What is exciting about Pacific/Asian/American studies right now? How it may grow in the future on UO’s campus? What work is still to be done? Join us for a panel discussion with leading scholars in Pacific Islander and Asian American studies erin Khuê Ninh, Keith Camacho and Kēhaulani Vaughn who will discuss the present and future of the field as they see it. The talk will explore current issues and critical scholarship occurring in Pacific, Native Hawaiian, and Asian American studies. This panel is organized by the Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies and is free and open to the public. 

Dr. erin Khuê Ninh, UC Santa Barbara | Chair Asian American Studies. 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.

Dr. Keith Camacho, UCLA | Chair Asian American Studies. Professor Camacho received his training in the anthropology, history, and literature of the Pacific Islands at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. His research has mainly focused on Chamorro cultural and historical politics, as well as American and Japanese colonialisms and militarisms. Presently, Professor Camacho is studying Samoan youth violence and justice in Aotearoa New Zealand and the United States.

Dr. Kēhaulani Vaughn, UC, Riverside | Associate Professor of Indigenous Feminisms. Kēhaulani Vaughn’s (Kanaka Maoli) book manuscript, Trans Indigeneity: The Politics of California Indian and Native Hawaiian Relations, is about the trans-Indigenous recognitions between Native Hawaiians living in the U.S. and California Indian tribes. As a scholar-practitioner, her teaching and research interests are in Pacific Island Studies, Indigenous epistemologies, higher education, and decolonial practices and pedagogies.