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Amidst the outpouring of conversation surrounding the popular romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians (2018), a common response by Asian American audience members centered on the experience of crying at ...

This research examines the use of Participatory Action Research (PAR) methods in conducting a media messaging campaign designed to increase the visibility of queer people of color in a local community. Rather than focusing on the impact of viewing the campaign on the local community, this project assesses the way that participating in creating a campaign can positively impact a grassroots social justice organization. Here we see that the process of creating and managing an image campaign can serve as an opportunity for education and capacity-building for organizations that is distinct from the impact of the media campaign on its target audience. This includes achievements such as expanding the capacity of the organization to engage in strategic media work now and in the future, developing the ability for members of the organization to clearly articulate the goals of the media campaign and engage in productive conversations about the campaign within the community, and strengthening community buy-in for the...

The Asian American blogosphere has developed to encompass a variety of voices regularly providing readers with news items, opinions, and personal narratives of life in Asian America. In this article I investigate the relationship between emotion and activism in order to better understand the potential for using blogs as part of a sustainable social movement, as well as to theorize the kind of labor that activism can entail. This study is based on interviews with 15 bloggers who have created or written for blogs that focus specifically on Asian American issues. Through an analysis of the bloggers’ interviews and their blogging archive, I argue that emotion can play a foundational role in generating activist interventions and building the necessary community required for contributing to social change, but can also have a deleterious impact on the individuals involved. It is only through recognizing the ambivalent role of emotion within the affective labor of activism online that we can work toward more sustainable participation and impact.

This article analyzes the highly politicized Asian American newspaper Gidra as a way of expanding our conception of ethnic media beyond mainstream publications to include radical ethnic media. In contrast to the notion that ethnic communities might shy from exposing the internal conflicts that jeopardize their own community’s stability, Gidra demonstrates three different kinds of conflict: external conflict, internal conflict, and conflict that is produced by the paper itself. Through this exploration, the different ways that Asian American identities were created and discussed during the late 1960s and early 1970s are also assessed, as the radical contingent of the Asian American Movement used print publications to redefine what it meant to be Asian in America.

This article provides an alternative to the masculine construction of the blogosphere by analyzing 'mommy bloggers' through the lenses of feminism and autobiography. It uses the event of the 2005 BlogHer conference as a starting point for a discussion about the mommy blogger phenomenon, wherein a constellation of ensuing conversations challenge the use of the title 'mommy blogger' and the activities that are encompassed by it. In qualitatively examining the form and content of mommy blogs, this article ultimately argues for their potential to build communities and to challenge dominant representations of motherhood within our society.