In this presentation for the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Tamara K. Nopper analyzes the emergent discourses of “anti-Asian violence” and “Black-Asian solidarity” within historical and sociological contexts. She begins with a discussion of the importance of the 1980s and 1990s as formative moments in terms of post-Asian American Movement organizational infrastructure. She then discusses interracial violence, the coeval growth of hate crime data and legislation, and the hashtag #StopAAPIHate. Her primary concern in this discussion is to reveal what work these narrative framings do in service of or in opposition to anti-Blackness and carcerality.

This essay explores the meaning of the term Black Indigeneity (BI). Afro-Indigenous Studies scholar Kyle T. Mays asks, what is Black Indigeneity? How do scholars talk about it? What are its possibilities? Relying on a survey of recent scholarship, Mays argues that BI is largely understood as a form of Black Americans participating in settler colonial processes meant to erase and displace Indigenous peoples. He argues that we should look at BI as an analytic that African Americans have used to create belonging and continue to express cultures practiced throughout the African diaspora, adapted and transformed into a modern iteration of cultural expression. In this way, we should rethink how we view blackness and indigeneity as two separate entities, and explore how people of African descent create belonging on dispossessed Indigenous land.

Lina Abirafeh describes the global conditions of gender equality and violence against women. She offers a brief history of her work to prevent violence against women and to build a better world for women. The author outlines the current promises and challenges for women’s equality in the Arab states, and the role of the Arab Institute for Women in realizing those promises and overcoming the challenges. She ends with a call for support of feminist activists and gender equality-focused organizations, including the Arab Institute for Women.

Lina Abirafeh discusses her work as director of the Arab Institute for Women, an academic/activist institute at Lebanese American University. Abirafeh describes the work of the Institute, the first women’s institute in the region (covering 22 Arab states)—and one of the first globally. She explains how she engages in gender-based violence prevention and response, and how individuals, academic institutions, and governments can participate in creating justice for women globally. Abirafeh offers her vision for creating feminist Arab states.

This report offers aggregated national data and some selected personal testimonials about Asian American experiences with anti-Asian violence. The data is presented by types of discrimination and violence experienced, the ethnic breakdown of those being targeted, and the locations where Asian Americans were targeted.

This autoethnographic, multidisciplinary illness narrative describes the working conditions of a crew of Latina/o chicken workers ( gallineras/os ) in North Carolina and explores how these laborers respond to and make meaning of their brutal and dehumanizing work. Transporting us back to a pre-pandemic era, this project seeks to demonstrate how systemic conditions, exacerbating health disparities among poultry workers during COVID-19, are, in fact, endemic and will persist after a post-pandemic US society. Engaging with medical anthropological scholarship that investigates the intersections between Latina/o labor, legislation, and health, this project employs structural violence and structural vulnerability frameworks to investigate the network of structures that contribute to poor health outcomes among Latina/o immigrant workers. “Chicken Doctors” explores how disabling working conditions and their attending legislative and occupational policies debilitate Latina/o immigrant workers, and it argues that gallinera/o labor must be understood as a form of illness, as their toil leaves them with daily pains and lasting impairments. The project draws from an interview with the author’s father, who worked as a gallinera/o laborer and manager for over two decades, as well as from the author’s own observations and journal entries written during his work as a gallinera/o. The piece details the incapacitating gallinera/o labor required to move and vaccinate chickens, describes the toxic working environments, and reflects upon the collective strategies for transcendence that gallineras/os employ to survive their conditions. While this project unveils the spirited resilience of gallineras/os, who make up an essential link in the poultry industry chain but are less conspicuous than their meatpacking counterparts, it especially seeks to expose the network of injustices surrounding their labor.

Ron Reed and Kari Norgaard discuss the importance of fire for Karuk tribal culture, health, food, and sovereignty. They describe the history of settler colonial fire suppression practices and its ongoing impacts on Indigenous communities. Reed argues for the need to center place-based, Indigenous ecology model.