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This contribution to the special forum argues for understanding the classroom as a site of activist scholarship through the pedagogical intervention of keywords. In my capacity as instructor and facilitator, I instrumentalized "keywords" to destabilize disciplinary boundaries and center SWANA diaspora studies in our survey of Asian American studies. This piece was written in collaboration with some of the students from the course to illustrate the work of "collective theorization" that allowed us to construct a field of study that prioritized historical processes rather than geographical delineations.
As a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, I (Ida) am tasked with teaching one self-designed undergraduate seminar per year offered in the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights (EMR). The project of this program—effectively, the institution's answer to ethnic studies—gives me the freedom to play with content while also articulating an intellectual project based in institutional critique and revision.1 The course I chose to teach this past spring, called Meeting Asian/Arab American Studies,2 was inspired in purpose and stakes by the 2006 Journal of Asian American Studies article of the same name by Sunaina Maira and Magid Shihade.3 In this course, we explored, expanded, and questioned the disciplinary boundaries between Asian American and SWANA diaspora studies. Grounded in converging critiques of US empire, we collectively asked: What are the possibilities and limitations of linking these two fields in shared struggle and solidarity? What can each field give to and take from the other, and how are they already intersecting?
The course had two distinct pedagogical interventions. First—as is the case for many ethnic studies courses—it reflected my own desire to cultivate an "engaged pedagogy" in the classroom, a concept introduced by bell hooks in Teaching to Transgress (1994), which relates hooks's own experiences of teaching at elite institutions as a woman of color and remains a seminal text for its critical pedagogical interventions. Through an "engaged pedagogy," she contends that the work done in the classroom can be liberatory for students and teachers who practice vulnerability with ideas and each other.4 That is to say, an engaged pedagogy is a way of undertaking an activist mode of scholarship by collaboratively building the vocabulary and relationships we need to carry ourselves toward collective liberation.
Second—and most...