More than simply a “myth” or a stereotype, the model minority is a racial form that brings with it very real expectations and consequences for Asian Americans. What kinds of harm are done when Asian Americans too often and too readily invest in the idea of the model minority? What will it take to undo this devastating ideal altogether? This panel brings together authors whose work examines the relationship between the model minority, health, and Asian American well-being.

James Kyung-Jin Lee (he/him) is Professor of Asian American Studies and English and the former Director of the Center for Medical Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Pedagogies of Woundedness: Illness, Memoir, and the Ends of the Model Minority (Temple, 2022), which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2022. He also wrote Urban Triage: Race and the Fictions of Multiculturalism (Minnesota, 2004), and was a co-guest editor (with Jennifer Ho) of a special issue of Amerasia Journal in 2013 titled “The State of Illness and Disability in Asian America.” Most recently, Jim has been developing new pedagogy that centers care as a primary learning objective.

Mimi Khúc, PhD, is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. She is the 2023 Scholar/Artist/Activist in Residence for FLOURISH: Community-Engaged Arts and Social Wellness at the University of Toronto Scarborough, Managing Editor of The Asian American Literary Review, and an adjunct lecturer in Disability Studies at Georgetown University. She is the creator of the acclaimed mental health projects Open in Emergency and the Asian American Tarot. Her forthcoming book, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss (Duke University Press, 2024), is a creative-critical, genre-bending deep dive into the shapes of Asian American unwellness at the intersections of ableism, model minoritization, and the university, and an exploration of new approaches to building collective care.

erin Khuê Ninh is Professor and Chair of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She writes about the model minority as racialization and subject formation (not myth). Her books are Passing for Perfect: College Impostors and Other Model Minorities (written up in the New Yorker), and Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature (awarded Best Literary Criticism by AAAS). Along with Shireen Roshanravan, she edited #WeToo: A Reader, a special issue on sexual violence for the Journal of Asian American Studies (awarded "Best Public Intellectual Special Issue” by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals).