Inclusive Reads & Conversations with UWGB Libraries

Lisa Lamson

Lisa Rose Lamson recently received her Ph.D from Marquette University (2021) and is currently a lecturer in History and Humanities at the University of Wisconsin – Green Bay where she teaches a variety of African American history and historic methodology courses. In Fall of 2022, she will be teaching an experimental course on Asian American History.

She researches the intersection of education, gendered citizenship, and childhood history in 19th century urban spaces. Ultimately her research asks how children learned how to belong and how adults shaped the children’s understanding. She is currently working on a monograph based on her dissertation, “’Our Duty is to Furnish Such Education:’ Black Childhood and Schooling in Baltimore City, 1828 – 1900” that explores black parental advocacy, the intersection of citizenship and schooling, curricular policy, and childhood.

Her teaching interests include: U.S. African American History, the history of childhood, gender history, education history, the history of segregation and Civil Rights, textile and fashion history, and popular culture. She is an avid knitter, comic book and science fiction fan, and romance reader.

The Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community in the United States is a vibrant, diverse, and rapidly growing segment of the population – both on and off campus. However, the rich cultural diversity within AAPI students, spanning a broad geographic region, many different languages, and ethnic groups, is often flattened to “Asian American” in DEI discourse if included at all. Broadly and nebulously defined, AAPI students often feel caught in-between multiple ethnic and social groups, initiatives, or classroom spaces that ignore or brush off their classroom experiences due to societal myths around “model minority,” “success fame,” and positive stereotypes around student success. In framing AAPI student population as a monolithic entity, colleges and universities fail to best support the varied experiences, provide necessary interventions, and minimize the wide variety within student success and attainment found in this group. “Hapas,” or a person of mixed ethnic ancestry and often used as a racial pejorative, further complicate a belief in the seeming homogeneity of AAPI students – often belonging to two or more ethnic groups and not feeling like they belong. Multi-racial or ethnic AAPI students are also a growing population and their collegiate experiences are shaped by their “in-betweenness.”

For this month's reading, the authors attempt to highlight the experiences of multi-racial AAPI students on college campus. These students, neither fully “Asian” nor their other ethnic identity markers, really question how universities can best foster a sense of belonging as the chapter highlights, many students took years before they found a “place” on campus. In increasing racialized harassment and violence focused on AAPI persons due to the ongoing COVID – 19 pandemic, I think it’s particularly important to examine how AAPI students and multi-ethnic AAPI students find their sense of belonging on campus and have a conversation around how we, as educational professionals in a variety of roles, can best facilitate that.

This month we will be reading the book chapter, "Hapas in College: Multiracial Asian Identify and the Model Minority Myth"  from the book, Killing the Model Minority Stereotype: Asian American Counterstories and Complicity. Click on the title below to read online through our libraries.