(0:00:00-0:01:37) Sara Schwebel: My name is Sara Schwebel. I'm the Director of the Center for Children's Books, also known as the CCB. And we were so fortunate to be able to bring RDYL, the Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, here to the iSchool at Illinois, for its new academic and scholarly home, and along with RDYL of course the irreplaceable Sarah Park Dahlen, co-founder and co-editor of the journal. And so she I'm going to be shortly handing over the mic, so to speak, to her. But I just want to say a warm welcome to everyone, and a special thank you to our pastelists here. As those gathered know there's just been an explosion of really exciting Asian American youth literature in the recent past. And with that very welcome and rich arrrival of youth literature and media, we also need a strong vibrant group of scholarly voices that are commenting on that literature, analyzing that literature and amplifying its effect. And that's who we have gathered here today is a group of emerging young scholars, exciting young scholars who are doing that vital work. And we are so pleased to have them here today to share some of their insights as they really are at the beginning stages of what promise to be extremely exciting careers. So I'm now turning over to Professor Dahlen. (0:01:38-0:05:19) Sarah Park Dahlen: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much, Sara. Welcome to our Emerging Scholars Panel on Asian American Youth Literature. As you may know, Illinois became the first state to legislate the TEAACH Act, Teaching Equitable Asian American Community History, which means all K-12 public school students must learn at least one unit of Asian American history and similar efforts are afoot in other States. As someone who didn't learn any Asian American history in my own K-12 education I cannot tell you how important this is, and how exciting I am for Illinois youth and youth all across the country. So wherever you are, we hope you will support the inclusion of such histories into your classrooms and libraries, because, after all, Asian American history is American history, just as African American history, queer American history, etc. are American history. So we have had a lot of exciting, TEAACH Act events already, and we have some more planned in the future. So I hope you'll check out our calendar and also, if you could look at the teach modules that we have on the College of Education website, we have some events coming up there, such as our TEAACH Summer Academy, which will be hosted on August 1st. So we'd love to know who's here with us. My graduate assistant, Marycruz, is about to put out a poll, so if you could take a moment to answer that that would be great, and I am going to put a couple of links in the chat for you about the TEAACH Act as well, so here whoops. Here is that, and then this is the modules, that the College of Eduacation and I have created. So when Director Sara Schwebel and I talked about how the iSchool Center for Children's Books could support the implementation of the historic TEAACH Act, we thought it'd be great to showcase some of the exciting research being conducted by Asian American scholars on Asian diasporic youth literature. So my RDYL co editor, Dr.Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez, and graduate assistant Marycruz Flores Reynoso, and I are honored to co-host this event with the CCB. And we are pleased to introduce to you Dr. Nithya Sivashankar, Mohit Mehta, and Yangyang Liu. Dr.Nithya Sivashankar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Texas State University. She has a PhD in Literature for Children and Young Adults from the Ohio State University, with a specialization in South Asian Studies. She has worked as an editor at Karadi Tales, a children's publishing house in India. Her work on South Asian and South Asian American youth literature, illustrated books, dramatic inquiry, and narrative theory have been published in many books and journals, including RDYL. She is also the RDYL Book Reviews co-editor, and currently serves as the chair of the International Committee of the Children's Literature Association. Mohit Mehta is the Assistant Director for the Center for Asian American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and a PhD candidate in Curriculum and Instruction. His research focuses on ways Asian American youth engage in critical racial and visual literacy through graphic texts. He was a former elementary bilingual teacher, and has taught in Guatemala, India, Palestine, and Nicaragua. He's currently working with a local nonprofit to bring Asian American studies to high school classrooms in Texas. Yangyang Lu is an MA student of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her major interest is modern Chinese children's literature. She is intrigued by the entangled narratives between children's literature and the sociopolitical milieu. She is also a graduate assistant for the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies, and a graduate coordinator for the Yellow Peril Redux Project Led by Dr. Shao Dan. When she is not reading or working, she enjoys spending time in the forests and near the lakes within the distance her unmature driving skills could bring to--those are her words. Okay, so please, Dr. Nithya Sivashankar. (0:05:20-0:23:28) Dr. Nithya Sivashankar: Thank you so much for the introduction, Sarah. I'll quickly just pull up my slides here. Are you all able to see my slides? Yes, thank you. Yeah, thank you for your patience. Thank you again for your introduction, Sarah. Thank you so much to the Center for Children's Books and Research on Diversity in Youth Literature for having me be part of the Emerging Scholars Panel. It's such a pleasure to be part of a panel on Asian American youth literature. My talk today titled: Ethical Engagement with Displacement Narratives for Children is going to specifically focus on refugee narratives, featuring Syrian refugees. So many educators, authors, illustrators, and reviewers of children's literature, including Gene Luen Yang and Ellen Oh, assert the need for diverse and global books due to the fact that reading without walls can get us out of our zones and help us build empathy. While if you notice on this slide, 2 of the 3 images are specifically about refugee stories and empathy. While reviewing globally published books in the English language about refugees and forced displacement published within the last decade, it can be observed that these narratives or conflict narratives more broadly, are often conceived with the notion of fostering empathy, and thus they are strategically constructed to affect their readers. Hence adults who act as creators, mediators, and even consumers of these stories, which often deal with war, persecution, and forced displacement, need to be made aware of how these texts, while evoking empathy, also distance their readers simultaneously. My talk