Research and Scholarly Work

By Cat Sandoval 
Experts say the trope of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners and treated as "others" continues today with dangerous consequences.

There aren't many headlines or news coverage of anti-Asian hate crimes now, compared to what was shown during the height of the pandemic — but attacks and insults are still happening in various parts of the country.

The national coalition Stop Asian American Pacific Islander Hate tracked 11,500 hate incidents from March 2020 to March 2022. At the start of the pandemic, Asians were scapegoated and wrongfully blamed for COVID-19. It is true that the Chinese government silenced their doctors and kept the outbreak a secret from the rest of the world.  

John C. Yang, is the president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice.

"We should be calling out that government. But in doing so, we absolutely need to be clear that it's a government that we are concerned about and not the people," said Yang. 

Politicians like former President Donald Trump publicly blamed China and continued to use radicalized terms like "Wuhan virus" and "China virus," terms the World Health Organization warned could lead to racial profiling and stigma. Trump's first "Chinese virus" tweet was followed by an increase in anti-Asian hashtags. But activists say anti-Asian hate didn't start with the pandemic.  

Stewart Khow, co-founded the Asian American Education Project.

"There was a political party built, the Workingmen's party that was established in California. That main point was to get rid of the Chinese. So there was violence," said Khow. 

Khow is referring to an American Labor Organization founded in San Francisco in 1877. Five years later, anti-Asian sentiments led to the Chinese Exclusion Act. That was the first and only federal law that banned immigration of a specific nationality.  

Experts say the trope of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners and treated as "others" continues today with dangerous consequences.  

"Regardless of how long we've been in the United States, whether we were born here or not, that we are seen as a foreigner," said Yang.

During WWII, Japanese Americans, men, women and children were rounded up and placed in detention camps. They were incarcerated for three years, their property and personal items taken.   

"Not one Japanese American was ever convicted for spying for Japan," said Khow. 

Then, when the Twin Towers fell in 2001, South Asians and Muslim Americans were targeted. It didn't matter if they were born here.   

"Hundreds of South Asians and Muslim Americans were singled out, brutalized, and some were killed in a wave of Islamophobia after 9/11," said Khow. 

Janelle Wong, is a professor of American studies, at the University of Maryland.

"This is a cyclical kind of trope that is always kind of beneath the surface, but arises in times where the U.S. feels under threat," said Wong.  

And now, during the pandemic, experts say one way to combat hate is through education.

"You prevent that from making sure people understand that Asian Americans are American, are part of the fabric of our history," said Yang. 

The Asian American Education Project aims to train teachers and teach this history in every public school from kindergarten through 12th grade. Currently, five states have passed a mandatory Asian American history requirement.    

"Asian American history, is American history. Let me say it again. Asian American history, is American history. You don't understand big parts of American history — unless you understand Asian American history," said Khow. 

The surge in anti-Asian hate has led to a reemergence and groundswell of Asian American activism. In the 80s there was no justice for Vincent Chin, who was killed in a brutal racial attack in Detroit over rising tensions over Japanese auto imports. 

Compare that to the reaction after the 2021 mass killing of eight people — mostly Asian women, at massage parlors in metro Atlanta. 

"The fact that President Biden went down to Atlanta, along with the vice president, almost immediately after the Atlanta murders, and that there was legislation passed within a within a couple of months addressing hate crimes against Asian Americans —  power to Black people, power to Asian people," said Yang.  

"One of the most exciting kinds of activism to emerge from the last two years is Asian-American young people's interest in telling their own stories," said Wang. 

Chicago held its first ever Blasian March, a coalition of stop anti-Asian hate and Black Lives Matter activists.   

Rohan, is the founder of Blasian March. 

"I think being Blasian and being a Black Asian is incredibly powerful because, you know, so often society is trying to divide us and separate us. But you can't separate me. You know, I am living proof that we can coexist," said Rohan. 

"We can unite as a community from the Black and Asian and Asian communities to come together and just understand our differences and also just celebrate our intersectionality and our history together," said Kate Ventrina, the Chicago Blasian March organizer. 

By Liam Farrell 

Three University of Maryland faculty helped illuminate the stories behind two 19th-century state icons for a new pair of documentaries premiering on PBS this month.

“Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom” debuts at 10 tonight, and “Becoming Frederick Douglass” follows at 10 p.m. Oct. 11. The films, directed by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Stanley Nelson, include interviews about Tubman with Cheryl LaRoche, associate research professor in the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and the author of “Free Black Communities and the Underground Railroad: The Geography of Resistance;” about Douglass with Christopher Bonner, associate history professor and author of “Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship;” and about Douglass with Robert Levine, whose most recent book is “The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson.”

