SATURDAY PANELS
Student
Activism against Hate Crimes (1)
Description:
A hate crime is a criminal act where the victim is targeted based on
his or her actual or perceived race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation,
disability or gender. A hate incident is any act of conduct, speech
or expression that is motivated by bias. Incidents and crimes can include
verbal harassment, ridicule, threats, insults, slurs, graffiti and threatening
messages conveyed in person or by e-mail, phone or mail. This panel
will discuss hate crimes, hate incidents, and alleged hate crimes against
Asian Pacific American students that have occurred in the past decade.
Different mechanisms for student action, the effects of these hate crimes
and/or incidents on campus climate, and administrative response will
be discussed. More details to come.
Panelists:
This panel will be composed of student leaders from Cornell, SUNY-Binghamton,
Duke University, and other universities that have experienced hate crimes
over the past five years. Panelists to be announced.
S.O.S. (Same
Old Story): Hate Crimes and Immigration Issues After 9/11/01 (2)
Description:
This panel will discuss the impact of September 11, 2001 on Asian Pacific
American communities in the areas of Hate Crimes and Immigration, with
a particular focus on students and student organizations. History will
rightfully record September 11 as a watershed in American history. As
we move forward from that historical event, a crucial agenda for Asian
Pacific American activists will be to assess the impact of the new environment
on our communities in terms of heightened security measures and differing
notions of civil liberties.
The speakers on this panel will address two key contexts in which this
impact will be felt: Hate Crimes and Immigration. Clearly, these issues
have been around much longer than September 11 and the speakers will
discuss community responses and strategies and how they have evolved
in light of recent events. Among the issues to be discussed include:
1) Increased hate crimes (particularly against Arab Americans and South
Asians) and renewed efforts to create multiethnic coalitions around
hate crimes and racial intolerance.
2) Immigrants and non-citizens and the extent to which they have had
to pay the price of restricted civil liberties for the sake of increased
national security.
Panelists:
Ben de Guzman is the Community Education Coordinator for
the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium (NAPALC). He also
works with the Community Partners Network, conducting outreach activities
and providing technical assistance for community based organizations.
Previously, Ben worked at the National Center for Cultural Competence
at the Georgetown University Child Development Center, where he helped
provide technical assistance nationwide around health care delivery
and cultural competence. His community and volunteer experience has
given him the opportunity to serve a wide array of Asian Pacific American
and Filipino American constituencies. De Guzman studied communication
at the University of California, Berkeley and at the Annenberg School
for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
Sumita Bhandari is a staff attorney at the National Asian Pacific
Legal Consortium (NAPALC) in Washington, DC, where she advocates for
the fair and nondiscriminatory treatment of immigrants. She works on
policy issues that relate to immigrant rights, with particular attention
to immigrant access to justice, citizenship, and public benefits. Prior
to joining NAPALC, Ms. Bhandari served as a legal associate at Sakshi,
a women's organization in New Delhi, where she refreshed a pioneering
project to identify gender inequality and bias in the judicial treatment
of sexual assault and child molestation cases. Ms. Bhandari is a graduate
of Boston University Law School and the University of California at
Davis.
Graciela "Liz" Geyer is the Director of the Student
of Color Campus Diversity Project of the United States Student Association
Foundation. The Campus Diversity Project works to support student organizing
around issues of access through trainings, research and technical assistance.
The project and the Foundation are committed to developing students,
especially students of color, as long-terms activists for social justice.
Ms. Geyer is a recent graduate of CLA in Sociology.
More panelists to be announced.
Zines: Representation,
Media, and the Asian Pacific American Cultural Experience (3)
Description:
What are you into? What do you want to say? Zines - self-published underground
magazines - give a public forum to individual voices and help like-minded
people find each other. They are also darn entertaining. Join seasoned
APA zinesters in a lively and enlightening discussion about what zines
are, and the hows and whys, pitfalls and joys, of making and distributing
zines. Learn about the world of zines and discuss how APA-created zines
bridge the gap between mainstream pop culture and the Asian-American
cultural experience.
Panelists:
Karen Eng edits and publishes PekoPeko: a zine about food. Over
the years, she has also written and edited for San Francisco-based zine
Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture and the now-defunct LA-based
zine Ben is Dead. Her work has also appeared in BUST and in non-zine
journals such as Wired and Publishers Weekly. Her essay "A Bride's
Anxiety" is included in the recently published Seal Press anthology
Young Wives' Tales: New Adventures in Love and Partnership.
Annie Koh believes is the
Program Director for Locus 1640 Post, a pan-APA performing arts space
in SF's Japantown, and a longtime volunteeer and webmaster for Kearny
Street Workshop, the nation's oldest multidisciplinary APA arts organization.
She organized Zine-licious! which featured over 20 Bay Area APA self-publishers
and comic artists. A creative non-fiction writer, Koh writes and edits
her own sporadic print zine, For Mation Discomfort, and an online journal
at www.crankygirls.com. She has also published her work in local and
national publications, including Afterimage, the San Francisco Examiner,
and the Seal Press anthology Sex and Single Girls.
Eric Nakamura is the Publisher
and Co-Editor of Giant Robot magazine. Giant Robot magazine began in
1994 as a photocopied, staple-and-fold publication, and grew into a
color magazine which is sold around the world. Giant Robot magazine
has been featured on NBC Asia, Media Television Canada, PBS, and in
the pages of Wired, Time Asia, Surface, Washington Post, LA Weekly,
Los Angeles Times, Jane, Vogue, Asian Week, Asia Week, and numerous
other publications. Giant Robot is known as a magazine covering Asian
Pop Culture and Beyond. Aside from reading, writing, taking photos for
Giant Robot, Eric also puts in hours at the Giant Robot retail store,
which opened in October 2001. When he's not working, Eric is working.
In 2002, V. Vale will mark
25 years of "long-term cultural remapping," as he describes
it. Founder of the seminal periodical Search and Destroy, the voice
of the early punk movement, Vale continues to explore cultural movements,
innovations and the avant-garde with his 20- year-old publishing house,
RE/Search Publications. With Vale's interviewing tactics and his ear
to the underground, RE/Search books continue to be manuals of cultural
subversion, empowerment and creativity. As Calvin Reid (Publisher's
Weekly) put it, "V. Vale legendary San Francisco hipster, anthropologist
of the wierd and obscure and founder of Re/Search continues his surveys
of the cultural fringe." V. Vale, Founder of RE/Search Publications
"... the man who founded the groundbreaking punk 'zine Search &
Destroy and the lauded RE/Search Publications, a line that produced
books on everything from state-of-the-art masochism to cutting-edge
feminism and is credited with helping kick-start a renaissance in lounge
music (thanks to Incredibly Strange Music) and the vogue for body manipulation
(Modern Primitives)."