begins with the premise that empathy is a response that needs to be critically investigated, especially with regards to children's literature that features diverse characters, including those that are about refugees. My book project takes a broader outlook to the issue of empathy and connects it to the concept of ethics and for the purpose of this talk I present a small segment of this project to you. I suggest through this larger project that we need to focus on the ethical responsibilities of producers and consumers who present, market, mediate, and interpret picturebooks featuring diverse and more specifically refugee characters. I argue that these texts should be thought of as a medium of communication between the producers and the consumers in the same way that the news media, for example, mediates current events between journalists and spectators. I argue for the consideration of empathy as the means to engage with picturebooks critically, and not as the end product of reading texts with characters who are different from the readers. In order to do so, I propose a theoretical framework that can be employed to critically investigate readers as empathetic responses to picturebook narratives for the purposes of this talk. I'm only going to focus on the aspects of narrative ethics and narrative empathy. Literary Studies scholar Wayne Booth suggests that ethics must be integrated into the discussion of fiction. An ethical reading of narratives is a process, that I suggest entails, A) being, or becoming aware of one's own social positioning, privilege, and marginalization as a reader with regards to the characters and the settings of the story. B) considering multiple viewpoints and perspectives, if included in the narrative and questioning the absence of them if they aren't, in order to understand various ideological positionings with regards to the issues discussed in the text. C) recognizing narratives as another person's reality and humanizing characters and people who are different from the reader and D) understanding that there are many agents, including the author, writer, sorry illustrator, editor, publisher, etc. who's conscious decisions, result in the text that the reader holds in their hand, and subsequently inquiring into systemic structures, issues, and the power hierarchies that operate both within and outside the settings of stories in the writing and production of them. An unethical reading, on the other hand, involves the reader not recognizing their responsibilities of engaging with the narrative and their agency as a reader, thus not participating in accountable reading practices such as those that I just mentioned. Now, why does ethical reading matter? Adult authors and illustrators of children's literature, especially of war and displacement narratives for children, often tend to view their child readers as vulnerable and in need of protection. They take on the responsibility of shielding their audience from the impact of the conflict that they are writing about by including elements that enable the children to distance themselves from the narrative. For example, showing illustrations, not from the perspective of a child, but that of a third person who is not part of the story themselves, or by choosing elements that are presumably less distressing for their young readers such as anthropomorphic characters or comfort objects such as toys, animals, etc. Considering that adult authors are and young readers are inherently placed in a specific relationship of power, with regards to each other during the reading experience, and that adult authors' moral values get coded into the narratives of conflict that they publish. It is essential that we read, devote more attention to reading children's literature very broadly in light of narrative ethics. Returning to the idea of examining empathy in relation to ideas of ethics of representation. I want to briefly talk about narrative empathy. Suzanne Keen in proposing a theory of narrative empathy notes that "authors' empathy contributing to the creation of textual beings designed to elicit empathic responses from readers" (Keen, "Narrative Empaty" 221-2). She suggests that narrative empathy is the "sharing of feeling and perspective-taking induced by reading, viewing, hearing, or imagining narratives of another's situation and condition," (Keen, "Narrative Empathy" 220). As yet another aspect of her theory on narrative empathy, Keen proposes the concept of strategic empathizing to illustrate how authors deploy resources in the text in order to sway the feelings of their readers and audiences closer and further from themselves and their subjects of representation. She notes that there are 3 types of strategic empathizing: bounded, ambassadorial, and broadcast strategic empathy which are commonly employed by authors of narrative fiction. First bounded strategic empathy "occurs within an in-group stemming from experiences of mutuality, and leading to feeling with familiar others." Second, amassadorial strategic empathy "addresses chosen others with the aim of cultivating their empathy for the in-group, often to a specific end." Third, broadcast strategic empathy "calls upon every reader to feel with members of a group, by emphasizing our common vulnerabilities and hopes." As demonstrated in the figure shown in this slide, empathy needs to be viewed as a response that could potentially provide an entryway into the investigation of narrative empathy and narrative ethics, both of which are concepts grounded in rhetorical narrativeology. I suggest that through this process of critical engagement we must not view picturebooks, featuring diverse and global characters, including those that are about refugees in isolation from their context of production and reception. I add that it is necessary for us to view them as political objects being written, illustrated, edited, compiled, published, and marketed by people who occupy certain positionalities in the world. And bear ideologies that might, or might not be reflected, in their creations. Similarly I want to draw attention to the idea that we need to take stock of our own social positioning as readers who are consuming these texts, and we respond to these narratives in them based on the knowledge that we have had the privilege to access. So how exactly do we employ this framework while reading picturebooks about Syrian refugees. Across my research of picturebooks about Asian and Asian American forced displacement and refugees, particularly South Asian and Middle Eastern refugees, I have observed that the peritext functions as the space that the authors use in order to provide a context for the conflicts to their audiences. Peritext is the collective term for the "elements that are inserted into the interstices of the text": front covers, back covers, blurbs, glossary, dust jacket, flap, dedications, title pages, etc., are all examples of the peritext. These