Thank you!

Asian Canadian Studies at Congress 2019 has officially come to an end!

Thank you to every scholar, student, teacher, community member, elder, and activist who came out and joined our conversations about the past, present, and future of Asian Canadian studies. We really appreciate your input on the topics of emotional labour, community collaboration, student experience, digital tools, cross-racial coalition building, and archival research. Regardless of your background, each of you brought unique experience and thought-provoking perspectives to our events. All your ideas contributed to our learning and re-learning of what it means to build and sustain Asian Canadian communities within academia and beyond.

Community building is often a long-term process (and emotionally draining, as some of you have noted), which requires us to constantly negotiate common grounds and revisit values that we would like to fight for in order to create a more inclusive and equitable future. This, of course, is never an easy task, given our differently situated histories and positions of power. In this light, we are grateful for those of you who spoke about difficult pasts that your communities have been through and treacherous institutional battles you have fought and continue to fight. We hope that our events have provided a platform where all of us could gather together, share our stories, showcase our work, and build a sense of community in difficult times.

We want to thank the support from the UBC programming team at Congress, the Canadian Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, and the Canadian Historical Association. We also want to shout out another special thank-you to friends and family members of the ACAM program. ACS event series has marked ACAM’s 5th anniversary and we would not have come this far without you. We will continue to provide programs and courses in the future. Hopefully, we will see you soon again at our next event!

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