Day 1, 02-24-2022
08:00AM - 08:30AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
Opening Ceremony
Speakers
Alejandro T. Acierto, Arizona State University
Rudy Guevarra Jr., CMRS President, Arizona State University
Chandra Crudup, Conference Manager, Critical Mixed Race Studies
Moderators
Sarah Herrera, Edson College Of Nursing And Health Innovation - ASU
08:30AM - 09:30AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
PANEL: Confounding the Liberal Expectancy
Format : Panel
Speakers
Lily Anne Welty Tamai, Lecturer , UCLA
Fedja Buric, Associate Professor Of History, Bellarmine University
Adrienne Edgar, Professor, U.C. Santa Barbara
Paul Spickard, University Of California, Santa Barbara
Moderators
Chandra Crudup

Confounding the Liberal Expectancy Panel Proposal Critical Mixed Race Studies 2022 Daniel Patrick Moynihan identified a dominant interpretation of 20th-century racial history-"the liberal expectancy"-which posited that racial divisions will necessarily decline over time and racist ideas will lose their power under the forces of modernity. The history we tell in Critical Mixed Race Studies has typically embraced a related hopeful vision. Interracial marriage used to be outlawed but times have changed, racial attitudes have improved, and interracial marriages, interracial families, and multiracial identities are the frequent and happy consequence. But is it true? Is racial harmony on the increase? For that matter, are interracial romance and marriage and multiracial identity necessarily good things? Are we indeed on a path to ever-greater mixing and ever-greater intergroup harmony? And if this is true in the United States, is it equally true everywhere? The papers in this panel examine four places where substantial intermarriage and intermating have taken place, sometimes encouraged by the state: Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Islamic State. In all four places, official ideologies have at times encouraged intergroup mating. But none of them has shown a steady path toward racial harmony. Chair: Lily Anne Y. Welty Tamai, UCLA (she/her/hers) 

  • Paper 1: Paul Spickard, UC Santa Barbara (he/him/his, they/them/their) The Liberal Expectancy and Multiracial Islamism: Intermarriage and the Making of a Polycultural State in ISIS Abstract: This paper lays out the 20th-century liberal expectancy, from Charles W. Chesnutt to Milton Gordon and Herbert Gans. It surveys writing about intermarriage and multiraciality that embodies a happy narrative of ever-increasing racial harmony through racial mixing. It then contrasts these hopeful visions to the desperate, brutal recent history of forced and coerced intergroup mating under the regime of Islamic State. It further outlines developments in India and the United States that suggest darker futures. 
  • Paper 2: Adrienne Edgar, UC Santa Barbara (she/her/hers) Ethnonationalism and Mixed Marriage in Post-Soviet Central Asia Abstract. This paper examines the fate of mixed families in Kazkahstan and Tajikistan after 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Central Asian republics became independent states. After the collapse of communism, the long-standing tension between ethnic nationalism and a supra-ethnic Soviet identity was resolved in favor of the former. A fascination with genetics that began to manifest itself in the late Soviet period emerged as a full-blown obsession with genetic purity and preserving the "gene pool" in many post-Soviet republics. These developments have made life much more difficult for existing mixed families and for young couples considering marriage across ethnic lines. 
  • Paper 3: Fedja Buric, Bellarmine University (he/him/his) Mixed Marriages in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the Life and Death of Yugoslavia: Moving Beyond the 1990s Abstract: This paper argues that the consensus around the mixed marriages in Bosnia that emerged during the wars of the 1990s was wrong. For nationalists and anti-nationalists, mixed marriages in Bosnia during the Communist regime represented the regime's suppression of ethnic specificity and were a sign of peaceful coexistence, respectively. I argue that mixed marriages remained rare in Yugoslavia. In fact, by the late 1960s even the Communist regime began to stigmatize mixed marriage as a political nuisance. This is because like ethnicity, mixed marriage becomes a cause to be celebrated, or a threat to be combated, only sporadically, in moments of acute political polarization.
08:30AM - 09:30AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
LIGHTNING SESSION: Global Multiplicity NEW LINK
Format : Lightning Session
Speakers
Leonardo Rocha, None
Chinelo L. Njaka, Peckham Rights!
Heather Proctor, Newcastle University
LEDSON CHAGAS, PhD Student, Fluminense Federal University/UFF, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil
Moderators
Alma Villanueva, Texas A&M University

Featuring the following presentations...

TitleAbstractAuthors
The invisibility of multiracial populations in Brazilian statistical data: a critical analysis
In Brazil there are several categories of multiraciality: Mulatto (Black/White mixed people), Caboclo (Amerindian/White) and Cafuzo (Amerindian/Black). Brazilian census collect data on ethnicity/race using the category Pardo as an "umbrella-term" for all these multiracialities. Since 2010, Brazilian legislation defines Pardo as a subgroup of the Black population. Thereby, data on race has been produced in a way that make invisible the Amerindian-mixed populations. This work will describe and analyze data on race and ancestry in three Brazilian states: Amazonas, Acre and Ceará, aiming to understand to what extent Pardos can really be characterized as Black in these states.
Leonardo Rocha
Mixed Race Dialectics in the United Kingdom: The Presence/Absence of Mixed Race at the State, Institution, and Voluntary and Community Sector Levels
For the twenty years that mixed race has been on the United Kingdom (UK) censuses, and thus officially added to the racialised groupings recognised in nearly all UK institutions, organisations, and individual identity preferences, the main story of mixed race in the UK remains one notable for its widespread absence and nominal presence in public discourses on race and ethnicity, racialisation, and racism(s). The presentation explores this through connecting the continued presence/absence of acknowledgement of mixed race in public discursive spheres to the role that White supremacy continues to play at systemic, structural, and institutional levels within UK society.
Chinelo L. Njaka
Popular culture, embodiment, and creative practice in British mixed-race identity construction
In this presentation I explore how mixed-race individuals in the UK construct identity through engaging with popular culture, as well as through creative writing (and how they might challenge/subvert/reproduce constructions of race through it). I focus particularly on the role of phenotype and embodiment on lived experiences of mixedness, in aiming to identify and dismantle colonialist/white supremacist conceptions of race and mixedness within popular culture. Through examining this, I aim to encourage discussion around the discursive complexity of mixed-race identity construction and the potential creative/methodological tools that can be used for challenging/subverting colonialist discourses of race.
Heather Proctor
Building the invisibility of the Mixed-Race Brazilian population: a critical overview of the role of the national hegemonic media in this contemporary process
This communication presents an overview of journalistic articles broadcast nationally that address the issue of ethnic-racial categorizations but that: 1) do not mention the existence of sections of the Brazilian population that categorize themselves as Mixed and 2) naturalize the recent public policy of absorption of self-declared Pardos as part of the Black population. By analyzing titles and excerpts from articles and interviews that represent a broader corpus, this communication aims to critically question whether this contemporary media production has been guided by respect for the native categories of the self-declared Pardo portion of the Brazilian population.
LEDSON CHAGAS
The invisibility of multiracial populations in Brazilian statistical data: a critical analysis
08:30AM - 09:30AM
Presented by :
Leonardo Rocha, None
Mixed Race Dialectics in the United Kingdom: The Presence/Absence of Mixed Race at the State, Institution, and Voluntary and Community Sector Levels
08:30AM - 09:30AM
Presented by :
Chinelo L. Njaka, Peckham Rights!
The paper explores global mixed race through the comparison of racialisations of mixed race in the United Kingdom and the United States at the level of the state. Through the examination of mixed race transnationally, the paper contributes to Critical Mixed Race Studies through its use of unique qualitative methodology to examine mixed race construction through the national census and knowledge production through empirical research in two national sites. In the last thirty years, contemporary research and community activism around mixed race experience has increased and developed into what now falls under the umbrella of CMRS. Shifts in the canon have rightfully moved from uncritical celebrations to the current moment of deeper, critical engagement with meanings, contestations, rethinking, and problematising established and developing concepts around mixed race (Daniels et al. 2014, Ifekwunigwe 2004, Mahtani 2014). Despite this more critical turn, there remains a gap when imagining and understanding global mixed race. CMRS includes contributions from around the world (though largely concentrated in North American, Brazilian, South African, and western European contexts) exploring mixedness in specific spaciotemporal contexts. However, there is limited academic dialogue between national locations, let alone across the globe. In the last decade, two key edited volumes have begun to address the latter gap (Edwards et al. 2012 and King-O’Riain et al. 2014), which aim to explore how collating research from multiple national contexts works to identify and examine international experiences of mixed race. Though fulfilling this initial exploratory remit, both volumes issue calls for further systematic comparative mixed race research on smaller scales (in addition to additional global research), which remains scarce well after their publications. The proposed paper aims to address this remaining gap through developing systematic qualitative methodologies to understand mixed race constructions in the United Kingdom and the United States. An overview of historical, social, and political contexts provides rationale on the suitable comparability of the two nations vis-à-vis racialisation practices, the census, and the addition of a mixed race question. Following, analyses of state discourses on mixed race further develop a robust comparative and relational framework through which similarities and contrasts in process and outcomes of mixed race construction are identified and examined. Through building on the interest to expand knowledge of transnational mixed race experience, the paper contributes both empirically and methodologically to the global mixed race canon. Daniel, G. Reginald, Laura Kina, Wei Ming Dariotis, and Camilla Fojas (2014). “Emerging Paradigms in Critical Mixed Race Studies.” Journal of Critical Mixed Race Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 6 65. Edwards, Rosalind, Suki Ali, Chamion Caballero, and Miri Song (eds.) (2012). International Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Mixedness and Mixing. Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge. Ifekwunigwe, Jayne O. (ed.) (2004), ‘Mixed Race’ Studies: A Reader. London, UK: Routledge. King O’Riain, Rebecca C., Stephen Small, Minelle Mahtani, Miri Song, and Paul Spickard (eds.) (2014). Global Mixed Race. New York City, NY: New York University Press. Mahtani, Minelle (2014). Mixed Race Amnesia: Resisting the Romanticization of Multiraciality. Vancouver, BC: UBC Press.
Popular culture, embodiment, and creative practice in British mixed-race identity construction
08:30AM - 09:30AM
Presented by :
Heather Proctor, Newcastle University
Building the invisibility of the Mixed-Race Brazilian population: a critical overview of the role of the national hegemonic media in this contemporary process
08:30AM - 09:30AM
Presented by :
LEDSON CHAGAS, PhD Student, Fluminense Federal University/UFF, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil
08:30AM - 09:30AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
PANEL: Multiracial Identity: Embodying Deeper Understanding Through Ancestral Connection and Intuitive Knowing
Format : Panel
Speakers
Jennifer Lisa Vest, Artist/Speaker/Ceremonialist/Teacher/Author (Ancestor Count-book), Www.DrJenniferLisaVest.com
Ramona Laughing Brook Webb, Poet In Residence, University Of California, San Francisco -
Farzana Nayani, DEI Consultant & Author
Moderators
Mathew Sandoval, Senior Lecturer, Barrett The Honors College @ Arizona State University