peritextual fringe elements in these picturebooks about forced displacement tend to serve as the space wherein the author, or the author illustrator, is explaining in greater detail about the setting of the story. How it relates to true incidents and how the world is seeing an increase in the number of refugees, so on and so forth. The peritext is also one of the spaces where authors, illustrators, and publishers employ strategic empathy to reach out, not only to the children and their hypothesical audience, but also to the adults who might read these picturebooks to or with a child. Let's now see some examples of the peritext of 2 picturebooks featuring Syrian refugee characters to see how strategic empathy is being employed in order to appeal to audiences who are mostly non-refugees. So this is where the scripted part of my talk ends. I'm going to now show you some examples of these peritext of these 2 picturebooks. One is Stepping Stones: A Refugee Family's Journey, and the other is My Beautiful Birds. To give you a context about these 2 books, Stepping Stones is a transnational picturebook which has been produced by a Canadian publisher featuring a Canadian author who reached out to a Syrian artist, a sculptor artist who still lives in Latakia, Syria, in order to produce this book. My Beautiful Birds, on the other hand, is published by, is authored and illustrated by a Canadian author, Suzanne del Rizzo, who has no connection with Syrian refugees. So, let's look at the peritext, that is, the front covers, etc. author's note, etc., of Stepping Stones. So in this front cover of Stepping Stones we look at-- I want you to, you know, I want to draw your attention to the image that is used here. This image has been selected by the publisher or the designer of the front cover from a range of images that have been supplied by the sculptor artist, And it looks like they have chosen this particular image in order to illustrate you know the sorrow and the burden that the refugees are carrying right, and this is meant to evoke a kind of sympathy or pity in a range of viewers--refugees, and non-refugees alike. So this is something this is a narrative move that could be likened to the idea of broadcast strategic empathy, which is basically the idea that something is being used in order to reach multiple groups of audiences whether or not they're refugees. Alright, now let's take a look at the title here. Alright the title, as you can see, is written in both the English font as well as the Arabic font. This is a bilingual text, featuring text in English as well as Arabic, but if you look at the font size now, you can see that the English language font is, you know, it is bigger, and in fact, even bolded when you see Stepping Stones when compared to the Arabic font. Alright, now that leads us to question as to who exactly this book is meant for right. Is it meant for just an refugee audience, or just an English-speaking refugee audience, or is it meant for a very broad English audience, comprising of refugees, non-refugees,immigrants, non-immigrants, and the like? So this is something that we call, or Suzanne Keen calls, ambassadorial strategic empathy, which is being employed again by the publishers in order to reach out to a very broad audience for a specific end. Basically, they want the English language or English speaking audience, to pick up this book that is meant it is supposed to be about refugees right? It's not just meant for a refugee audience or an Arabic speaking audience. Now, taking a look at the back cover. Right, we see a small seal there. I'm sorry that the image is not very clear, which indicates that this is a Junior Library Guild Selection. Now focusing on the lower part of the back cover, there is a small note that says that the portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book will be donated to refugee resettlement organizations across North America. If you noticed the back cover does not have any writing in Arabic at all. It is entirely in English language. Right now think again about who this is being directed towards, and for what purposes? Again, ambassadorial strategic empathy is being employed in this context to reach out to English speaking audience, who are presumably wealthy enough to be able to purchase this book, which is costing $20, as you can see here in small font, and you know who are able to contribute to this cause of supporting resettlement organizations in North America. I'm not going to dwell too much on the foreword here, but I want to draw your attention to the fact that the foreword and which is penned by only the author, does not feature any contributions from the illustrator. The author basically situates the illustrator, somebody who is poor who does not even have money to buy the glue that would, you know, give him permanence to his art. Somebody who's still living in the conflict zone--amidst ongoing conflict, and again there is no translation in Arabic at all. We don't get to hear the voice of the Syrian illustrator, here. Now, this is also ambassadorial strategic empathy reaching out to audiences who can speak in the English language, presumably a non-refugee audience. In the author's and illustrator's biographies page. Also, we can see here that the author's biography is placed above that of the illustrators', even though the illustrators' artwork, actually came first, and the author reached out to the illustrator by seeing his images on Facebook and then, you know, deciding to work with the publisher to produce this as a book. And while the author is, the first word that's used to describe the author is that she's the author of many award-winning books. The illustrator, the first thing that's being used to describe him is that he's living in one of the oldest civilizations on Earth, and that he's, you know, never left his hometown or his country like a lot of emphasis is being given to where he is from, his refugee status, whereas the author is introduced as someone who is an award-winner. So again, ambassadorial strategic empathy being employeed here. This is another space where very similar to that idea of a portion of the proceeds of the sale of this book will go to refugee resettlement organizations. There is this page that gives you a list of links as to where you can learn more about refugees. Clearly targeted to a non-refugee audience who might not be familiar with who the refugee are, or you know what resources are available to learn about refugees, etc. So I'm going to be a little quick, because I only have 2 min to wrap up my talk. The next thing that I briefly want to talk about is My Beautiful Birds. As I said earlier, the author/illustrator is from Ontario. Look at this, this is the information that's available in the flap of the dust jacket. It says that she basically wrote this book when she was looking for resource to explain the Syrian Civil War to her own children. She was