Undergraduate Programs
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HDFS 341 asian american youth
same as AAS 346
3 hours (lecture-discussion)
Fall Semesters
Course Description and Objectives
Asian and Pacific Islander (API) youth make up one of the fastest growing populations in the United States. According to the 2000 census, approximately 90% of the API population are
either foreign born or are second-generation with immigrant parents. A large portion of this
population are the 1.5 and second-generation who have come of age in the 21st century in the post
1965 immigration era. These API youth represent an extremely heterogeneous population including
Cambodian, Chinese, Hawaiian, Filipino, Japanese, Indian, Korean, Laotian, Mien, Samoan, Thai,
Tongan, and mixed race youth. We will explore the ways that second-generation youth are actively
shaping the U.S. landscape in terms of identity formation, youth cultural production, youth culture,
education, politics and activism, and community formations. These experiences will be examined
within larger historical, economic, racial, social and political forces in the United States.
This course seeks to understand the cultural production and discursive and material
positioning of “youth” in society. Rather than approach the study of youth through a developmental
psychological model of adolescence, this course will examine youth as a historically and culturally
specific social formation. We will engage with texts that draw from different academic disciplines to
provide us with theoretical, historical, and ethnographic perspectives of young people. We will also
compare and situate the unique (and not so unique) experiences of API youth with young people of
different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
Topics
- Immigration and the new second generation
- Social construction of adolescence and representations of youth
- Identity formations
- Youth culture
- Education
- Juvenile (in)justice
- Political activism
Graded Activities
- Reflection papers (7)
- Ethnography of the University Initiative assignments (10)
- EUI project postings (4)