Multiracial individuals often experience a lack of cohesiveness to their identities due to a suppression of aspects of their cultural heritage, separation from members of their family, or cultural loss due to generations of migration and assimilation. As a result, people of mixed-heritage may feel unresolved or on a constant quest for understanding and acceptance within themselves, and by others. How can multiracial people find resolution around this? Three panelists representing diverse academic background and lived experiences triangulate around the common thread of intuitive knowing and healing as a means of (re)connection. Each panelist, of various mixed-race heritages including African, Native American, Asian, Pacific Islander, and European backgrounds, will share their story of navigating multiracial identity as well as linkages to their ancestors and descendants through the practice of intuitive connection. These precious gifts, cultivated over time, stem from lost traditions of indigenous and cultural practices of healing, knowing, and connecting to ancestors and the realm of pre-colonial spiritual guidance. Reviving and embodying these practices within mixed-race bodies poses its own challenge as the cultural loss of marginalized peoples continues within the greater context of systems of White supremacy and capitalism which widely denounce the existence of such traditions in favor of mainstream methods of communication, understanding, and pathology. Panelists will share with the audience their own personal stories of the deepening acceptance of their own mixed-race heritages, which can inspire thought and reflection as to the transcendent experience of bridging realms beyond one's earthly existence, which is ever-present in many cultures and traditions. Panelists represent authors, spoken-word artists, and healer facilitators who practice intuitive healing, mediumship, vocal activation, and lead others through meditation, as access points to inner knowing and deeper consciousness around self and others. These experiences of heightened understanding can offer healing and resolution to mixed-race individuals who may otherwise lack the relief of clarity or mourn the disconnection to parts of self that can occur as a result of this complexity of identity. The intersectional identities of panelists who represent queer, mixed-race, multifaith, and multiethnic backgrounds brings forth an even more unique conversation about traversing boundaries that are set by society's limited understandings of self. How can multiracial individuals find healing and acceptance, with the many complex layers of one's identity that remain unresolved? Join this panel of scholars, artists, and healer practitioners to explore how mixed-race individuals can more deeply connect with themselves and their lineages of both ancestors and descendants through accessing the intuitive realm. Panelists will share their personal experiences of navigating multiracial identity in parallel with the journey of ancestral understanding, self-discovery, embodying culture, and offering of healing to others. The audience will witness how the domains of the healing and performing arts act as entry points for understanding.

09:45AM - 10:45AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
WORKSHOP: With Love for Us: Grieving, Healing & Liberation among Mixed folks
Format : Workshop
Speakers
Sara Caldwell-Kan, University Of Alaska Anchorage
James Speed, University Of Colorado Denver
Charlene Martinez, Associate Director Of Student Experiences & Engagement, Oregon State University
Moderators
Mathew Sandoval, Senior Lecturer, Barrett The Honors College @ Arizona State University

Navigating racism, monoracism, and multiracial (micro)aggressions impact our ability to hold space for others and heal ourselves, especially while working on college campuses. We understand that what you are mixed with matters, however, there are few places and spaces in higher education and beyond to unpack the complexities of our realities collectively and meaningfully (Osei-Kofi, 2012). The purpose of this session is to create a restorative space for multiracial/multiethnic folks to grieve, heal and engage in liberatory practice through storytelling and embodiment exercises. We will explore the idea of reclamation, through ancestral process and rememory, as we navigate the complexity of holding identities that may not be as apparent to others. As thought leaders and activists, we need to hold space for each other to work through grief to experience joy, before moving onto "the next thing." Our workshop focuses on the notion of practice. What are we practicing to become? How has this year reduced us? What do we want to reclaim? And how do we want to emerge moving forward?

Healing and processing spaces for multiracial folks who often find themselves at the tension points of being both/and at the cultural and racial borders of our lineages are critical (Harris, 2017; Jackson & Samuels, 2019). This session is focused on applied practices of reclamation of our ancestral strength, while navigating our positionality as multiracial people in a monoracial world. We hope that by the end of this session, participants will have benefitted from engaging in storytelling, resourcing community practices, and strategies which honor the tensions of our existence and navigating rigid systems.

We are inspired by the emergent strategy principle around the importance of critical connections, "There is a conversation in the room that only these people at this moment can have. Find it." (Brown, 2017). Using practices from Oregon State University's Multiracial Aikido - a retreat for students, faculty, and staff - we will engage participants in grounding/meditation, an exercise to practice rememory and calling in our ancestors, and sharing in community (Martinez, 2021). Research and practice shows the need for people of color to have spaces which honor their lived experiences, dignity, and humanity to heal. Depending on the group size we may use the breakout groups function for people to build greater community.

At the 2021 National Conference Race and Ethnicity (NCORE) day-long pre-conference on Multiraciality, participants expressed their genuine gratitude for the convening which centered Multiracial experiences, embodiment exercises, and dialogue around reimagining kinship (Johnston-Guerrero, Martinez, Kwist, & Wells, 2021). Being able to create this space at CMRS would offer a similar, shortened version of a personal and collective healing and radical imagination space for practitioners.

References

Brown, A. M. (2017). Emergent strategy: shaping change, changing worlds. Chico, CA and Edinburgh, Scotland: AK Press.

Harris, J.C. (2017). Multiracial Campus Professionals' Experiences With Multiracial Microaggressions. Journal of College Student Development 58(7), 1055-1073. doi:10.1353/csd.2017.0083.

