As part of the Spring 2022 Sociology Colloquium, the Department of Sociology invites you to attend the virtual lecture with guest speaker Jennifer Lee, Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Social Sciences at Columbia University. Please note the date change, the event has been rescheduled to Friday, April 22 at 3pm.
Reckoning with Asian America and the Racial Foundations of Science, Medicine, and Law
It took the mass murder of six Asian women in Atlanta on March 16, 2021 to draw national attention to what Asian Americans have been warning about since the wake of Covid-19: a surge in anti-Asian violence and hate. Since the onset of the coronavirus, 1 in 6 Asian American adults experienced a hate incident, and 1 in 7 women worry all the time about being victimized—reflecting a legacy of bigotry, misogyny, exclusion, and violence born from the racial foundations of science, medicine, and immigration law. Most Americans do not know this history, yet the stereotypes that emerged from it are familiar: Asians may be highly educated and hypercompetent, but they are, nevertheless, foreign and unassimilable, and Asian women, morally depraved and hypersexual. Linking the past to the present, I show how science, medicine, and law do more than reflect social constructions of race, morality, and citizenship; they also produce and reproduce them.
About the speaker:
Jennifer Lee is the Julian Clarence Levi Professor of Social Sciences at Columbia University, and an incoming Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. An award-winning author of four books, most recently of The Asian American Achievement Paradox, she is this year’s recipient of the Distinguished Contribution to the Field Award from the American Sociological Association’s Asia and Asian American Section. Her wide-ranging research addresses morally urgent questions about the implications of contemporary US immigration—particularly Asian immigration—on the native-born population. She has studied this from a variety of analytical lenses, including immigrant entrepreneurship and ethnic conflict, intermarriage and multiracial identification, educational opportunities and outcomes, and, most recently, affirmative action and the rise in anti-Asian hate. She is a Board Member of the Obama Presidency Oral History, a Trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation, and a Senior Researcher at AAPI Data, which recently received a $10 million grant to study anti-Asian discrimination and hate. Committed to public engagement, she is a Contributor for Science and The Brookings Institution, and was invited by the Biden-Harris Administration to present her research to the COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force.
Event hosted by Sociology and co-sponsored by Asian American Studies Program