Congratulations to Thu-Huong Nguyen-Vo, Asian Languages and Cultures and Asian American Studies Professor for being recognized as a UCLA Academic Senate’s 2021-22 award recipient for the Distinguished Teaching Award and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Award. Well deserved!
Dr. Kelly Fong, a continuing lecturer for the Asian American Studies Department, is the 2021-2022 recipient of the C. Doris and Toshio Hoshide Distinguished Teaching Prize in Asian American Studies at UCLA.
Students and colleagues alike spoke of her dedication to bridging research with community as well as the care and attention she gave to her students. One of her colleagues stated, “I have always been a big fan of Kelly’s teaching philosophy, one that always centers the agency and knowledge of students in any effort to effect critical political and social change.”
Over the past nine years, Dr. Fong has taught various classes at UCLA that cover a range of topics and methodologies in Asian American studies, including AAS10/10W: History of Asian Americans, AAS40: Asian American Movement, AAS 103: Social Science Research Methods, and General Education Cluster 20B: Interracial Dynamics in U.S. Society and Culture, to name a few. She has also mentored over twenty students as a faculty advisor for undergraduate research projects.
The long-term and transformative impact of her teaching and mentorship was clear in the praise given to her by her students. One nominated Dr. Fong because of “her dedication to using her classes as a space for uplifting and empowering the next generation of Asian American scholars.” Another one of her students expressed that “[t]he most important things Dr. Fong taught me are that there is great power in empowering others, there is great strength in healing, and there is great love in community.”
The engaging nature of Dr. Fong’s teaching even extended to remote learning. She taught many large classes during the pandemic, which required extraordinary work and dedication. A colleague lauded her student-oriented pandemic pedagogy, which she had detailed in an article featured in Amerasia Journal issue 46:3. As another demonstration of her inclusive mentoring approach, the article was co-written with her graduate teaching assistants and it shared “strategies for a student-oriented virtual classroom that fosters engagement through relatability, accessibility, and compassion.”
Dr. Kelly Fong shared that “As a lecturer, my presence at UCLA is grounded in teaching and mentoring students and it is these students that have kept me returning to the classroom each year despite the precarity of being contingent faculty. It is an honor to introduce students to the world of Asian American Studies and to see where they will take this knowledge with them in the future to build a better world.”
Dr. Fong is a Bruin alum, Class of 2013, with a doctorate in archaeology with a graduate concentration in Asian American Studies. She was recently featured in an episode of “Take Out with Lisa Ling,” where she spoke about Chinese Americans in the Sacramento Delta, and her next project explores Chinese American foodways through community cookbooks. She currently serves as the co-editor/co-director for the AAPI Multimedia Textbook for the UCLA Asian American Studies Center.
We are honored to award this well-deserved recognition to Dr. Kelly Fong for her extraordinary contributions and impact as a teacher, mentor, and advocate for Asian American Studies and Asian American and Pacific Islander communities.
The late C. Doris Hoshide, Class of 1934, of Rockville, MD established the teaching prize to annually recognize an outstanding professor in Asian American Studies. She and her late husband were longtime supporters of Asian American Studies at UCLA. The Hoshide Prize includes a one-thousand-dollar award. This is the first year that the prize has been opened to nominations of lecturers and adjunct faculty.
Please join me in congratulating Dr. Kelly Fong!
Best wishes,
Karen Umemoto
Helen and Morgan Chu Endowed Director’s Chair of the Asian American Studies Center
We want to congratulate our Asian American Studies student who has been awarded this year’s Asian Pacific Alumni of UCLA Scholarships!
Michelle Le, Exp. ’22 – Undergraduate
Michelle Le is a rising junior majoring in Public Affairs with a double minor in Education Studies and Asian American Studies. She intends to pursue a career in academic counseling and educational policy. This past year, Le has served as a SEA CLEAR peer counselor where she is able to offer support to different student populations, helped host UCLA’s first Southeast Asian Activism Week in order to facilitate community learning and advocacy and provided health education to API communities as a presenter at the Asian Pacific Health Corps (APHC) health fair. Her field of study, community involvement and activism, is rooted in her dedication and love for her community.
The faculty of the UCLA Asian American Studies Department stands in solidarity with Afghan people who are facing Taliban rule as only one of a number of brutal consequences arising from twenty years of invasion, occupation, and war waged by the US military and its allies. In tradition with Asian American Studies’ long critique and opposition to US militarism in Asia writ large, including Central Asia, Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA), we condemn and oppose this war and all imperialist wars from the Americas to Asia, Africa, and beyond.
We stand firmly with the growing movement in the US and join our voices to say: our government must ensure that those seeking to leave Afghanistan continue to have ways to do so safely, remove admissions caps for refugees, and provide genuine resources for the resettlement of Afghan refugees. Neighboring countries must keep their borders open and ensure safe passage for fleeing refugees, and grassroots organizers and humanitarian workers must recognize Afghan people as leaders in the struggle against authoritarian and military regimes. Our own university must commit to creating safe harbor for Afghan scholars, students, and teachers and all peoples displaced by imperial military violence.
Refugee histories, forced migration, asylum, detainment, and the separation of families have unavoidably shaped and splintered communities and peoples across Asia and the Pacific. Thus, war and its aftermath of management of international peace and relocation are ongoing violences our field continually takes up in our intellectual inquiries, oral histories, and memory of what has and can constitute Asian American Studies. In this vein, we lift up all who have built ongoing challenges against US militarism and support peoples displaced, erased, and resilient.
In solidarity,
The faculty of the Asian American Studies Department, University of California, Los Angeles
UCLA Asian American Studies Department Professor Renee Tajima-Peña’s five-part miniseries entitled, “Asian Americans,” has received a Peabody Award. The series, which aired in Spring 2020, tells stories of struggle, progress and solidarity from the perspectives of multiple Asian American communities, highlighting their national, ethnic, religious, political, linguistic, and cultural diversity. Read full article here.
Source by UCLA Newsroom.
This past year was an opportunity to become even stronger advocates for social justice and equity. This article features Asian American Studies Department Professor Karen Umemoto and Professor/Vice Provost David Yoo. Please read more about this article here.
Photo by UCLA.
UCLA is the first University of California campus to offer a program specific to Pilipino Studies. The program, which began this academic year, offers a range of courses spanning history, language, literature and more. Read article here.
For more about the Asian American Studies Department Pilipino Studies Minor, please visit our page.
Photo by iStock.com/Pawel Gaul
Panel A
Panel B
Panel C
Video Presentations
Professor Paul Ong speaks with LA Social Science about the challenges the Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) community faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, big data research, and the xenophobic racism the AAPI community face here in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Read more about it here.
Asian American Studies Department Professor Renee Tajima-Pena featured in UCLA Newsroom story about her UCLA video campaign focusing on multiracial solidarity for AAPI month. Read more about it here.