struck by the universality of a child's relationship to animals. So she started writing this book. So again, this is kind of targeting the idea of broadcast strategic empathy, and also ambassadorial strategic empathy, and none of these books do any service in favor of what is called bounded strategic empathy which is to specifically reach out to people who are from the in group. Just 2 days back, I unfortunately don't have images for this, but I want to show you the book that does this really well. There is a picturebook called The Unexpected Friend: Rohingya's Journey, which does bounded strategic empathy quite well. I'm very happy to talk about this in the Q&A if that interests you, but I want to wrap up my talk by saying that it's important for us to consider these ideas because we need to think about how we, as readers are positioned by the text, by authors and publishers. We are often placed in relationship of power when compared to the refugee characters in the text, and most often in the books that have been published. We are often positioned as people who are the savior of these refugees, which are problematic in its own right, and for this reason we need to examine our responses and think about the ethical implications of it. Thank you once again for your time, and if you want to reach out to me here are my details, and I'm happy to talk more about this in the Q&A. Thank you. Oh, Sarah, thank you for that link. (0:23:28-0:40:22) Mohit Mehta: Thank you, Dr. Sivashankar. I learned so much from your presentation, and I have questions that I'll definitely bring up in the chat. Give me just one moment to transition and bring up my screen and if you can just give me a thumbs up that you're able to view my screen. Great, thank you so much. Thank you Sarah and Dr. Sonia Alejandra Rodriguez and Marycruz, and everyone at the Research on Diversity in Youth Literature, and also to Sara at the Center for Children's Books. Thank you for this opportunity also to my colleagues, Yangyang and Dr. Sivashankar. I will be talking today about a Saturday program that we were able to start this past fall, for Asian American youth in, and as a way to do multiple things, including to engage in critical racial literacy practices to graphic texts. I'm just gonna take a moment before I dive in to make and acknowledgement as part of our ongoing recognition in various institutions, including my own here at the University of Texas at Austin, Indigenous people for their struggle for various fights, including for repatriation of ancestral remains. So I'd like to acknowledge that my institution, the University of Texas at Austin, is on the land of the Carrizo, Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Caddo, Comanche, Lipan Apache, Alabma-Coushatta, Kickapoo, and Tigua Pueblos. So I'm gonna start here. You might remember how in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic media outlets used photos of masked Asian Americans in US Chinatowns for their news coverage, these images quickly circulated on social media despite the outcry from Asian American community leaders on the potential harm of associating contagion with Asian bodies. Scholars of Asian American history drew historic parallels with other moments in North American history, such as as you see on the right at Angel Island, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when arriving passengers from Asia were subject to humiliating medical inspections. Although Asian Americans were simply masking in their home communities in order to practice care for themselves and their loved ones, these images were weaponized to signal disease and contagion in ways that reflect the racist tropes and stereotypes that have a long history in Asian America. In the pandemic, much was written and speculated about ways that oral and written discourse reinforced the racialization of Asian Americans, particularly those of East and Southeast Asian descent, as bodies of contagion. We are all familiar with verbal forms of racism through the usage of Kung flu, China virus, and how this was generated and circulated. More recently the Chancellor of a university in Indiana mocked Asian languages in a attempt to otherize Asian and Asian Americans. Just last week a Mississippi lawmaker tweeted a meme circulated across different social media platforms, using the r in place of an l in the word, totally. Less attention, however, has been given to ways that the visual image in both the contemporary period and historically is produced, consumed, and circulated in ways that reproduce racist visual discourse. Throughout the past century different modes of visual culture, from political drawings to animated cartoons work to sell a solidified way that racial categories are cemented in the United States, and equally important are ways that Asian American visual artists have produced powerful counter narratives to these visual forms of racism through multiple modes. For example, on the bottom right hand, corner we see the cover of Gidra magazine that was published for a handful of years from the Asian American Study students at UCLA and the drawing on the cover is a powerful critique of these artists of ways that Asian American soldiers, during the Vietnam war were used as targets for training before soldiers were deployed to Southeast Asia. So, how does youth literature enter into the conversation? And Dr. Shivashankar brought up the pivotal and just foundational work of Gene Luen Yang, in American Born Chinese, of which I just found out recently, is coming on to Disney plus or Netflix, and I'm very interested to see how some of these visual dimensions are going to come to play in this form, in the screen form. So graphic text as this audience knows very well, including comics as well as graphic novels, memoirs, histories, and other types of visual storytelling that incorporate the semiotics of panels, speech bubbles, and are usually told in some form of sequencing. And in terms of groundbreaking graphic novels, the field of youth literature is indebted to the work of Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese, published in 2006, and winner of the Michael L. Printz Award, American Born Chinese, tells the nested story of Jin Wang, a Chinese American teenager, at a predominantly white school. Also of the Chinese exchange student, and a play on words, Chin-kee and the Chinese fable the Monkey King. And American Born Chinese, as this audience knows, has generated dozens of scholarly articles about how graphic novels lend themselves for students learning about multimodal literacies. However, I became more--most interested in an article published by Melissa Schieble, an Associate Professor of English at CUNY Graduate Center, in 2014. Of all the written work about American Born Chinese, hers is one of the few to theorize about the visual semiotics that the author/illustrator uses intentionally, by way of the highly stereotypical