May 10th & 11th, 2024
Care as the First Student Learning Objective:
Breaking the Genre of the
Higher Education Classroom
University of California, Irvine
Humanities Instructional Building 135
A two-day symposium to reimagine the genre of university education in which student care and intellectual rigor are mutually constitutive goals of every classroom
Day 1
- An opening Keynote titled "Unwellness and Care in the University" from Dr. Mimi Khúc
- A panel titled "Disintegrating Rigor" that will feature Dr. Jonathan Alexander, Dr. Traise Yamamoto, Dr. Emma Stapely, & Ph.D candidate, Row Ramires
- A working session titled Our Albleist Syllabi: Reading Our Syllabi for Filth facilitated by
Day 2
- A panel titled "On Illness. On Care: How We Teach the Body" featuring Ph.D candidates, Claire Chun & Maile Aihua Young
- A working session titled Toward an Access and Care-Centered Classroom facilitated by
This 2-day symposium will bring together faculty, staff, and students to ask What is a syllabus for? What is a learning objective? What is rigor? How might one reimagine time in the classroom? What might it mean to include care in evaluating student performance? What might care look like at the beginning of a term? In the middle and at the end?
Join us for a two-day wholescale reimagination of the college classroom culture, its relations of power and knowledge, its relation to temporality, its relation to differential bodyminds.
Speakers, Panelists, & Facilitators:
Dr. Mimi Khúc
Mimi Khúc (she/her) is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She was the 2023 Scholar / Artist / Activist in Residence for FLOURISH: Community-Engaged Arts and Social Wellness at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and is currently the Co-Editor of The Asian American Literary Review and an adjunct lecturer in Disability Studies at Georgetown University.
Dr. Jonathan Alexander
Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English at UC, Irvine. His most recent book is Writing and Desire: Queer Ways of Composing.
Dr. Traise Yamamoto
Traise Yamamoto is an Associate Professor of English at UC, Riverside. She is the author of Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body (University of California Press, 1999), and her scholarly work has appeared in Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society; positions: east asia cultures critique; The Intimate Critique: Autobiographical Literary Criticism; Race, Gender and Class; and Asian American Literature: A Brief Introduction.
Dr. Emma Stapely
Emma Stapely is an Assistant Professor of English at UC, Riverside. She specializes in American literatures before 1900 and the long 18th-century Anglophone Atlantic. She is the author of Afterlives of the American Revolution: Insurgent Remains (Palgrave 2024).
Dr. erin Khuê Ninh
erin Khuê Ninh is a Professor and current Chair of the Asian American Studies Department at UC, Santa Barbara. Her research centers on the model minority not as myth, but as racialization and identity. Throughlines in her writing and teaching are the subtleties of power, harm, and subject formation, whether in the contexts of terror and war, of family and immigration, or of gendering and rape culture. Ninh's recent monograph is Passing for Perfect: College Impostors and Other Model Minorities, a New Yorker featured book that examines the pressures of striving to achieve the "success frame," where failure is too ruinous to admit.
Maile Aihua Young
Maile Aihua Young (they/them) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their research examines the post-1945 development of global public health culture through epidemiology and Asian diasporic literature.
Claire Chun
Claire Chun (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Ethnic Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her research explores how modern conceptualizations of “Korean” and “Asian” beauty, wellness, and aesthetics are shaped by overlapping forces of US militarism, tourism, and humanitarianism.
Row Ramires
Row Ramires is a Ph.D candidate in the English Department at UC, Irvine.
Symposium Schedule
Friday. May 10, 2024
9-9:20 am: Gathering and Morning refreshments
9:20-9:30 am: Welcome remarks, James Kyung-Jin Lee (he/him), UCI
9:30-10:45 am: Opening Keynote: "Unwellness and Care in the University," Mimi Khúc
Keynote description:
Our students are dying. This is a reality many of us, including students themselves, have not been able to face. We have not been able to look directly at the mental health crisis happening beneath the veneer of our beautiful universities—a crisis the pandemic has only exacerbated. Dr. Mimi Khúc invites us to confront this crisis together, by drawing from her recent book, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss, and sharing what she has learned from students during her mental health tour across the U.S over the past seven years.
Keynote speaker:
Dr. Mimi Khúc (she/her) is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She was the 2023 Scholar / Artist / Activist in Residence for FLOURISH: Community-Engaged Arts and Social Wellness at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and is currently the Co-Editor of The Asian American Literary Review and an adjunct lecturer in Disability Studies at Georgetown University.
10:45-11 am: Break
11 am-12:30 pm: [Panel]: "Disintegrating Rigor"
Panel description:
This panel brings together four scholar-teachers to reflect on what it means to think beyond, perhaps even against, “rigor” as the imposition of standards that elide relationships of care. What happens if, in setting aside the pursuit of “rigor” with its attendant and calculated judgments and exclusions, we pay more attention to the networks of learning – and care of learning – that animate both scholarly and pedagogical endeavors? What if we exchange evaluation and assessment for exploration and attunement – exploring with one another, scholars and students, the pressing questions of our time and attuning one another to our mutual, collective, and individual needs as the “best practice” for developing intellectual engagement?
Panelists:
Dr. Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor’s Professor of English at UC, Irvine.
Dr. Traise Yamamoto is an Associate Professor of English at UC, Riverside.
Dr. Emma Stapely is an Assistant Professor of English at UC, Riverside.
Row Ramires is a Ph.D candidate in the English Department at UC, Irvine.
12:30-1:30 pm: Lunch
1:30-3 pm: [Working session]: "Our Ableist Syllabi: Reading Our Syllabi for Filth"
Workshop description:
This working session will give participants the opportunity to collectively break down actual syllabi, to expose and deconstruct its ableist assumptions that make students and instructors unwell.
Facilitator:
Dr. erin Khuê Ninh is a Professor and current Chair of the Asian American Studies Department at UC, Santa Barbara.
3-4 pm: share out and reflect
Saturday, May 11, 2024
10:30 am-12 pm: [Panel]: "On Illness, On Care: How We Teach the Body"
Panel description:
This panel begins from our position as graduate students who study the medical practices we turn to for addressing our own conditions of unwellness. Within scaffolded personal reflections and group activities, we ask: how do we teach about pain while acknowledging that the people in our classrooms, educators, and students, are also experiencing pain?
Panelists:
Claire Chun (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Ethnic Studies.
Maile Aihua Young (they/them) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
12-1 pm: Lunch
1-2:30 pm: [Working session]: "Toward an Access- and Care-Centered Classroom"
Workshop description:
This working session will begin the work of rebuilding and rewriting the classroom as a space that centers disability, decolonial, and queer practices of worldbuilding.
Facilitator:
Dr. erin Khuê Ninh is a Professor and current Chair of the Asian American Studies Department at UC, Santa Barbara.
2:30-3:30 pm: share out and reflect, closing
Event Location:
Humanities Instructional Building #135