Jackson, K. F., & Samuels, G. S. (2019). Multiracial Cultural Attunement. Washington, DC: NASW Press

Johnston-Guerrero, M., Martinez, C., Kwist, S., Wells, J. (2021, June 8). Coming Home: Our Multiracial Identities, Kinship, and Racial Justice Work. National Conference on Race and Ethnicity, virtual.

Martinez, C. C. (2021). Building Multiracial Aikido: A student social justice retreat. In Johnston-Guerrero, M.. Wijeyesinghe, C, and Daniel, G. R. Multiracial Experiences in Higher Education : Contesting Knowledge, Honoring Voice, and Innovating Practice. First ed. Sterling, Virginia: Stylus, LLC, 2021.

Osei-Kofi, Nana. (2012). Identity, Fluidity, and Groupism: The Construction of Multiraciality in Education Discourse. The Review of Education/pedagogy/cultural Studies, 34(5), 245–257. https://doi.org/10.1080/10714413.2012.732782

09:45AM - 10:45AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
LIGHTNING SESSION: Topics of Higher Education
Format : Lightning Session
Speakers
BRITTANY ARONSON, Associate Professor Of Educational Leadership, Miami University
Pietro Sasso, Graduate Faculty- Educational Leadership, Stephen F. Austin State University
Hannah Stohry, Miami University
Elizabeth Watkins, Loyola University New Orleans
Keisuke Kimura, University Of New Mexico
Anthony Peavy, University Of New Mexico
Moderators
Kelly Jackson, Associate Professor, Arizona State University

Featuring the following presentations:

TitleAbstractAuthor(s)
More Than the (re)Mix: Racial Buffering in Multiracial Sorority and Fraternity Members
This session will distill results from a descriptive psychological phenomenological study of multiracial sorority and fraternity members which examined their experiences negotiating whiteness and traversing monoracialism. The themes are interrogated through a multiracial critical lens (MultiCrit) in which participants experienced hypodescent discourse, colorism, race questioning, and other forms of oppression. They also experienced liminality in which they were often invisible to their peers and institutions across their inhabited multiple racial locations and had to negotiate their multiple racial identities against whiteness. Implications for practice regarding multiraciality, terminology, and inclusion are provided and processed through group discussion.
Pietro Sasso
Lindsy Perry
Past, Present, & Future Legitimacies and Raised Consciousnesses of Biracial Educators
This presentation expands on the findings of our collaborative "A Negotiated Relationship: Nuances of 'whitened' Biracial Educator Identities" paper. We desired to better understand the complexity of multi/ethnic-racial identities, positionality, and how this relates to solidarity building within educative spaces. We framed our multiracial shape-shifting identities/work using Anzaldúan concepts of nepantla, conocimiento, and the Coyolxauhqui imperative to reveal testimonio as methodology. We revisit those findings of legitimacy and raising consciousness as an invitation for us to reflect on our multiracial identities across past, present, and future ancestral legacies.
Hannah Stohry
Brittany Aronson
Teaching about Mixed Race in the Middle Ages
When students think about mixed race literature, their minds generally gravitate towards the works of modern authors, but as is demonstrated in Geraldine Heng's landmark study The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, literature discussing mixed race people is certainly nothing new. The titular hero of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, for example, has a biracial half-brother Feirefiz who forms part of King Arthur's Round Table. The misperception, however, that mixed race people did not exist in the Middle Ages runs deep and contributes to larger issues about misunderstandings about the long history of mixed race people. In my lighting presentation, I will argue that one way to counter such notions in the classroom is through courses that juxtapose portrayals of multiracial people in medieval writings with contemporary texts to show how the medieval and the modern navigate issues of identity, family, language, and community. I will broadly outline a course I have created and explore what is to be gained by historically contextualizing mixed race identity in this way, particularly in the study of the Middle Ages, a period which white supremacists often reimagine as a "white wonderland." Framing medieval literature in this way facilitates thinking about the connections across time and shifts in discourse surrounding mixed race people, the spaces they occupy, and the literatures created about or by them, complicating and complexifying not only our perceptions of the Middle Ages, but also broadening our understanding of multiracial identity.
Elizabeth Watkins
Envisioning the future of U.S. higher education: Critically utilizing mixedness to create a more inclusive classroom dynamic
In this presentation, we discuss the significance of mixedness in U.S. higher education to contribute to research in CMRS. As mixed-race Black and international mixed-race/ethnic Asian educators, we discuss (1) how mixedness allows us to relate to multiple students; (2) how mixedness is monoracialized and monoethnicized in the classroom; (3) the importance of mixed identity in helping teach often 'controversial' concepts to undergraduate students; and (4) the utility of mixedness in deconstructing a White-centric curriculum for public speaking courses. We envision a new future where mixedness is incorporated into education to create a more inclusive classroom dynamic.
Keisuke Kimura
Anthony Peavy
More Than the (re)Mix: Racial Buffering in Multiracial Sorority and Fraternity Members
09:45AM - 10:45AM
Presented by :
Pietro Sasso, Graduate Faculty- Educational Leadership, Stephen F. Austin State University
Co-authors :
Lindsy Perry, Austin Peay State University
Past, Present, & Future Legitimacies and Raised Consciousnesses of Biracial Educators
09:45AM - 10:45AM
Presented by :
Hannah Stohry, Miami University
Co-authors :
BRITTANY ARONSON, Associate Professor Of Educational Leadership, Miami University
Teaching about Mixed Race in the Middle Ages
09:45AM - 10:45AM
Presented by :
Elizabeth Watkins, Loyola University New Orleans
Envisioning the future of U.S. higher education: Critically utilizing mixedness to create a more inclusive classroom dynamic
09:45AM - 10:45AM
Presented by :
Anthony Peavy, University Of New Mexico
Keisuke Kimura, University Of New Mexico
09:45AM - 10:45AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
WORKSHOP: Mixed Feelings Collective: DIY Healing Spaces for Queer & Trans Mixed Communities
Format : Workshop
Speakers
Tiffaney Barba-Padilla, Autonomous
Moderators
Tonya Gray, Arizona State University

This interactive workshop focuses on the existing immediate need for mental health spaces and intentional community for mixed race and LGBTQ+ people that is lacking in society and the ways members of Mixed Feelings responded to this need by creating a DIY mental health space. It will contextualize the realities mixed race people experience as a historically excluded and underrepresented demographic in the mental health field. As well as the experiences of LGBTQ+ mixed race people and the realities of how underlooked we are in larger conversations of mixed race politics in the 21st century, as well as conversations around mental health and wellness.

This workshop will introduce Mixed Feelings, the history and politics shaping it, a reflection of our experiences, where we are now and will invite queer and trans mixed people to share space with us with the hope of inspiring for DIY mental health spaces and art collectives. It will be grounded by collective agreements created by workshop facilitators in collaboration with attendees. It will include a presentation, testimony, a call for attendee participation and end with Q&A. We will model our "hot seat" practice in Mixed Feelings: inviting new members to prepare to be in the "hot seat", where we get to know each other through asking an array of funny, silly and random questions. In this way, we get to honor each other's self-determination and uniqueness. And heal our inner child. And we will intentionally center the voices, participation and experiences of queer and trans conference attendees.

As well, it will highlight the ways multiracial queer & trans kinship can be a site of immediate resistance to erasure, isolation and the impact of systemic oppression on our sense of self, identity, health, well-being and creativity. As well as, a need to create mutual aid versus waiting and depending on U.S. institutions to meet our communities' needs. The workshop will also center the need for more trans-led mental health spaces and DIY projects to meet the needs of queer and trans healing spaces for mixed race people.

The purpose of this workshop will be to share the possibilities that exist for us as qt queer and trans mixed people in experiencing community, connection and healing and will provide a space for queer and trans conference members to meet and learn together and become inspired to consider creating similar forms of mutual aid during these times of crises and need. It will be a safer space that highlights the need of celebrating and honoring transgender power and presence in mixed race studies and liberation.

This workshop aligns with the mission of the conference because it focuses on what we could create for ourselves now and in the future, with our own experiences and existing connections of kinship. And it shows how what we may not have yet in broader society many of us have within our closest relationships and can be a source of reclamation and possibility for what can grow.