character Chin-kee with the clothing evocative of the Qin Dynasty, and the long queue used by Chinese migrants to the United States during the early years of transnational migration, Yang references the dozens of political cartoons that appeared in US newspapers that depicted the Chinese as yellow perils. But as the author/illustrator, Yang notes the appearance of Chin-kee for most readers is often lost, it's just uncomfortable or laughable. Unless we guide young readers to understand the visual legacy that gave rise to Chin-kee, we--again his presence is just laughable or uncomfortable. Instead, we can learn about the historical roots that gave rise to this character. And, as Yang says in the quote at the bottom, "images have power, and images have history. We must remember who they're grandfathers were. We must ensure that the next generation does the same" (Gene Luen Yang, 2007). And so inspired, by the way American Born Chinese allows teachers and students to engage in critical visual literacy practices and deconstruct race and racism. We're able to create a Saturday program in partnership with the local community center and generously funded by a grant. During 2 months we got together with 17 Asian American youth between 10 and 14 years old. The young participants were all first or second generation youth of Chinese, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Indian, Korean, Burmese, and Kami American descent, and we were also supported by 3 teaching assistants from the University of Texas, who are studying Asian American studies. During that 8 week program we incorporated 5 graphic texts, including the Best We Could Do by Thi Bui, Escape to Gold Mountain by H.T. Wong, Displacement by Kiku Hughes, Almost American Girl by Robin Ha, and Pashmina by Nidhi Chanani. We paired each text with political cartoons or historical photographs, so that students had the opportunity to make connections between the author/illustrators' creative world and factual moments in Asian American history. Students were also encouraged to create their own graphic panels with paper and art supplies, and later with ipads in digital applications that allowed students to manipulate drawings and video in interesting ways At the heart of this work is an attempt to make sense of 2 significant movements in contemporary literacy practices. One is a growing moment to teach racial literacies and the other is an ongoing emphasis on visual literacy in a world that continues to proliferate with multiple modes of media. While there's ample scholarship in both areas, and often conflicting definitions of each of these areas. I choose to use Dr. Yolanda Sealy-Ruiz's work on racial literacy, and she presents 6 components, of racial literacy, including historical racial literacy, which she defines as developing a rich and contextual awareness of the historical forces that shape not only the communities we work in, but the society we live in. I believe that understanding how the visual image has been manipulated to racialize Asian Americans is part and parcel of developing this racial literacy. Moreover, much of this work is concentrated on developing racial literacy for white teachers or for white audiences for racialized children, including Asian Americans. Understanding how race permeates different dimensions of individual and structural experiences is important to understanding the world and ultimately disrupting ways that this visual grammar of race has been used in different racial projects. I wanna spend some time now delving into 2 of the texts we used starting with Kiku Hughes' Displacement published by FirstSecond in 2020. Kiku Hughes is a very gifted third generation Japanese American author/illustrator. Who researched her family's history, particularly that of her maternal grandmother, who was incarcerated during World War II. In Displacement she definitely reimagines her grandmother's experience, and so previous-- prior to reading the text together we spent some time learning about the steps that led to the forced relocation of 120,000 Japanese Americans between 1943 and 1946. We spent quite some time, dissecting this historical photograph by Dorothea Lange at Tatsuro Matsuda's grocery store in Oakland, California. Students discuss what it meant for Japanese Americans to have to display this visual emblem of being American after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and students make connections to other moments in US history, including after 9/11. We also spend some time before jumping into the book, understanding the historical legacy of Dr. Seuss, and the appearance of racist cartoons in US newspapers immediately after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Students understand that Seuss later apologizes and visits Japan, the sites of the atomic bombs, and so students engage in active discussion of so called cancel culture, and what it means to idolize a children's author-- who we all love and use in our classrooms-- despite his racist or his participation in the formation of these racist cartoons, at one time in his history. And so, like Gene Luen Yang, Kiku Hughes employees factual pieces of visual documentation from Japanese American incarceration. The notice of evacuation that was pinned in Japanese American communities after Franklin Delano Roosevelt issues Executive Order 9066. We talk about the iconicity of this evacuation notice and ask students, why did Kiku Hughes choose this visual in her work? Why has this evacuation notice come to represent the entirety of the Japanese American incarceration Experience? We also spent some time generating idea about the authors intent, and in incorporating her version of historic photography. We actually had the opportunity to speak with Kiku on Zoom one Saturday morning and found out that she researched extensively before and during the process of creating a graphic text, and so for her employing photos that have been reprinted in multiple media outlets and have become iconic reminds us that these events are actually based in reality. Although they show up in a form of graphic historical fiction, they anchor us into knowing that even in this fictional historical--fictional world the events that transpired actually do happen in reality. I'd like to move on now into Displacement-- sorry from Displacement into The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui an illustrated memoir. Another genre of graphic texts, that you all may be familiar with, and there's graphic memoirs intended for older audiences. And so one of my university teaching assistants had to text me on the group website chat, reminding me to send a notice home to parents about the sensitive content that is approached in many of the early chapters in this book, and collectively we decided that we would skip over the initial chapters 1 through 6 as the author delves into the pre-war, or the pre-American war histories of her