“There are no two people more important to our country’s history than Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. Their remarkable lives and contributions were a critical part of the 19th century, and their legacies help us understand who we are as a nation,” Nelson said. “We are honored to share their stories with a country that continues to grapple with the impact of slavery and debate notions of citizenship, democracy and freedom.”

La Roche said Tubman is a fascinating figure because of the leadership she was able to show despite being a diminutive figure barely 5 feet tall who didn’t know how to read or write.

“She doesn’t have the impressive credentials we really associate with (being a leader),” she said. “And yet she is leading men, women, children—sometimes whole families—out of slavery.”

Tubman developed a strong sense of herself from an upbringing on the Eastern Shore with an intact nuclear family, La Roche said, and her religious faith gave her the confidence and strength to help liberate slaves on the Underground Railroad.

“She did not allow herself to be defined by what the 19th century thought of Black women,” she said. “She transcended all of that.”

Bonner teaches a course on Douglass, who was born into and escaped from slavery in Talbot County, Md., before launching a career as an abolitionist, orator and writer; a statue of him now stands on the UMD campus. He said Douglass’ life can be a lens onto how America has wrestled with its stated ideals and how it failed to live up to them even after slavery was ended.

“We can see the work that had to be done to make freedom real … and the insufficiencies of freedom,” he said. “He points to a history of people seeking opportunities in the United States and confronting its limitations.”

While both Tubman and Douglass are known as historic icons, Bonner said he hopes the documentary also shows the bravery and contributions of the people who supported and worked alongside them. In order to achieve remarkable things, he said, “the extraordinary needs other extraordinary.”

“Individuals can change the world but that happens when people work together,” he said. “Their histories are histories of solidarity.”

The films are co-productions of Firelight Films and Maryland Public Television, with additional support from the state of Maryland, Bowie State University, DirecTV and Pfizer.

Click above to view the video of Creative Placemaking in the Community.

Idyllic scenes of nature and towering, colorful hands communicating in American Sign Language are more than a pretty backdrop for al fresco diners at The Hall CP in the University of Maryland’s Discovery District. The sweeping mural project led by Assistant Professor of Art Brandon J. Donahue is an example of how a community—in this case, that of the campus—can come together to beautify a place and begin fertile conversations about a shared future.

Donahue is one of the faculty members involved with UMD’s new creative placemaking minor, which started this fall as a collaboration between the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and the College of Arts and Humanities and is part of the university's Arts for All initiative. It will imbue students with expertise that allows them to support a community’s vision and nurture vibrant, socially responsive and just places.

Student artists creating with Donahue’s guidance are the focus of the latest installment of the new video series, “Enterprise: University of Maryland Research Stories,” which gives a window into how placemaking research translates into enhanced spaces for all.

Video by Bethany Swain

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Fresh out of undergrad and working in advertising in Chicago in the late 2000s, Catherine Knight Steele found an online escape from her cubicle—in the blogosphere. Each day, she soaked up musings on topics ranging from gossip and entertainment to beauty and motherhood, written mainly by Black women. Not only did the content fascinate and enliven her, but it began to feel essential to her sense of personhood—like home. 

Steele became so interested in these online spaces that she began to wonder whether she could pursue research on them. There weren’t many examples at the time of scholars of color working at the intersection of race and digital media, so Steele paved her own way, returning to graduate school for a Ph.D. in communication. Her dissertation, “Digital Barbershops,” focused on the politics of African American oral culture in online blog communities, tracing the ways that Black people have long found spaces outside the purview of the dominant group. 

Now an associate professor of communication at UMD, Steele is committed to building community and expanding opportunities for a new generation of scholars in the burgeoning humanistic field of Black digital studies—the ways that technology impacts and intersects with Blackness and the lives, histories and cultures of Black Americans. Through her research and publications, collaborative projects and teaching, Steele wants people—and especially Black women—to know that if they’re interested in Black communication and technology, there’s a space at UMD for them.   

“I’ve been very fortunate and privileged to get to this place, and now I have a sense of responsibility and a debt to pay to those on a similar path,” she said. “I want to help people find their people, find their passions and drive themselves forward in spaces they’ve been boxed out of.” 

A native Chicagoan, Steele has long been interested in technology—but is the first to admit she’s not “techie” in a traditional sense. She remembers learning to type as a young girl using “Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing” on the family’s computer and was among the first batch of students to get Facebook in college, “back when you had to have a .edu address.” Mostly though, technology has been a tool to express herself and find belonging. 

