Advocacy, Outreach and Collaboration

Panel

Handle with Care! Critical Ethnic and Filipin@ Studies: Archival Practices and Librarianship Within and Beyond the Usual

Panel Organizer(s)

• GC

  Gerardo Colmenar

  Social Sciences and Humanities Librarian
  University of California Santa Barbara

Panel Presenter(s)

• RB

  Rick Bonus

  Associate Professor
  University of Washington
• AT

  Antonio Tiongson

  Associate Professor
  University of New Mexico
• 

  Sine Hwang Jensen, MA, MLS

  Asian American and Comparative Ethnic Studies Librarian
  University of California, Berkeley

Our group proposes a panel to reflect on the processes, politics, and prospects of collective intellectual and community work situated within and beyond our locations in Critical Ethnic Studies focusing on Filipin@ studies under the banner of “care.” Those of us who profess to do critical Ethnic Studies intend to reflect on the ways in which our privileged positions as faculty, archivist, and librarians ( as cultural workers) speak to both local and global questions of “well-being”; engage us to reappropriate the notion of care from neoliberal definitions that render it in individualistic or personal terms; and recognize and engage with how the conference themes of “gathering and embracing” nudge us to think deeply about the positive advantages and limitations of our institutional locations, including our sometimes precarious relationships with our allied professional associations and our colleagues outside of the U.S.

Why and how can critical Ethnic and Filipin@ Studies be a site of gathering, embracing, and care for those who are involved in it? How are practices of collaboration and community work possible in an environment of neoliberalism in which the emphasis is on caring for the individual and the pursuit of institutional capital? What forms can “gathering and embracing” take in the neoliberal university? How are they susceptible to institutional appropriation? (Tony Tiongson)

Why and how does critical Filipin@ Studies gather/embrace and care for its subjects and objects of study? Why are these important and what are overlooked when we do our academic/library work with and on our subjects? (Rick Bonus)

Why and how is critical Filipin@ Studies a site of “archival/library” support? What does it mean to collect, to network, and to preserve and make accessible academic/community materials we deal with in a moment of high-tech, digital, and mobile set of conditions? (Gary Colmenar)

What does it mean to support various campus groups such as undergraduate and graduate students as well as academics? What does that look like, beyond how institutions are sites of building careers, and in ways that are more than (or deeper than) getting a degree, tenured, and further promoted? (Sine Hwang Jensen)

 

Learning Objectives:

• To think deeply about the positive advantages and limitations of our institutional locations, including our sometimes precarious relationships with our professional associations and colleagues outside of the U.S.
• To reflect and understand the ways our privileged positions as archivists, librarians and faculty speak to local and global questions surrounding care and the well-being of the communities we serve.
• To build skills, knowledge, and resources to support students, especially from underrepresented populations, navigate and succeed in the university.