11:00AM - 12:00 Noon
CMRS Virtual Conference
QUEER CAUCUS
Speakers
Camilla Fojas, Professor And Director, Arizona State University-Tempe
Moderators
Brandon Yoo, Associate Professor, Arizona State University

Contact(s): Camilla Fojas (camillafojas@gmail.com)

The queer caucus was formed to provide mentorship, advocacy, and networking opportunities for LGBTQA members of CMRS. We support scholarship, cultural productions, community engagement and activism around LGBTQ issues.

11:00AM - 12:00 Noon
CMRS Virtual Conference
LOMA CAUCUS
Speakers
Thomas Lopez, Treasurer, Multiracial Americans Of Southern California MASC
Moderators
Alexandrina Agloro, ASU/ CMRS E Board

Contact(s): Thomas Lopez (Thomas.lopez@mascsite.org)

The Latinx of Mixed Ancestry (LOMA) caucus brings together anyone interested in the issues of unique interest to the LOMA community in the spirit of mutual support and collegial discussion. We promote LOMA research and researchers by connecting them with the subject of their work.

11:00AM - 12:00 Noon
CMRS Virtual Conference
CLINICAL CAUCUS
Speakers
Sarah Yang Mumma, Smith College
Moderators
Kelly Jackson, Associate Professor, Arizona State University

Contact(s): Sarah Yang Mumma (sarahyangmumma@gmail.com)

The Clinical Caucus was created to provide a space for mixed race clinicians (counselors, social workers, psychologists, psychiatrist, etc.) to network, discuss experiences within the field, and promote advocacy efforts.

11:00AM - 12:00 Noon
CMRS Virtual Conference
MENA/SWANA CAUCUS
Speakers
Naliyah Kaya, Associate Professor Of Sociology, Montgomery College

Contact(s): Naliyah Kaya (Naliyah.Kaya@montgomerycollege.edu

This caucus was created to bring together CMRS members who identify as Middle Eastern, Southwest Asian, North African and/or Arab. We will collectively design our mission statement/purpose at the 2022 CMRS Conference!

12:00 Noon - 01:00PM
CMRS Virtual Conference
FEATURED ARTIST SHOWCASE
Speakers
Leslie Berns, Featured Artist, Unaffiliated
Chinelo L. Njaka, Peckham Rights!
Asaya Plumly
Aisha Harrison, Artist
Wendy Gaudin, Xavier University Of Louisiana
Naliyah Kaya, Associate Professor Of Sociology, Montgomery College
Moderators
Sarah Herrera, Edson College Of Nursing And Health Innovation - ASU
01:15PM - 02:15PM
CMRS Virtual Conference
PANEL: Publishing on Mixed Race: A Mentoring Discussion
Format : Panel
Speakers
LeiLani Nishime, The University Of Washington
Myra Washington, University Of Utah
A. B. Wilkinson, University Of Las Vegas, Nevada (UNLV)
Greg Carter, Associate Professor, University Of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
Rudy Guevarra Jr., CMRS President, Arizona State University
Moderators
Mathew Sandoval, Senior Lecturer, Barrett The Honors College @ Arizona State University

This panel titled, "Publishing on Mixed Race: A Mentoring Discussion," will include a select number of CMRS book authors who will talk about their books and the process of book writing and publication. This roundtable will foster discussion among several academics who have grappled with understanding and translating questions around mixed-heritage people in North America and the United States and also facilitate the transferal of skills and tactics to others who are working on doing the same in the future. Currently, there are several participants who (re)confirmed for the 2022 conference (who had committed for the previous year's conference): Greg Carter, Rudy Guevara, Ralina Joseph, LeiLani Nishime, Myra Washington, and A. B. Wilkinson (Michele Elam and Minelle Mahtani had confirmed for 2021, but as of this CFP submission date, we do not have reconfirmation). Participants will address the triumphs and woes of the book publication process, which will include, though is not limited to, how to move from dissertation to book, deciding when and where to "place" your work, approaching publishers, building relationships with editors, dealing with reviewers, marketing your project, and more. We hope that this panel will provide insight into how the authors developed their books and the issues that surround writing critically on "mixed race" as well as provide mentorship to students, teachers, and academics who are thinking about writing a book or publishing their scholarship. This roundtable will be an informative discussion that allows the free exchange of ideas surrounding CMRS issues and will also share best practices for completing the arduous task of book publication. These objectives both speak to the significance of building within the CMRS scholarly community and supporting generations of future growth.

01:15PM - 02:15PM
CMRS Virtual Conference
LIGHTNING SESSION: Methods
Format : Lightning Session
Speakers
Victoria Vezaldenos, University Of Michigan- Ann Arbor
Siri Gurudev, PhD Student, Performance Artist, University Of Texas At Austin
Victor Betts, Librarian, North Carolina State University Libraries
Shelly Black, North Carolina State University
Amalia Macias-Laventure, Community And Cultural Organizer , San Francisco State University - College Of Ethnic Studies
Moderators
Marc Guerrero, Associate Department Chair, Ohio State University

Featuring the following presentations...

TitleAbstractAuthor(s)
Quantitative Methodological Considerations: The Use of Logistic Regression in Examining Multiracial Identity
The main objective of this presentation is to spark discussion regarding quantitative methodologies that can be employed when studying multiracial populations, ending with a conversation regarding the efficacy of logistic regression analysis. First, challenges and considerations that arise when employing complex statistical models with multiracial participants will be presented. Examples of standard practice in the existing literature will be shown. Further, the efficacy of categorical data analysis, particularly the use of logistic regression models, will be introduced. Finally, sample research questions and statistical models will be displayed in order to convey the usefulness of such methods.
Victoria Vezaldenos
Performing Muisca's Origins: Futurity
The purpose of this video-performance lecture is to center the body and performance as a methodology for research. I see my work as a way to investigate my mixed-race identity through the body, i. e. performance making as academic work. I argue that performance as a method is necessary for research because there is information stored in the body that cannot be accessed via text or discourse (i.e., the body is an archive) and because there are ideas whose extent and pertinence are better tested by means of performance.
Siri Gurudev
Breaking down monoracial barriers to library and historical research
Libraries have systemically excluded not only communities of color, but mixed race people through harmful classification and descriptive practices. The language and taxonomies used in library and archival collections reflect white and monoracial normativity, thus impairing our ability to find resources and learn about mixed race identity. This presentation will address these impacts and how libraries can reclaim the humanity of mixed race people in their collections and the historical record.
Shelly Black
Victor Betts
Digital Authenticity, Social Media, and Replicating Racial Realities Online
Through a critical media analysis of three popular videos in the TikTok Trend "Mixed Girl Check", Digital Authenticity, Social Media, and Replicating Racial Realities Online analyzes digitized race-work mixed-race women perform to prove themselves as racially authentic online. Their "digital racework", the emotional labor exerted in the videos of self-racialization, and claims to authenticity are validated, questioned, and interrogated in the comment sections. Through a discursive analysis of the comment section of three of the trend's most popular videos, I intend to show how these digital actors participating in the TikTok trend are seeking racial validation at the expense of reinforcing false conceptualizations of race as biological reality to an audience ready to sustain these eugenicists ideals.
Amalia Macias-Laventure
Quantitative Methodological Considerations: The Use of Logistic Regression in Examining Multiracial Identity
01:15PM - 02:15PM
Presented by :
Victoria Vezaldenos, University Of Michigan- Ann Arbor
Performing Muisca’s Origins: Futurity
01:15PM - 02:15PM
Presented by :
Siri Gurudev, PhD Student, Performance Artist, University Of Texas At Austin
Breaking down monoracial barriers to library and historical research
01:15PM - 02:15PM
Presented by :
Shelly Black, North Carolina State University
Victor Betts, Librarian, North Carolina State University Libraries
Digital Authenticity, Social Media, and Replicating Racial Realities Online
01:15PM - 02:15PM
Presented by :
Amalia Macias-Laventure, Community And Cultural Organizer , San Francisco State University - College Of Ethnic Studies
01:15PM - 02:15PM
CMRS Virtual Conference
PANEL: Generation Mixed Goes to School: Lessons Learned from a CMRS Project
Format : Panel
Speakers
Sarah Gaither, Duke University
Anjuli Joshi Brekke, The University Of Wisconsin-Parkside
Allison Briscoe-Smith, The Wright Institute
Meshell Sturgis, University Of Washington
Ralina Joseph, University Of Washington
Moderators
Kelly Jackson, Associate Professor, Arizona State University