parents. But given the age range and the lack of students previous exposure to Asian American history, it just was not amenable for us in that moment. So we jumped to Chapter 7, which starts to illustrate the family's departure from Vietnam as boat people and as we read chapter 7 we learn about the experience of Vietnamese boat people. Their passage to secondary countries, like the Philippines and Indonesia. The risks associated with taking a river boat onto the open sea. Risks like pirates, capsizing, running out of water and food. And Andrea, her pseudonym, on the bottom left hand picture shares with us her grandparents journey from Laos to Texas, via Thailand, on land. She explains that Laos is a landlocked country, and so for the refugees that come from Laos their journey is a different one. We spend some time thinking about the symbolism of boats: their size, their shape, their function, their representation for so many Vietnamese Americans in diaspora as both a symbol of freedom, but also of trauma. And that's leads us to discussing an event that happens in Texas in the 1980s in Seadrift, a small town on the Texas Gulf coast. Many Vietnamese American refugees are resettled in the cities of the Texas Gulf coast to participate in the shrimping and fishing industry. Some run into skirmishes, not understanding the fishing rules, what docks to use, how long your fishing line can be, and they're met with racialized violence from the Ku Klux Klan. We spend quite some time thinking together about these 2 iconic photographs. One of the students, an eighth grader, shares with us that he's learned about the KKK. in eighth grade US History Class, but is surprised to know that Viennese Americans in Texas were also target of this racist violence by the KKK. Mimi, another student interrogates the foot on the left, remarking, "Look, they're cameramen present! And so they're probably not embarrassed by what they're doing." Our teaching assistant again points out that the boat on the left is painted Viet Cong, and explains from her personal experience how all Southeast Asian refugees are seen as the enemy, after arriving to the United States. In this process of students and teaching assistants are doing the very difficult work of building visual, racial literacy skills. Needless to say, we're only able to do this exercise together in the sixth or seventh week after we've been in company, built trust, and familiarity. And so as places like where Dr. Shivashankar and I are in Texas, as books continue to be pulled up of library shelves, states enforce exclusionary laws prohibiting certain histories to be taught, I find great power and promise with creating parallel spaces including in libraries, of which many of you join us from, to give racialized students, like the Asian American students I work with the tools they need to understand the world and disrupt racism, including visual racism for transformative justice. Thank you. (0:40:23-0:54:17) Yangyang Liu: Yeah, thank you, Mohit, for your presentation. I learned a lot from it, and I'm kind of interested in doing this project myself If we have chance here at Champaign. Yeah, and okay, I'm going to share the screen. Please let me know if you can see it. I'm going to put it into presentation mode. Okay, so can you see that screen? Sure. Thank you. My name is Yangyang Liu, and I'm currently a second year MA student of East Asian Languages and Cultures department at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and I'm very happy to have this chance to share my thoughts here. But my topic is a little personal and special. My topic is How I Came to Know Asian American Youth Literature. So before I jump into it, I want to ask you a question. How is it likely for a patron or for parent, for a librarian, for an educator to come across an Asian American picturebook when they are just randomly searching for topics and books for storytime? So it's a question that interested some other scholars as well. For example, we could see that based on the data compiled by the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education, Corporative Children's Book Centre, or the CCBC, David Huyck, Dr. Dahlen and Molly Beth Griffin created 2 infographics of how diverse children's books are. According to the 2018 data, 7% of children's books, depict Pacific Islanders and Asian Americans. So given this data, I presume that it shouldn't be that hard for a librarian or a parent to come across Asian,Pacific Islanders, and Asian American picturebook in their search. So I need some research to justify the presumption,right? So I search for some study. A study conducted by Ingram and Cahill in 2022 they use Google search engine to locate 6 storytime program resources' websites. And they pick up 481 books under different themes from these 6 websites. So I want to ask you to participate here. How many of them do you think would feature an Asian American main character? Could you type your answer, your choice in the chat box? A)0, B) 4, C) 17, D) 31. Let me have a look. So I see [in the chat] B. C. So a lot of answer is about like 17 or 4. I guess you are good at math to calculate okay, so 7% multiply 481. Oh, it should be about like 30 or no! No, it shouldn't be that much perhapsst 17. Okay, I see, Vicky said. Better not be 0. So the answer is unfortunately 0. According to the research, only 4 books. So that is 0.84% of them depict a parallel culture. And among them 3 depict Asian Americans. One feature American Indians. Oh, sorry! And then none of them depict Asian American, or Pacific Islanders. So is that explain something right? But someone will say, Oh, it's just online website resources. How about real life? How about in reality, storytime session in the libraries? How about then? So the same group of scholars they did another research. So they seek help from 35 libraries across 3 states in the United States, and they gather information from 68 storytime sessions ongoing within the 160 books shared in the storytime 55 books depict human characters and among these 55 books, only 2 depict a parallel population. So I think these 2 research outcomes justify my reason to talk about how I came to know Asia American youth literature because it's not an everyday encounter. I don't have a chance to get to know Asian American youth literature if I'm just searching online randomly. So my story begin with a medical appointment. I'm not sure if it's the most weird way to get to know Asian American youth literature. So one day I got a medical appointment at McKinley Health Center here on campus of University of Illinois. And I talked to my doctor, and I share with her that I'm learning Chinese children's literature. She was apparently very surprised and happy. She told me you know I have a cousin who is writing books for Asian American children, and we are so proud of him--proud of her-- and her recent work is Watercress. So I go to the library