After she received her doctorate from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 2014, she served as an assistant professor at Colorado State University before coming to UMD in 2016 as the founding director of the Mellon-funded African American Digital Humanities Initiative (AADHum). The multi-year initiative encompasses research, education and training at the intersections of African American history, culture and the digital humanities—what’s often called Black digital humanities, or “BlackDH.” For three years, Steele and her team worked especially to create a community among those at the graduate and faculty levels in a range of disciplines and with varied interests. They organized workshops, panels and reading groups, hosted a conference, launched the first cohort of AADHum scholars and more.

“Catherine brought to life what was then a collection of plans and hopes,” said Trevor Muñoz, the director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities and AADHum co-principal investigator. “She nurtured a scholarly community that encompassed and was genuinely interested in many different approaches to the study of Black life through and with technology.” 

Steele dove back into her dissertation research, but with a renewed focus on Black women and Black feminists and how they’ve transformed technology over centuries. Using both historical and archival analysis and empirical Internet studies methods, Steele’s first book, “Digital Black Feminism,” was published in 2021 and offers a throughline from the writing of 19th-century Black women all the way to modern-day bloggers and social media creators. The book won the 2022 Nancy Baym Book Award from the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). In its announcement, AoIR said the book “reclaims feminism for Black women and directly intervenes in Internet scholarship.”

For Steele, the best part of publishing “Digital Black Feminism” has been the resultant conversations. From high school book clubs and a community college Black feminism course, to graduate programs in digital studies and feminist studies, it’s been used in “a variety of different generative spaces of conversation,” she said. 

At UMD, Steele teaches courses on digital studies, media theory, methods in media and digital research, Black discourse and digital media and more. She recently became the director of Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities, or DSAH, an interdisciplinary graduate certificate jointly administered by the College of Arts and Humanities and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. She’s part of the inaugural cohort of the “Breaking the M.O.L.D.” initiative, which seeks to prepare underrepresented arts and humanities faculty from UMD, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Morgan State University for institutional leadership. And she’s working on three simultaneous collaborative book projects.

She was also recently named a Higher Ed IT “Influencer to Follow” by EdTech Magazine. 

These days, Steele is focused on launching a new space on the third floor of the Skinner Building for anyone with an interest in Black digital studies. The Black Communication and Technology—or BCat—Lab will feature tables for workshops and writing sessions, a sofa and comfy chairs for reading from a Black digital studies library and a big screen for virtual workshops, lectures and events. 

It’s part of the Mellon Foundation-funded Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, & Optimism (DISCO) network, a collective of six scholars at institutions across the country that are “envisioning an alternative and inclusive digital future.” Each is leveraging their own areas of expertise to establish new research hubs, courses and more at their institutions. All the while, they are working together to share knowledge and experiences. 

At UMD, the BCaT Lab will develop a program model to introduce undergraduates to digital research through workshops and coursework, help students carry out graduate research and find jobs and create a mentoring network for students and faculty to navigate Black digital studies, focusing on collaboration across generations of researchers. 

Doctoral student Alisa Hardy, a graduate assistant at the lab and Steele’s advisee, has been working to spread the word about BCaT on campus and beyond. She said students—and Black students especially—are eager for a space to talk about technology, “and write together and learn together.” 

“Working on the BCaT project has really fostered my own Black identity as a digital scholar,” Hardy said. “When I came to UMD, I wanted to study digital communication but I didn’t know if I had the tools, understanding or perspective. Working with Catherine has opened my mind up to so many other possibilities. Seeing this lab and how it's come to be—it’s inspiring. It makes me think I could do something similar one day.”

Among the lab’s upcoming events: BCaT will host a panel discussion this semester for early career scholars on writing a first book manuscript, which will feature published authors and an acquisition editor from a major academic press. Participants will then be invited to a weeklong workshop on writing the book proposal. It will also begin the “BCaT Writes Open Lab,” where undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty gather to write their own projects.

Eventually, Steele hopes to introduce students in Prince George’s County high schools to the field of Black digital studies and encourage future scholarship.

Her message for interested students: “There’s a place in the humanities where you can do what you want to do—where you can be of service to this community, and that’s in Black digital studies,” she said. “There is a wide range of possibilities with a graduate and undergrad degree with this background and skillset.”

“We need to show what that path looks like and provide branches along the way,” she added. 

Steele will be in conversation with ARHU Dean Stephanie Shonekan on September 28, 2022, (on Zoom) to discuss “Digital Black Feminism” and how to marry digital research with historical and archival work as we consider a path for the humanities in the digital age. Learn more and sign up.