Asian American Studies Now:
The Great Teach-In, with Poems
January - March 2026
An Asian American studies teach-in for the crumbling sinkhole of 2026 America. With poems. Join lifelong Asian Americanist scholars learning with and from students new to the field alongside leading Asian American poets and writers. Together we’ll weigh the possibilities–and responsibilities–of Asian American studies and Asian American arts right now. With sessions on genocide in Gaza; the sweeping purges of all things DEI and QTNB; the abyss of the Asian American mental health crisis; the radical potentials of friendship and grief. Throughout will be a commitment to DIY access culture and disability justice we'll wear like garbage bags into a monsoon. Course texts will include “hijacked” poems by George Abraham; a class-sourced FAQ on dealing with EYE-CE; an “intimate lecture” by newly minted US Poet Laureate Arthur Sze; queer eco-justice stickers and film shorts by Jess X. Snow; the spring 2024 student encampments as epic poems. Course learning objectives will include fun, vulnerability, trust-building, lip-biting hope, and–cue grandiose music–the groaning sounds of doors opening inside us.
What to Expect
❋ Instructorslawrence-minh bùi davis
(TA) Mimi Khúc
Winter 2026
January 15, 2026–March 19, 2026
(10 sessions)
❋ Dates❋ TimeThursdays, 7:30–8:45 P.M. ET / 4:30-5:45 P.M. PT
(1 hour 15 minutes once a week)
❋ Enrollment100 students
Enrollment closes January 14, 2026, 11:59 P.M. ET
Course Outline
Asian American Studies Tries to Field an FAQ for Ruinous Times
Week 1Radical Friendship
Week 2Week 3Gaza O Gaza
Week 4Encampments
The US is a Point In, Not The Finish Line of, Diaspora, Or: Global Anti-Imperialism + Lit
Week 5The Trans + NB Reading Room that Never Was (n’t)
Week 6The Abyss of the Asian American Mental Health Crisis
Week 7The Islanders Have Been Telling Us Since Forever
Week 8Queer as in Mother Earth’s Justice
Week 9Chaos is a Ladder
Week 10
lawrence-minh bùi davis, PhD is a refugee diaspore, curator, writer, and troublemaker who lives as a guest on the ancestral lands of the Piscataway Nation. A co-founder of the arts anti-profit AALR (2009), the Asian American Literature Festival (2017), and the Center for Refugee Poetics (2018), he believes in stewardship of literature as social and ethical ecosystem. As far as anyone knows, he was the first curator of viet descent at the World’s Largest Museum and Research Complex, as well as the first to be exiled from it. Sometimes you can see new things by the light of his neurodivergence.
Mimi Khúc, PhD, is a writer, scholar, and teacher of things unwell. Her work includes Open in Emergency, a hybrid book-arts project revolutionizing Asian American mental health, and the Asian American Tarot, a reimagined deck of tarot cards. Her creative-critical, genre-bending book dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss (Duke UP, 2024), is a journey into the depths of Asian American unwellness at the intersections of ableism, model minoritization, and the university, and an exploration of new approaches to building collective care.
L + M are partners in teaching, artmaking, and life. Both are Scorpios, and, you know, Scorpios sharpen Scorpios.