Our Approach
Our goal in the creation of this AAPI History Museum is to foster a space where the community can come together and learn about AAPI history, cultures, and impacts on Rhode Island. This space will be the AAPI History Museum & Culture Center (brick & mortar version).
We want to create exhibits that appeal to different learning styles, so that anyone can form a connection with the subject, AAPI History, in front of them. The museum exhibits are created with four main learning styles in mind: visual learning, kinesthetic learning, auditory learning, and classic learning through reading and writing. There are other learning styles, such as
logical/analytical, social/linguistic, solitary, nature, etc., but we generalize our exhibits to encompass the four main categories of learning styles. By opening to a wide audience variety, we are also striving to get more members of the youth community involved through this museum, to convey an understanding of history and an appreciation for museums.
The name of the museum is subject to change, depending on the outreach to people of Pacific Islander descent (an issue asked about in our interest form). Completing the AAPI History Museum is an ongoing process and project that may last for years, but we will have a product to show in the interim.
We have some update on the museum goers from the American Alliance of Museum's latest survey, which was conducted in conjunction with Wilkening Consulting.
Demographics of US Museum Goers: A 2024 Update
This report gives us insight in how to structure our AAPI History Museum more effectively so we can engage our audience and community more closely. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ewrX187EExfDRL04oqJbhQ_QwWcHjUU4/view?usp=sharing
What's Next
We want to create more exhibits, which are hands-on activities that people can feel and interact with. Music and sounds are some potential tools to use with exhibits and embody the spirit of the history being communicated. Participation among museum-goers is key, as many museums rely heavily on visual learning such as looking and watching. This museum aims to engage audiences with their five senses, and perhaps even their sixth sense: writing! It is also our intention to have every exhibit translated into its respective ethnic language, i.e. Chinese American Journey website will be translated into Chinese, Cambodian American Journey will be translated into Khmer, Vietnamese American Journey into Vietnamese…etc. so we can bridge the gap between the first and second generations, especially when the first generation whose English may not be proficient. Visiting the AAPI History (website, mobile or brick-and-mortar versions) can be something that unifies the family despite their English proficiency.
Advisory Council Board
We have a list of scholars on the Advisory Council Board in which they lend us their expertise.
Dr. Diego Javier Luis is the Rohrbaugh Family Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Johns Hopkins University. He studies the colonial histories of Latin America and the Pacific World, race-making, and Afro-Asian diasporic convergences. He is the author of The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History, published in 2024 by Harvard University Press
Dr. Jason Oliver Chang of University of Connecticut (UConn), is the Associate Professor in Asian American Studies, History and Ethnic Studies and is also the Director for Asian/Asian American Studies Institute in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Dr. Chang teaches courses that bring together the fields of Area Studies, with emphasis on the Pacific and western hemisphere, and Comparative Ethnic Studies that stresses the dependent and continguent nature of race and its intersection with class, gender, and sexuality. His classes address topics such as global capitalism, transnationalism, diaspora, identity and community formation, indigeneity, inter-racial contact zones, governmentality, and the environment, as well as, the legal, cultural, and political economic foundations of colonism, imperialism, and nationalism in the Americas.
Dr. Elaine Stiles is an Associate Professor of Historic Preservation in the Cummings School of Architecture at Roger Williams University, Rhode Island where she teaches courses in preservation practice and the history of the built environment. Before entering academic, Elaine worked as an architectural historian, historic preservation planner, and preservation advocate, engaging in projects from the rural reaches of northern Maine to the streets of San Francisco. She is also the Faculty Director of RWU Public Humanities and Arts Collaborative (Co-Lab).
Dr. Hongyan Yang is an interdisciplinary activist-scholar who enters the built environment in the research, teaching, and empowerment of marginalized communities in the United States. She explores the intersections of race, ethnicity, and space, and asks how Asian immigrants’ identities and culinary practices shaped and were shaped by the spaces they designed and inhabited. Her work is guided not only by historical methods but also by her engagement with local communities through field documentation, oral history and preservation efforts. Dr. Yang is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Boston College where she is working on her first book Landscapes of Resistance: Chinese Placemaking across the Pacific.
Dr. Esther June Kim is an Assistant Professor in Curriculum and Instruction and affiliate faculty for Asian Pacific Islander Studies at William and Mary. Her research focuses on how racial and religious identities (or different origin stories) might shape student understandings and embodiments of citizenship. She also explores how religious and racial narratives are taught (or not) primarily in secondary classrooms with particular attention to Asian American communities. Currently, her work includes collaborations with undergraduate students adapting archival research on Asian American histories to resources for K-12 students and educators. Dr. Kim is a former high school humanities and history teacher who taught in both South Korea and California.
Dr. Noreen Naseem Rodriguez is an assistant professor of elementary education and educational justice. Her research engages critical race frameworks to explore the pedagogical practices of teacher of color and the teaching of so-called difficult histories through children’s literature and primary sources. Her current study is funded by the Spencer Foundation, examines grassroots efforts for Asian American studies teaching and learning in K-12 classrooms in Georgia, Texas and Virginia. She is co-author of “Social Studies for a Better World: An Anti-Oppressive Approach for Elementary Educators” (W W Norton and Co, Inc., 2021) with Katy Swalwell, and co-editor of “Critical Race Theory and Social Studies Futures: From the Nightmare of Racial Realism to Dreaming Out Loud” (Teachers College Press, 2022) with Amanda Vickery. Her newest book is “Teaching Asian America in Elementary Classrooms” (Routledge, 2023) with Sohyun An and Esther Kim. Before becoming a teacher educator, she was a bilingual elementary teacher in Austin, Texas for nine years.
