Week 8 - Yiwen Bao

Yiwen Bao

ASA2 A01

Week 8

This week I read the “Precariously Positioned: Asian American Women Students Negotiating power in Academic Wonderland” by Leslie l. Đỗ from University of California at Davis and Shannon Deloso from San Francisco State University. Đỗ and Shannon present two examples of institutionalized student activism fighting against imperialism and social injustice, especially there involvement of women. Although they didn’t have all the knowledge and abilities, faced much challenge, pressure and injustice, both of them have achieved some level of success and learnt some from experiences of activism. 

Đỗ mentioned about gender roles that constrained women’s engagement of activism and she faced most problems with administrators and leaders. The topic of imperialism came backand her leaders payed a lot more attention on personal identity and emotional connect build-up rather than solving concrete problems. I feel ending activism up at building up social connects and showing big emotions to others is quite common in activism activities among students. No further steps would be taken because leaders didn’t know much to do next and they themselves focus more on releasing emotions. It might also be my stereotypes on how activism pictures like. When talking about activism, I often visualize scenes of emotional protests. So both leaders, participants in activism activities and the public could have not enough knowledge about how true, effective activism perform. 

Shannon’s experience was different and of more success. When reading at Shannon's part, I got insight of how activism could go further beyond only emotional and social connections and activities. Building up a culture of activism would take more efforts and longer time but whenever a culture was built, it would keep spirit for next generations of activists whenever they had something to fight. 

I agree with the idea of staying happy and optimistic rather than being fear because having more and more knowledge is exactly the way people can concur fear and have more confidence. Sometimes the fear only came from people imaging different situations with no knowledge. But according to the title "false wonderland", university administrators are still a big problem. Administrators are who at the top so their words can control more. The public wouldn’t know much about issues activists fight on, so when administrators’ control over narratives could more easily shape and induce others thoughts, just as in the reading how they escaped from criticism but lead it to target on activists. Thinking back to topics in last two weeks: university imperialism and academic freedom, student grassroots activism should seek to escape control from administrators to achieve greater success.

Question:

When minimizing the involvement of administration and institutions in grassroots activism, where would the fundings and budgets for activism come from? What could be alternative to replace self-interested administrations?

References:

Đỗ, L.L. & Deloso, S. (n.d.). Precariously Positioned: Asian American Women Students Negotiating Power in Academic Wonderland. Retrieved November 07, 2017.

McShan, D. (2016). “Hell No, We Won’t Go”: Student Activism as a Vehicle for Leadership Development. Retrieved November 07, 2017.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hell-we-wont-go-student-activism-vehicle-leadership-dominique-mcshan