This panel draws on a history of mixed race, racism, and education to offer suggestions for future equitable and anti-racist practices in K-12 education by attending to the present moment experiences of youth in the Seattle area. As such, it fits well with the 2022 CMRS Conference theme on Ancestral Futurisms. Furthermore, it more broadly ties in with the mission of CMRS to end anti-Blackness within mixed-race research and to end racial and colonial miseducation. In the 2018-19 academic year our center conducted the "Generation Mixed Goes to School" project. We spent a year listening to K-12 multiracial youth share how race impacts them both inside and outside the classroom. The project produced an interdisciplinary, co-authored book by two faculty, a comic chapbook by a graduate student, and a database of audio clips and podcast by another graduate student. Our session brings together these researchers to share out our "Gen Mixed" lessons learned while producing critical mixed-race studies scholarship using theories and methods grounded in radical listening. Generation Z, those born from 1997-2012, are currently the majority within our K-12 education system. They also contribute significantly to the rise in multiracial identification and this proves to be just as pressing of an issue now as it has been in the past as racism within education persists. Below is a brief summary of four presentations. All identifying information has been removed. In addition to these four panelists, we have invited a discussant to moderate our panel. Our session keywords include: Education, Radical Listening, Psychology, and Media. 

  • Presenter 1: Centering CMRS in Generation Mixed Critical Mixed Race Studies structured the Generation Mixed project. In this talk I will discuss the ways in which we wove CMRS throughout the data collection, dissemination, and writing of the book. I will pay special attention to the ways in which we connected CMRS to radical listening. 
  • Presenter 2: Race, Psychology, and Generation Mixed. In this talk I will discuss the ways in which our interdisciplinary project Generation Mixed Goes to School both relies upon work in race and psychology, and pushes on the boundaries of race and psychology by centering mixed-race. From frames of implicit bias, to the central methodology of radical listening, critical mixed-race psychology emerges as a new force in this book. 
  • Presenter 3: Podcast Listening as A Means to Center the Voices of Multiracial Children in Education. I worked as a story editor and producer for "Generation Mixed Goes to School." I helped record interviews with multiracial students ages 5-17 and created audio clips and a podcast based on youth recommendations for their schools. These audio stories are housed on the center's website and act as additional resources for teachers and parents. As part of the project, we also organized "radical listening" events where mixed race youth, their families, and the greater Seattle public could hear and discuss clips from these conversations. 
  • Presenter 4: (Auto)ethnographic Comix that Capture the Mixed Race Experience. I created a limited collection of handmade double-stitch bound chapbooks as an artistic inquiry into difference, multiracial identity, and racism. Drawing on the interviews and personal experiences that shaped my interpretation, I will share the integrative process of making (auto)ethno-graphic comics. Narrative, panel sequence, sound, and color collide in this alternative scholarly representation in order to digest concepts explored in the CMRS project Generation Mixed Goes to School (2021). Thank you for your consideration.
Day 2, 02-25-2022
07:00AM - 08:00AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
GLOBAL CAUCUS
Speakers
Alma Villanueva, Texas A&M University
Moderators
Ascala Sisk, Studio For Creativity, Place And Equitable Communities

GLOBAL | INTERNATIONAL |CROSS-NATIONAL CAUCUS
Contact(s): Alma Villanueva (villadealma@gmail.com)

The Global Caucus is intended to be a collective space for people living outside of the U.S., for people whose engagement with CMRS is not focused in or on the U.S., and/or whose CMRS work decenters the U.S. as a primary site of discussions and embodiments of multiraciality. At the 2022 CMRS Conference, we will discuss what we want to do with this space, so this description and the mission statement/purpose will change accordingly.

08:30AM - 09:30AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
LIGHTNING SESSION: Literature
Format : Lightning Session
Speakers
Andy Nunn, Doctoral Candidate Of English, University Of Maryland, College Park
Courtenay Chan, Department Of English And Film Studies, University Of Alberta
Moderators
A. B. Wilkinson, University Of Las Vegas, Nevada (UNLV)

Featuring the following presentations: 

TitleAbstractAuthor(s)
 "Only You": Deconstructing the Hybrid Child Hero in Octavia Butler's Fledgling and Steven Universe
Despite appearing diametrically opposed in content, tone, and even medium, Octavia Butler's Fledgling (2005) and popular children's television show Steven Universe (2013-2019) take fundamentally similar approaches in their portrayals of childhood, hybridity, and performativity, all against a science fiction backdrop. The mixed utopia so prevalent in SF is traded for the realism of multi-faceted experiences, where Shori and Steven recognize the critical weaknesses within their origins as 'experiments' and forge their own identities not on the exclusive basis of their own self-image, but rather on the needs of two societies that must reconstruct to accommodate them.
Alexandria Nunn
The Politics of Recognition and Representation in Mercedes Eng's Writings
This paper reads Vancouver-based poet Mercedes Eng's recent publications as significant contributions to the ever-expanding archive of mixed race writings by women within Canada. Mercenary English, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes and my yt mama all vacillate between the autobiographical and the archival as an aesthetic and affective technique to disrupt and unsettle the language of Canadian multiculturalism and settler colonial mythologies of space/place. I read Eng's investigation of her mixed race subjectivity in the Prairies during the 1980s, and contemporaneously on the West Coast, as an aspiration for cross-racial solidarities that complicate legacies of white supremacy.
Courtenay Chan
“Only You": Deconstructing the Hybrid Child Hero in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling and Steven Universe
08:30AM - 09:30AM
Presented by :
Andy Nunn, Doctoral Candidate Of English, University Of Maryland, College Park
The Politics of Recognition and Representation in Mercedes Eng’s Writings
08:30AM - 09:30AM
Presented by :
Courtenay Chan, Department Of English And Film Studies, University Of Alberta
08:30AM - 09:30AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
PANEL: Toward a More “Critical” Mixed Race Studies: Troubling Representations of Race and Gender
Format : Panel
Speakers
Alma Villanueva, Texas A&M University
Corrine Collins, University Of Southern California
Roberta Wolfson, Lecturer, Stanford University
Anna Storti, Assistant Professor, Duke University
Moderators
Tonya Gray, Arizona State University

This panel engages the issue of representation, extending an invitation to critical mixed race studies to think through the ways racial mixture functions as a foundational tenet of anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and US imperialism. Recent scholarship on racial mixture and representation-such as Maile Arvin's Possessing Polynesians (2019)-illustrates the ways some depictions of racial mixture reproduce "the logic that mixed-race people must be folded into a universal humanity that is always nonetheless white" (208). Collectively, the papers featured in this panel address the ways gender, sexuality, and power complicate the liberal representation of mixed race people, gesturing towards alternative theoretical frameworks, objects, and discourses that may help facilitate a more critical approach to representation, history, and violence. By examining mixed race media, narrative, and visual culture, the panelists refuse easy distinctions between the past, present, and future, and instead suggest that an anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperial CMRS must resist the progress narratives too often attached to mixed race bodies. In this context, we find the late 20th and early 21st century to be an integral historical moment to our analysis. On October 30, 1997 after years of deliberation, the United States Census Bureau's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) decided to offer a "check more than one box" option on the US Census. This decision came as a result both of the increased number of children from interracial unions and of the growing need to report and measure increased diversity in the United States. These impact factors can be traced back to the late 1960s when the US Supreme Court's decision to overturn anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1 (1967). Growing numbers of legally recognized interracial families signaled a new division in American racial politics in which a largely ubiquitous interest in legally recognizing multiracial people and families was split between a conservative advocacy of colorblindness and a liberal investment in establishing "multiracial" as a protected class. Since 2000, mixed race people have become the fastest growing racial group in the US. Projections of Census data for upcoming decades coincides with predictions seen in such popular publications as National Geographic whose 2013 special issue on the "Changing Face of America" projected that by 2050 the average American will be mixed race. Similarly, in Time magazine's prominent 1993 issue "The New Face of America" a digitized woman of multiracial descent was featured on the cover with a tagline: "How Immigrants are Shaping the World's First Multicultural Society." In 'Mixed Race' Studies (2004), Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe has called attention to the ways Time's "The New Face of America" represents "the dangerous ways in which confused media […] induce fantasies about a future replete with 'interracial' cyborgs" (2). Deeming mixed race people "artefacts of the past and beacons of the future" (1), Ifekwunigwe situates the problematic origins of miscegenation alongside contemporary discourse which celebrates mixed race as a new racial category primed to beget an answer to racial conflict. The formal institutionalization of the "multiracial" category in the late 1990s and the subsequent mainstreaming of racial mixture not only renders the mixed race person as a harbinger of post-racism, but reinforces heteronormativity and conceals the ways in which the conservative ideology of colorblindness and the colonial tenet of white supremacy continue to haunt the political project of multiracialism. Our panel responds to this formal institutionalization through a critical engagement that troubles the visual, discursive, and popular representations of mixed race. It is our claim that depictions of racial mixture, including statistics which register multiracials as the soon-to-be majority, obscure the enduring legacies of colonialism, slavery, capitalism, and empire.