and check out Watercress by Andrea Wang and Jason Chin, and it is my first time to read an Asian American picturebook. I'm so glad this one is my first one, because the multilayered narratives shown in this book just make me curious how many potentials could Asian American picturebook harbor, and how many difficult topics could it cover? And how many excellent technique could they use in their stories? So I check out more books about Asian American and in that summer I was invited to share my thoughts in the Food for Thought event at Asian American Culture Center, here on the campus. After this Food for Thought event, a participant approach me. And she said, I'm Hannah from Orchard Downs Community Center. And I'm curious if you are interested in bringing the story to our kids club as a storyteller, and that's how I started to get beyond a reader, and to become a storyteller with the sponsor from the local community, the libraries and the Center for East Asian and Pacific studies. However, it is also the beginning of another kind of challenge. It's not until that we started to program the storytime that I realize how many traps are there, and how many pitfalls I could have stepped into. First of all what troubles me most is the disproportional emphasis on festivals and food. It happens when we sit down and try to program these themes and to brainstorm the themes for each month's storytimes themes. Seems I feel like I can not stop but thinking about festivals like for August we think about Oh, how about the storytime of Japanese and Chinese version of Valentine? And for September, how about the Moon festival: The Mid-Autumn festival, and for February definitely Lunar New Year. It was not until I took the class by Dr. Dahlen Asian American Youth Literature, and consulted her that I came to realize that the exclusive depiction of five Fs could be a problem. According to Jamie Campbell Naidoo, five Fs: foods, festivals, folklore, fashion, and famous people could actually be a way of distancing if children are only exposed to books about these five 5s. Since they might connect Asian American, and Pacific Islanders culture with something as is like-- they are not in the daily life interaction, but something only connected with special time and special events. This tourist approach is actually very problematic. And I'm glad that this system, this problem has get more emphasize in recent research, like in 2017, the statement of the National Council for the Social Studies also mentioned that and there's a kind of five Fs: festival, flags, films, and they are not a good way to approach social studies in the classroom, either. And I'm also glad to find out that it might be also a concern of some writers, authors, and illustrators, as well. Let's take Grace Lin as an example, so her 2010 book, Thanking the Moon: Celebrating the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, it's very much a plain depiction of how people celebrate Mid-Autumn Moon Festivals like by eating mooncake, by gazing at the moon. However, 8 years later, in her new book, A Big Moon Cake for Little Star in 2018, I think she intentionally jumped out of the limitation and use mooncake, one of the five Fs: food, as a connection between a culture of food and daily life interaction. It's actually a warm-hearted story about a mother and a daughter who cannot stop nibbling mooncake. So it also, this experience bring us to rethink about books with five Fs topics. Is it possible for us to find out more potential within these books and can we adress different topic and encourage diversity and inclusion with books about five Fs? I'm very happy to find out that some books seemingly about five Fs like Halal Hot Dogs, This Next New Year, A Morning with Grandpa, and The Story of Tanabata, they could be used as some way of embracing inclusive, and encourage diversity. Also, we're thinking about the challenge. We agree that it's very important to bring books that is not only about five Fs. So we think about bringing Drawn Together, the Name Jar, Suki's Kimono, and Where's Halmoni? in which five Fs is not important elements. So beyond that, I think about taking different classes to explore more about Asian American children's literature and children's literature broadly. So I took a class by Dr. Dahlen, Asian American Youth Literature, and class by Dr. Hoiem, History of Children's Literature. This classes encourage me to discover and consider more complicated questions. I encountered a book by Minjie Chen, she's an alumni of our iSchool here. Her book, the Sino-Japanese War and Youth Literature: Friends and Foes on the Battlefield raises an important question. Why is there very few depiction about Sino-Japanese War in Asian American youth literature? Why is it this disproportional emphasis on European experience? And what is this even coming to Asian battlefield, atomic bombs will be a very will be the emphasis instead of the war, happened in China. So it also brings me back to the movement that is going on in our campus. I joined project led by Professor Shao Dan in our East Asian Languages and Literature department; It's called Yellow Peril Redux, we study the yellow peril from the historical and reality perspective. I'm so glad that I came to know Asian American youth literature, and how this chance make me to reflect on my study and research and my daily life interactaction with people and community. And to think about it, all of this begin with a medical appointment at McKinley Health Center. Thank you. (0:54:18-1:03:02) Sarah Park Dahlen: Thank you so much to each of our scholars. That was just so phenomenal, and I learned so much. I knew a little bit about each of your research, but this was just putting it all together was just amazing. So high-five to Sonia and Marycruz and Sara for planning this and then to our scholars for your excellent presentations. We do have a few minutes left. We would love to hear feedback from the audience, questions you have. I know Mohit you said you have some questions as well. So yeah, let's get started. Let's have a conversation. Mohit Mehta: Sorry. Yeah, I can jump in. Dr. Sivashankar I've never seen a book on Rohingya refugees. Can you--and I know you didn't have a chance to really go into that and the modes of empathy there. So I didn't know if you wanted to share. Nithya Sivashankar: Thank you, Mohit. Thank you so much Mohit and Yangyang, for your beautiful talks. It's such a pleasure to be part of this panel with the both of you, and thank you all. I'd love to talk about this book. So I literally got this book in my hand on Saturday, and that's why I couldn't take pictures of it to include in my slides. So this book is again a transnational book published by Bengali authors, who are now in, I think both of them are the US, or one person is in Europe, and one person is in the US. And they have produced this in collaboration with Save the Children. So it was based