Description

Not infrequently fleeing hostility or persecution of one form or another, Asian migrants to the United States have repeatedly confronted other forms of hardship upon their stateside arrival. Facing xenophobia, racism, or economic inequality, many Asian Americans turn to religion in forming a response—yet they often do so in isolation from other groups in their communities, and in the context of a public culture in which many civic leaders, social activists, and academic analysts remain largely ignorant of their distinctive experiences and concerns. Taking this problematic as their starting point, a team of scholars based at Baylor University, Princeton Theological Seminary, and the University of Michigan propose a collaborative and exploratory project that will examine religiously-inspired Asian American coalition building—the practice of finding common ground across lines of difference in order to renew and remake democratic communities.
Assembling a transdisciplinary team of researchers, the project will study “the meaning and practice of justice work as it transcends lines of race, religion, and nation” through collaborations with local groups that are building innovative forms of civic friendship. Seeing these groups and their efforts as local laboratories of justice, the project’s leaders aim to learn alongside them, and to share their religious perspectives, practical knowledge, and collective experiences with a range of wider publics.
Through a request for proposals, the project’s research team will identify and select local partners at six different sites, making small grants intended to catalyze their collaborative work. Over the course of two years, members of the research team will work alongside representative leaders from the different local sites to share findings and complete joint analyses. In conjunction with these efforts, knowledge makers based in the local sites will engage in additional documentary work to be shared with diverse audiences through a digital humanities platform growing out of the project.
The project will be led by Dr. David Chao, Director of the Center for Asian American Christianity at Princeton Theological Seminary; Dr. Melissa Borja, Assistant Professor in the American Culture Department at the University of Michigan, where she is also a core faculty member in the Asian/Pacific Islander Studies Program; and Dr. Jonathan Tran, George W. Baines Chair in the Department of Religion at Baylor University, where he co-leads the Ethics Research Initiative in the College of Arts and Sciences.
Recommendation: That the Directors of the Henry Luce Foundation approve a three-year grant of $250,000 to Baylor University to support a project on religiously-inspired Asian American coalition building.
https://www.baylor.edu/