  • Panelist 1 looks to Meghan Markle as a case study revealing the anti-Blackness that festers at the heart of empire. "Pretty Face, Wrong Race: Anti-Blackness, Anti-Americanness, and Meghan Markle" argues that as a biracial Black American woman, Markle's treatment is reflective of Britain's elision of British anti-Blackness and imagining of America as the place of race problems. Consequently, the media's mocking of Meghan as an ethno-racial outsider, and accusations of her "importing" race issues to the U.K., is indicative of a British racial liberalism that obfuscates legacies of enslavement and colonization. 
  • Crossing the Atlantic, Panelist 2 analyzes the case of Elliot Rodger, the misogynistic and mixed race incel who killed six others and himself during the 2014 Isla Vista killings, alongside Chanel Miller's 2019 memoir Know My Name, which is based on Miller's experience as the "Emily Doe" in the Brock Turner Stanford rape case. In doing so, "An Education: The University and Racism's Erotic Life" considers how the university functions as a site that secures racism's erotic life. In "Mixed-Racial Visual Constructions of Gendered Bodies," 
  • Panelist 3 brings mixed race photography to bear on the co-construction of gender-as-biological in the making of the mixed-racial body. By examining the first set of photographs of mixed race subjects-Louis Agassiz's 1865 "Mixed Race Series" of a Brazilian Black, Indigenous, and White interracial community, this paper demonstrates how contemporary photographic mixed race representations fix and normalize gender as though it were a biological given, which in turn reinforces dominant conceptions of race. 
  • Finally, Panelist 4 unfolds the tensions between popular discourses about multiraciality and narrative testimonials by mixed race authors. "Rewriting the Mixed Self: Narrative Resistance against the Monoracial Imagination" exposes the many violent discourses rooted in the US racial caste system and their effect on multiracial authors. Through personal narrative, these authors encounter a life-sustaining platform for reimagining the mixed self beyond the limitations of the monoracial imagination.
08:30AM - 09:30AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
LIGHTNING SESSION: Critical Geographies
Format : Lightning Session
Speakers
Selena Flowers, Texas A&M University
Reginald Daniel, University Of California Santa Barbara
Jody Metcalfe, PhD Candidate, University Of Bayreuth
Moderators
Kaleb Germinaro, University Of Washington

Featuring the following presentations...

TitleAbstractAuthor(s)
My Parents' Vietnam
Much of the work that focuses on children born to American soldiers and Vietnamese women during the Vietnam War are interviews or psychological studies investigating the fate of their abandonment. Their stories also emerged in news articles and magazines with pleas to recognize these children, specifically the children who have Black fathers; they would be especially unwanted. What is absent from these narratives are the stories of children who were wanted. My purpose is to expand the focus and tell a different story. This story is about my parents. Despite the racial and geographical boundaries, they sought to keep their family intact.
Selena Flowers

From Multiracial to Monoracial: The Anglo-Americanization of California and the Southwest 

The Chicano and Brown Power Movements rejected the goal of White-adjacency espoused by organizations such as League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) by initially embracing a Chicana/o identity that encompassed European, Indigenous, and to a lesser extent, African components through mestizaje, a radical and critical interrogation of monoraciality and White supremacy. Ultimately, they settled on a monoracial identity premised largely on Indigenous ancestry. Mexican Americans still employ monoraciality to challenge White supremacy but have not conceptualized multiraciality as a critical tool in antiracist discourse and organizing. Many may acknowledge the racial and cultural complexity of their backgrounds. Most do not conceptualize their racial position as one of hybridity but rather, as singular within the confines of the Anglo-American racial order. Although this hybridity has been present, particularly in some Chicana feminist articulations of mestizaje, it has neither permeated Chicana/o consciousness nor challenged monoracial norms.
Reginald Daniel
"What Are You?" The Role of Dominant Narratives of Whiteness in Identity Construction of Mixed-Race Young Adults in Post-Apartheid South Africa
This presentation explores the role of rigid racial categorisations and dominant narratives of whiteness in the identity construction of mixed-race people in South Africa. It discusses how mixed-race people challenge these racial categories in a society that still expects them to 'choose'. In addition, it unpacks the policing of white beauty standards for mixed-race people who try to navigate feelings of shame and compromise. Ultimately, it highlights how mixed-race people exercise agency over their identity, despite personal and private demands, to overcome racial boxes that seek to contain them.
Jody Metcalfe
My Parents' Vietnam
08:30AM - 09:30AM
Presented by :
Selena Flowers, Texas A&M University
From Multiracial to Monoracial: The Anglo-Americanization of California and the Southwest
08:30AM - 09:30AM
Presented by :
Reginald Daniel, University Of California Santa Barbara
“What Are You?” The Role of Dominant Narratives of Whiteness in Identity Construction of Mixed-Race Young Adults in Post-Apartheid South Africa
08:30AM - 09:30AM
Presented by :
Jody Metcalfe, PhD Candidate, University Of Bayreuth
09:45AM - 11:00AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
CONFERENCE AWARD CEREMONY AND KEYNOTE "WE ARE ABUNDANT"
Speakers
Aisha Fukushima, AISHA FUKUSHIMA | RAPtivism
Rudy Guevarra Jr., CMRS President, Arizona State University
Alejandro T. Acierto, Arizona State University
Chandra Crudup, Conference Manager, Critical Mixed Race Studies
Moderators
Sarah Herrera, Edson College Of Nursing And Health Innovation - ASU

Aisha Fukushima is an African American-Japanese scholar, singer and RAPtivist. She founded the global hip-hop project RAPtivism (rap activism) in 2009, and has since travelled to over 20 countries across four continents challenging oppression with expression. This highly engaging Keynote performance lecture explores questions of global citizenship, identity politics, and musical activism through storytelling and soulful musical melodies. We will also will move through some mindfulness practices to root us in our collective abundance. Come as you are, all are welcome.

11:15AM - 12:15PM
CMRS Virtual Conference
COMMUNITY CAUCUS
Speakers
Jeff Chiba Stearns, Owner / Co-founder, Meditating Bunny Studio Inc.
Ken Tanabe, Loving Day
Moderators
Chandra Crudup

Contact(s): Ken Tanabe (info@lovingday.org) and Jeff Chiba Stearns (info@meditatingbunny.com)

The Community Caucus offers an opportunity to meet and connect with various mixed race community-focused groups and non-profit organizations. Attendees will have the opportunity to present their interests and work to the group. We'll discuss strengthening overall impact, ways to support, international outreach, and possible collaborations.

11:15AM - 12:15PM
CMRS Virtual Conference
STUDENT AFFAIRS CAUCUS
Speakers
Victoria Malaney-Brown, Columbia University
Moderators
Kelly Jackson, Associate Professor, Arizona State University

Contact(s): Victoria Malaney (vmalaney1@gmail.com)

This Student Affairs Caucus organized by the American College Personnel Associations' the Multiracial Network seeks to bring together college administrators, faculty, and students who are seeking opportunities to network and learn best practices to support their multiracial populations at their higher education institutions. We invite Student Affairs professionals, faculty, and students to come together at CMRS to envision how we can create/brainstorm ways to support Student Affairs focused best practices and research that aligns with CMRS goals and also provides space for conference participants to network during the annual conference while continuing to build relationships and partnerships through ongoing virtual spaces throughout the academic year.

