colonial occupations of the Pacific Islands and highlight the work of decolonial queer-feminist thinkers like Haunani-Kay Trask, Maile Arvin, and Stephanie Nohelani Teves. We will attend to the incommensurability of migrant and indigenous frameworks, even as we move through the persistence and at times concurrence of multiple forms of colonialism that connect Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. Some questions we will address include: How do historical contexts (i.e. the Cold War, 9/11, Japanese internment) affect Asian American gender formations? What does the popular (Orientalist depictions of Asian women from Geisha Girl to Tiger Mom) have to do with the geo-political (U.S. economic relations with Asia)? How might an Asian American queer politics reveal the limitations of the model minority myth? How can centering Pacific Islander onto-epistemologies decolonize notions of gender and sexuality?

HIST 169. Globalization and Oceania: Hawai’i and Tonga.
C. Johnson, PZ, MW 1:15-2:30 p.m.
This comparative course explores the deep histories of Hawai’i and Tonga, beginning with their stories of creation and closing with the annexation of these independent kingdoms by the U.S. and British Empires at the end of the nineteenth century. Topics include: creation, voyaging, gender, power, and the land.

MS 100AA. Asian Americans in Media.
A. Kaneko, PZ, MW 11:00 a.m.-12>15 p.m.
This is a historical survey of Asian American involvement in media production, beginning with the silent film era and ending with contemporary projects in film, video, and new media. In this course, we will focus on the shifting yet continuous participation of Asians in the production of media in North America, and look at how changing political, social, and cultural discourses have shaped media representations of Asians throughout this period.

*SOC 126AA. Immigration and the Second Generation.
H. Thai, PO, M 1:15-4:00 p.m.
Analysis of post-1965 children of immigrants, and/or immigrant children in Asia America. Emphasis on variations on coming-of-age patterns, the course examines diverse childhood experiences, including ‘transnational’ children, ‘refugee’ children, and ‘left-behind’ children. Emphasis on gender, class, ethnicity, intergenerational relations, education, sexuality, popular culture, and globalization, and specifically how young adults negotiate major American institutions such as the labor market and educational systems.

THEA 115O Applied Theatre.
J. Lu, PO, MW 10:00 a.m.-12:30 p.m.
Applied Theatre encompasses all theatrical interventions that are deployed outside of a traditional theater space for community building, problem solving, and healing justice. In this course, you will learn techniques from Playback Theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed, the most widely known forms of Applied Theatre. You will then apply these skills in a curriculum for Bullying Prevention / Transformative Social Emotional Learning at a local elementary school.