Dr. Noreen Naseem Rodriguez and Dr. Sohyun An’s award winning page on Social Studies here.
Dr. Anne Anlin Cheng is a professor of English and former director of American Studies at Princeton University. She is an interdisciplinary, comparative race scholar focusing on the uneasy intersection between politics and aesthetics. Her scholarship draws widely from literary and visual studies, race and gender studies, film and architectural theory, legal studies, and psychoanalysis. She is the author of The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief; Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface; Ornamentalism; and most recently, Ordinary Disasters: How I Stopped Being a Model Minority.
Dr. Ying Lu is an Associate Professor of Applied Statistics at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. Originally from China, she earned a Ph.D. in Public Policy/Demography from Princeton University in 2005 and a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of North Carolina in 2009. Her research focuses on developing quantitative methods for social and behavioral sciences, with a particular interest in education studies. Outside academia, Dr. Lu actively engages with the community. She is a board member of Make Us Visible New Jersey, a grassroots organization that successfully advocated for the NJ AAPI curriculum bill in January 2022. This legislation mandates the inclusion of AAPI history in K-12 classrooms. In January 2023, she co-founded The E Pluribus Unum Project (TEPUP), a nonprofit promoting an inclusive curriculum in New Jersey schools. The organization strives to unite diverse communities to advocate for education that reflects the state’s pluralistic society and make pluralistic curriculum resources accessible to NJ schools.
Dr. Karishma Desai is an Associate Professor of Education Foundations. Dr. Desai’s interdisciplinary scholarship, teaching, and professional engagements employ anthropological and feminist lenses in the study of childhood/youth, gender, and education. Her central concerns gravitate around the politics of knowledge and being, and attend to how gendered and racialized differences are stabilized and unsettled. She examines the contested ways in which global norms about gender and childhood/youth are consolidated, translated, and negotiated in educational sites, predominantly in South Asia and the United States. Attending to global discourses alongside the everyday embodied and relational cultural lives of young people within unequal educational contexts, she investigates the kinds of gendered subjectivities that are forwarded as desirable with particular attention to the values, aspirations, and affective orientations made available. In doing so, she is interested in epistemological questions related to sites of figuring and educating young people. She asks: what knowledge and ontologies matter in the constructions of gendered childhoods? How have they come to matter, and how are they disrupted? As a scholar and educator, she is invested in attending to educational problems by foregrounding the construction of youth, their complex material lives, subjugated knowledge, and modes of being that might offer new possibilities. These questions and investments result in the study of coloniality within educational sites and feminist scholarship that decenters liberal, anthropocentric constructions of the human.
Our Priorities: RICCC
Respect: Respect people no matter where they are intellectually, emotionally, financially, and geographically.
Inclusion: We want to include as many people, perspectives, and viewpoints as possible. If you don’t see your viewpoint being represented, please let us know so that we may rectify the oversight.
Compassion: We know that dealing with a subject such as history can bring up sensitive subjects. In some situations, content may even regard incidents of violence. It is important to have compassion in our hearts for those involved in these occurrences. We ask that when you come to this juncture, embrace the opportunity to discuss, not ignore. Take a deep breath and self-reflect before you speak and share your thoughts. Make sure to do so with compassion!
Community: Community is the thread that ties all our humanities together. What we do, what we say, and how we respond impacts how another person feels. We embrace community for all these reasons, and more.
Collaboration: We are always in the hope and spirit of collaboration. There is still much to learn from other people and organizations; we must accept this knowledge with a sense of humility, in cooperating and learning from each other and with each other. We hope that through collaboration, we may produce something much greater than what could be achieved separately, resulting in an exponential return!
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AAPI History Museum Prototype
The Prototype's Schedules & Locations
1/16/24 to 2/15/24 – Rochambeau Library on 708 Hope Street, Providence, RI 02906
2/16/24 to 3/10/24 – Cranston Central Public Library on 140 Sockanosset Cross Road Cranston, R.I. 02920.
3/11/24 to 4/7/24 – Two Different locations at Johnson & Wales University (JWU). From 3/11 to 3/21 – It will be displayed at Friedman Center Library, located at 321 Harborside Blvd., Providence, RI. From 3/22 to 4/7 – It will be displayed at Bridge for Diversity, Equity & Social Justice, located at 259 Pine Street, Providence, RI. (For JWU Community to View only).
4/8/24 to 4/29/24 – Mt. Pleasant Library on 315 Academy Ave, Providence, RI 02908
5/6/24 – 5/31/24 – John Brown House Museum, located on 52 Power Street, Providence, RI 02906
6/1/24 – 6/30/24 – Museum of Work & Culture, located at 42 S. Main St., Woonsocket, RI 02893 0289
7/1/24 – 11/8/24 – West Warwick Public Library, located at 1043 Main Street, West Warwick, RI 02893
The images here provide different angles of view of the prototype.
The prototype is funded by a grant from the following organizations.
Our mobile museum made its debut at the PVD Fest on Sept. 7, 2024 and it’s now open for booking! See all our photos here.