11:15AM - 12:15PM
CMRS Virtual Conference
STUDENT CAUCUS
Speakers
Kaleb Germinaro, University Of Washington
Moderators
Alexandrina Agloro, ASU/ CMRS E Board

Contact(s): Kaleb Germinaro (kalebg@uw.edu

The student caucus is a space to network and discuss the unique challenges and opportunities related to mixed-race organizing on campus. We seek to provide a central space for sharing resources, information, advice, and events for multi-racial/ethnic/cultural student organizations, student leaders, and activists.

12:15PM - 01:15PM
CMRS Virtual Conference
FEATURED ARTIST SHOWCASE
Speakers
Naliyah Kaya, Associate Professor Of Sociology, Montgomery College
Daniel Torres, Featured Artist
Peri Law, Teaching Artist In Philly
Richard Gessert, Featured Artist, Northwestern University
Kirsten Furlong, Artist, Department Of Art, Design, And Visual Studies, Boise State University, Boise, Idaho
Naliyah Kaya, Naliyah Kaya Designs (Jewelry)
Mariko Middleton, Ichariba Choodee: Okinawan Voices & Stories Podcast
Moderators
Sarah Herrera, Edson College Of Nursing And Health Innovation - ASU
01:15PM - 02:15PM
CMRS Virtual Conference
PANEL: Preparing for Higher Education’s Mixed Race Future: Why Multiraciality Matters
Format : Panel
Speakers
Lisa Delacruz Combs, The Ohio State University
Orkideh Mohajeri, Assistant Professor, West Chester University
Victoria Malaney-Brown, Columbia University
Marc Guerrero, Associate Department Chair, Ohio State University
Moderators
Kelly Jackson, Associate Professor, Arizona State University

This panel features editors of and contributors to a forthcoming book about preparing for the mixed race future of higher education. We present an overview of the book and then share three different papers based on chapters from the book that all speak to the need for higher education to better prepare for its more mixed race future. The papers span different focal populations (students, graduate students, faculty) as well as more theoretical/conceptual versus empirical. Together, they highlight key future-oriented constructs and new directions in research, as well as guiding future scholars who want to bridge critical mixed race studies and higher education. This session focus directly aligns with the conference theme because it aims to push critical mixed race studies forward by imagining the future of multiraciality in higher education. Preparing for Higher Education's Mixed Race Future: Brief Overview As we eagerly await the 2020 U.S. Census results, which allow only the third opportunity to accurately count the self-identified multiracial population (or those who identify with two or more racial groups), all previous data support the fact that the multiracial population is increasing rapidly, particularly multiracial youth. Coupled with increasing attention and representation of multiraciality in both the scholarly literature and popular culture, we must further nuance what is understood about multiracial people, particularly in the changing contexts of higher education. We offer this session, preparing higher education for its mixed race future, to help guide both critical mixed race studies and higher education scholarship and practice to understand why multiraciality matters for the future. 

  • Paper 1: What is Multiracial Consciousness? Developing Critically Conscious Multiracial Students in Higher Education This paper asks the question, what is multiracial consciousness? Fundamentally, this paper draws on Freire's (1974/2013) concept of critical consciousness, which grew out of an educational wave of critical thinkers who realized that the historical conditions of minoritized populations were based on oppression. Drawing from a critical qualitative narrative study, multiracial consciousness is conceptualized and defined through the voices of the fifteen multiracial collegians at a Historically White Institution (HWI). Multiracial consciousness is defined as a heightened level of self-awareness where the student self-reflects on their multiple racial identities, has the ability to describe how monoracism affects daily life experiences, and influences their decisions and choices to engage or disengage from ethnic, cultural, or racial justice causes. This paper answers what is multiracial consciousness? Where does it come from? and how can higher education support its development? A model of Multiracial Consciousness Development is also presented. This paper concludes with implications for higher education to support multiracial students' development in cultivating their awareness of multiracial consciousness in higher education. 
  • Paper 2: The "Unwanted, Colored Male": Gendered Contested White Subjectivity Hailed through Contemporary Racial Discourse Panelist 2 will highlight her specific paper focusing on a poststructural perspective on gender and racial discourse. The fear of race-mixing through sexual and romantic relationships has long plagued the psyche of the United States (Ferber, 2004; Frankenberg, 1993; Steinbugler, 2005), and has had serious consequences in terms of buttressing the racial order (Irby, 2014; Spencer, 2011). The college and graduate school years are times when individuals learn from a range of romantic and sexual relationships, and development along this interpersonal line is critical to growth and maturation (Patton et al., 2016). This chapter takes up a feminist poststructural perspective on the narratives of 20 multiracial and contested white postsecondary students at a predominantly white postsecondary institution, and delineates the construction of subjectivity for some cisgender men. Namely, some men are interpellated as the Unwanted, Colored Male through enactments of the discourses of essentialist anti-Black racism, normative whiteness, colorblindness, denial, and the binary discourse, sometimes separately and other times working together. It is important to flesh out how antiquated mental models around race continue to shape the experiences of current students at postsecondary institutions across the U.S. in order to better prepare for the higher education's mixed race future. 
  • Paper 3: Becoming a Multiracial Scholar by Traversing Monoracial Academia Despite increasing numbers and presence of multiracial students, faculty who identify as multiracial have less exposure on campus, perpetuating academia entrenched in a monoracial pardigm. This paper explores the dynamic of multiracial scholars who either leave academia, move on to non-multiracial topics, or identify monoracially. From multiracial graduate students not having mentors or advisors supportive of studying multiraciality, to multiracial dissertations being viewed as niche or too narrow, to monoracial institutional logics forcing multiracial scholars to identify monoracially to advance, explore multiple challenging in trajectories toward becoming a multiracial scholar. At each step of the trajectory toward becoming a tenured faculty member, multiracial scholars are forced to contend with monoracist practices that can deter them from reaching their goal, especially if they do not adhere to monoracial social norms. Implications for advisors, colleagues, and processes associated with peer-review and promotion and tenure are discussed. 

References 

Ferber, A. L. (Ed.) (2004). Home-grown hate: Gender and organized racism. 1st ed. Routledge. 

Frankenberg, R. (1993). White women, race matters: The social construction of whiteness. University of Minnesota Press. 

Freire, P. (2013). Education for critical consciousness. Bloomsbury Academic. (Original work published in 1974). 

Irby, D. J. (2014). Revealing racial purity ideology: Fear of Black-white intimacy as a framework for understanding school discipline in post-Brown schools. Educational Administration Quarterly, 50(5), 783-795. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013161X1459958 

Patton, L. D., Renn, K. A., Guido, F. M., & Quaye, S. J. (2016). Student development in college: Theory, research, and practice (3rd ed.) Jossey-Bass. 

Spencer, R. (2011). Reproducing race: The paradox of Generation Mix. Lynne Rienner Publishers. 

Steinbugler, A. C. (2005). Visibility as privilege and danger: Heterosexual and same-sex interracial intimacy in the 21st century. Sexualities, 8(4), 425-443. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460705056618

01:15PM - 02:15PM
CMRS Virtual Conference
WORKSHOP: Parenting Multiracial Children: Understanding Diverse Lived Experiences and (the Limitations of) Existent Research
Format : Workshop
Speakers
Alethea Rollins, Instructor , Univ Of Central Missouri
Roudi Roy, Associate Professor, California State Unversity, Long Beach
Annamaria Csizmadia, Associate Professor, Universiy Of Connecticut
Annabelle Atkin, Purdue University
Moderators
Sarah Yang Mumma, Smith College

Multiracial children comprise a substantial and increasing proportion of the U.S. child population, yet research on parenting Multiracial children is limited (Atkin & Yoo, 2019). Grounded in the facilitators' lived experiences, critical mixed race theory (Harris, 2016), and extant Multiracial parenting literature (Roudi & Rollins, 2019), the purpose of the proposed workshop is to increase appreciation of the heterogenous Multiracial child population by describing shared and unique experiences within and across contemporary Multiracial families. The proposed workshop aims to 1) identify at least three sources of within-group variation among Multiracial families (e.g., ethnic-racial composition, first vs. multi-generation Multiracial status, immigrant background, phenotype, and geographic location); 2) describe shared experiences among Multiracial families (e.g., ethnic-racial socialization, managing (multi)racial microaggressions inside and outside the family, supporting Multiracial children's ethnic-racial identity development); and 3) explain the opportunities and challenges associated with parenting Multiracial children unique to specific Multiracial family contexts (e.g., First-generation White immigrant single-mother parenting a U.S.-born Black-White Biracial child; U.S.-born Multiracial mother parenting second-generation Multiracial children; Foreign-born and raised immigrant mother parenting U.S.-born Multiracial/Multiethnic children).

