Description

05/05/2021
Dear Mariko, 
I am writing to recommend an urgent needs grant of $250,000 to San Francisco State University, in support of a project on Asian American intergenerational stories. The project responds to the current crisis of escalating anti-Asian violence and racism while highlighting the religious and racial diversity of Asian Americans through a multi-generational lens. 
Emerging from a collaborative partnership between the Asian Pacific American Religious Research Initiative (APARRI) and Stop AAPI Hate, the “Asian American Intergenerational Stories Project” will record intergenerational “talk stories” between Asian American elders and students, with a view to creating both a longer film in conventional documentary format and shorter videos that can be used in classes and shared on social media. 
National in scope, the project will gather and record talk stories from the six Asian ethnic groups most impacted by COVID-19 discrimination: Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, Japanese, and Taiwanese. Teams of researchers and students will interview seniors from varied religious traditions: Chinese Popular Religion, Evangelical, Buddhist, Catholic, and Mainline Protestant. The project’s work will also include talk stories with members of Sikh and Muslim communities. Interviewers will pose a range of questions about how religious traditions, community participation, life trajectories, and cultural identity influence the ways in which individuals experience, understand, cope with, and respond to the current wave of anti-Asian hate and physical violence. The project will also explore perspectives on the relationship between religion and justice work.
Made famous by Maxine Hong Kinston’s novels Woman Warrior and China Men, “talk story” is a widely practiced mode of Asian American storytelling and Pacific Islander oral history, a collective ritual practice and open-ended process of community memory work that enables polyphony, multiple voices, and alternative imaginaries. Emphasizing the spiritual and therapeutic benefits of sharing stories, and articulating and claiming cultural heritage, the PIs of this proposed project have put forward a thoughtful proposal for the deployment of the talk story as an oral history research method, drawing on traditional wisdom as well as diverse bodies of scholarship.
Recordings of the talk stories will be edited for various broadcast platforms, translated into Asian languages, and combined for a longer documentary that can accompany community capacity-building and further intergenerational conversations. The project will also produce and make available shorter videos and digital multimedia materials to be shared online and aimed at advancing cultural literacy about Asian Americans and religion. Specific project outcomes will include: long and short videos of interviews, curriculum and discussion guides to accompany videos, social media tools developed to advance cultural literacy and to ameliorate racial trauma, intergenerational conversations and screenings (hosted by a range of institutional partners), and a culminating gathering to bring together community members and scholars to share the project and to strategically plan for future collaborations related to race, religion, and justice.
APARRI’s current and previous leaders are well-known to the Luce Foundation, and one notable feature of APARRI’s work—one that we do not always see in the study of religion and theology—is an engagement that includes seminaries and theological schools as well as colleges and research universities. The Initiative made its home for a time at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, for example, and still has strong ties there. APARRI was also based for a period at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, when Frank Yamada was president (Yamada is now president of the Association of Theological Schools). Other APARRI leaders are based in university settings, including UC-Berkeley and the University of Michigan. The co-PIs of the Asian American intergenerational stories project, Tamara Ho (UC Riverside) and Russell Jeung (San Francisco State University), are also both leaders in the APARRI network. APARRI’s leadership has demonstrated a substantial appreciation for the significance of religious, racial, and ethnic diversity, as well as for the transnational character of American religious life and experience – all key features of the Religion and Theology Program’s current work and goals, which focus centrally on advancing more inclusive and nuanced public knowledge of religion in America, especially through the support of diverse and underrepresented knowledge makers.
All the best,
Jonathan