on a report that was produced by Save the Children about the Rohingya refugees in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh, And the very first page of this book says, "thank you to the Rohingya children living in refugee camps in Cox's Bazar. This story is inspired by you, is about you, and is for you. We are also grateful..." So basically dedicated the book to them. The story begins with dedicating the book to them, and subsequently, at the end, in the author's note, the description of the Rohingya refugees itself is not very patronizing, and it's very to the point. It's a very short you know description, including a map about Rohingya refugees living in Cox's Bazar, but that's all. Whereas in other books about you know Syrian refugees, for instance, written by Canadian authors, you'll find description of where Syria is, you know, the first thing they write about. Whereas here they talk about where Cox's Bazar is and don't go into the description of who Rohingyas are, and it also says, towards the end that this book has a Burmese translation as well as a Bengali translation, right so this book itself is in English language but it's also been produced in Burmese and Bengali. And I found data online to state that this book is being made available to children in refugee camps, you know, in Bangladesh. So, not just looking at the peritext here. But what Genette calls paratext, which is looking beyond just the text to see where else is the text available, for example. Shows us that this book is more holistic in its approach to the depiction of refugees, and it doesn't just, you know, present it to non-refugee readers, but it literally presents it to refugee readers. So yeah, thank you Mohit, for asking me to talk about this. Yeah, so it's a lovely book. By the way, all, if you're able to get your hands on this, please, please do. Sarah Park Dahlen: Hmm, thank you so much. Do we have any other questions from the audience? Hey, So we have a comment from Melanie: "Yangyang your talk made me think that many of the Asian American youth lit may end up in nonfiction because of the five Fs instead of in the picturebook section of a library, due to cataloging. I have found that often in our library that many books end up in nonfiction, and children never even see those books." Okay. So there's access issues there. So books may be available but they're catalogued and stored differently. So Vicky has a question for Mohit: "How did you consider/account for the trauma surrounding showing racist images from history during your program?" That's a great question. Thank you, Vicky. Mohit Mehta: Yeah, that's a great question, and not a doctor yet. But thank you for that--that epithet, I guess. Yeah, I know, like I said, we work our way up. We, of course, you know, had signed consent informing parents and families about some of the nature of the images that we would be looking at, but it definitely, took trust and understanding that not all students have the same level of maturity or experience. It was also multi-age adolescence, and between 10 and 14 there's just a huge range. Of course you have those eighth graders, you know, 13-14, who are ready, but age of course, is not always a marker of that developmental ability, but you know it's very-- it's difficult work, and I think it just takes trust and building and knowing when certain things can touch too close to home to certain communities because of the very visceral and real experiences their families have had. Sarah Park Dahlen: Thank you. And we started a minute late, so I hope you'll entertain one more question. Sara Schwebel asks Mohit, "I'm curious to hear about the funding. The program sounds incredible. I'm sure you're thinking about replicability." Mohit Mehta: So we were funded by Texas Humanities, which is the local affiliate for National Endowment for the Humanities. So I imagine that other states and cities have similar sources of funds. But yes, so we were lucky. But I found in my experience that if you really find and ask, there's money for everything. Sarah Park Dahlen: That's great. Thank you so much. So one of the questions I had was, you know, I really loved hearing about Yangyang's journey of learning that there was a thing called Asian American youth literature, so Mohit and Nithya, how did you like sort of learn? Because you know one of the things I say is that the books were there. There were fewer in number when I was a child, but they were there. No one introduced me to them. So that is the important work of librarians and teachers, right? So how did you come to this area of study? Nithya Sivashankar: Mohit, after you. Mohit Mehta: Very short, so, catching up at 43 years old. 43 year old. All these, you know books here and behind me, just like Sarah you have here. So, just as an adult reading everything I didn't get to consume as a child, because the Jungle Book was the closest I had to represention. Nithya Sivashankar: My context is a little different, because I came from India to the US to pursue my PhD in 2015, but I grew up reading a lot of British books. Again, colonial influence. So a lot of the books that we read as part of our school curriculum were largely British and slightly American focused. But now, as a mother of an Asian American, I'm realizing the difficulty of finding books for her in the library. Yangyang, I didn't think about storytime until you started talking about it. I've taken my daughter to storytime. My daughter is 2 years old, so I've taken her to storytimes in the library nearby, and I am yet to see-- it's been 7 months since I've started taking her to storytime-- I've yet to see one book about any parallel culture, let alone Asian Americans being depicted you know in them. So I worry for my daughter, and luckily she has somebody who can find these books for her from the library. But if I didn't know where to find these books, I'm positive that she wouldn't be able to do so in the libraries that we have around here. So, yeah, and thank you for that question. And is it okay, if I ask a quick question for Mohit. Did you consider using Banned Book Club by Hyun Sook Kim? Mohit Mehta: That's not a text that's on my bookshelf yet, so I will be ordering it today. Thank you for the recommendation. I'm not familiar. Nithya Sivashankar: I'm not sure if it's meant for young adults or the age range that you're looking for, but I was just curious, considering what's going on in Texas and theme of your research. Sarah Park Dahlen: Yeah, thank you so much, for again, to our scholars, for your amazing presentations and to all of you today who joined us. We do have more events coming up. I'm putting the link in the chat one more time. We have a curriculum panel, and the Gryphon lecture, and so we hope that you will return and join us for those. So thank you once again, and I hope you have a lovely afternoon. Nithya Sivasankar: Thank you so much. Bye, everyone, take care.