The workshop will begin with the autobiographical experiences of three mothers of Multiracial children; mothers who also have studied, written, and published about Multiracial families and children for over two decades. Each facilitator will discuss their family background and their lived experiences of parenting their biological Multiracial child(ren). These narratives will give the audience an opportunity to hear first hand how racial categorization in Multiracial families limits a deeper understanding of their lived experiences. These experiences will be discussed in the context of existent literature and grounded in critical mixed race theory (Harris, 2016). Next, the fourth facilitator will identify common themes and highlight unique elements that emerge in the narrative of the three parents' lived experiences. Framed by critical mixed race theory and extant Multiracial research, the fourth facilitator will offer directions for future research and practical suggestions for parents of Multiracial youth and practitioners who work with Multiracial families.

The purpose and content of the proposed workshop align with several themes of the 2022 CMRS Conference. Consistent with the theme of "cross-racial and multiracial kinship," workshop attendees will describe shared and unique features of parent-child relationships within and across diverse types of Multiracial families. Consistent with the theme of "Decentering Whiteness and Dual Nonwhite Experiences," workshop attendees will compare parenting of Majority-Minority Biracial children to that of Minority-Minority Biracial children. Consistent with the theme of "Critical mixed-race methodologies and knowledge production," workshop attendees will explain methodological limitations of past research on parenting in Multiracial families and consider these issues in making future decisions about recruitment, measurement, and data analyses. Finally, aligned with the CMRS mission statement, workshop attendees will be able to describe the fluidity of racial and other intersecting identities and its bidirectional impact on parenting. Further, attendees will be able to discuss Multiracal families from within the diverse lived experiences shared by the facilitators.

01:15PM - 02:15PM
CMRS Virtual Conference
PANEL: “How do you know what you know?”: Pivotal Moments in Unlocking Erased Ancestral Knowledge
Format : Panel
Speakers
Margaret Little, Queen's University
Laura Scott, Queen's University
Sarah Waisvisz, Queen's University
Rachel Fernandes, PhD Candidate, Queen's University
Moderators
Ascala Sisk, Studio For Creativity, Place And Equitable Communities

Panel Proposal / Description: Inspired by the symbolism of the Akan Sankofa bird who moves forward while also looking back to the past, our panel, "Unlocking Erased Ancestral Knowledge," will address the conference's theme of Ancestral Futurisms via the narration of three different moments of critical reckoning. Set at the crossroads of past with future, our explorations offer a contemporary critique of how emerging/shifting foundational systems of ancestral knowledge and embodied archives (Diana Taylor) can inform pillars of western institutions such as education, health care, culture and art. Through personal testimony, our panel offers new models for what counts as "archive" and "wisdom" by examining three innocuous yet potent sites of meaning-making: an inherited copy of The Joy of Cooking; a family vocation in nursing; and a long night at a rainforest cultural club. 

  • Panelist #1: Heritage, Identity, and The Joy of Cooking When my grandmother died in 2020, I salvaged one of the few books in her apartment. Something drew me to her old hardbound copy of the American cookery classic, The Joy of Cooking-perhaps an odd thing for an Indian woman in her 80s to keep as her dementia kept her from reading. As I leafed through the pages, I realized the value of this treasure: the book is peppered with notes and recipes in my grandma's writing, newspaper cuttings, and a Christmas dinner menu from 1985. I began to uncover an intimate part of my grandmother's life. In this presentation, I consider what it means to be the new keeper of this book, this knowledge, and these memories. As I hold my grandma's cookbook, I think about how this book in particular, as well as food and cooking in general, can elicit deeper understandings of (mixed) heritage, identity, and family, even after death. 
  • Panelist #2: Celebrating Filipina Caregivers My Mother and my Tita (Aunt) came to Canada from the Philippines as registered nurses, and I followed in their footsteps initially with a career in nursing, eventually moving into academia via a health based practice of music and dance for people who live with dementia. The art of caregiving lies at the heart of this work, and upon hearing a Master's project review question, "how do you know what you know?", a door to my own ancestral wisdom was unlocked. Blending traditional and emergent methodologies, I aim to explore and celebrate the incredible power of the caregiver. 
  • Panelist #3: Not Ballet but Bèlè While on a research trip in 2011, I found myself squeezed in a car and careening through the dark rain forest of Martinique, a French island in the Caribbean, heading to a "Soirée Bèlè." "Ballet?" I kept mispronouncing. "Non. Bèlè." But what was Bèlè? No one would tell me. "Just listen to the drum," they insisted, "and you will understand." In this presentation I will explore how that night at a Martinican cultural club cracked open my rigid ballet dancer's body and invited me to listen to the drumming of my ancestors. That night, where the smell of fish fry mingled with the lush tropical flowers and I couldn't tell what was sweat and what was rain, a portal opened for me, a crack in time where I could see ahead and behind at once. This portal, which I stepped through, eventually led me from Martinique back to Canada and then all the way to West Africa.
Day 3, 02-26-2022
08:00AM - 09:00AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
WORKSHOP: Disrupting monocentricity in the helping professions: Toward critical multiracial cultural attunement
Format : Workshop
Speakers
Gina E. Miranda Samuels, University Of Chicago
Kelly Jackson, Vice President, Critical Mixed Race Studies
Moderators
Chandra Crudup

Multiracial persons and family systems are growing exponentially both in the US and abroad. For instance, a recent analysis of Census 2010 data by the Pew Research Center reported that almost 7% of the US population reports two or more races, making this diverse group the third largest minoritized racial group. Considering that many multiracial people continue to report only a single race on the Census, it can be deduced that the actual population of persons with multiracial heritage is much higher. Similarly, family systems are themselves diverse; estimates suggest transracial adoptions have increased by 50% in the last decade. This diversity is further complicated by intersectional statuses of culture, immigration, class, gender and sexuality among other social identities. Yet existing knowledge in social work and other helping professions continue to engage monocentric understandings of race that privilege single-race identities and experiences of family. For instance, social work continues to exclude multiraciality in its core competence language and ongoing efforts to enhance diversity, inclusion and equity, including more recent public-facing calls for anti-racism. Instead, the knowledge base continues to rely on simplified and reductive conceptualizations of race and other forms of diversity rooted in white supremacy. The purpose of this workshop is to introduce a long-overdue Model of Critical Multiracial Attunement - an anti-racist practice model that helps social workers, therapists, and counselors engage in critical and relational practice with multiracial individuals and families.

This workshop will provide an overview of the model's foundational principles, which include critical multiraciality, intersectionality, constructivism and social justice. Then the authors guide participants through the four fluid phases of the cyclical model: (1) critical reflexivity, (2) engagement, (3) exploration, and (4) collaborating in action by discussing the inherent philosophies, objectives, and practice skills associated with each phase. To stimulate critical thinking and discussion, the authors will offer specific case examples of how each phase may be situated in practice with diverse multiracial individuals and families, but contend that the Model of Multiracial Cultural Attunement is applicable for practice with any marginalized group.

Participants will leave the workshop having gained: critical insight into their own positionality as it applies to working with diverse multiracial individuals and families; important empirically-based practice skills and techniques to help leverage the strengths and resilience of their multiracial clients; and direction for taking necessary action to dismantle systemic racism and monoracism within their social environments and circles of influence.

08:00AM - 09:00AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
LIGHTNING SESSION: Mixed Race and the Everyday
Format : Lightning Session
Speakers
Anaïs Duong-Pedica, Åbo Akademi University
CHANDRA REYNA, University Of Maryland, College Park
Pietro Sasso, Graduate Faculty- Educational Leadership, Stephen F. Austin State University
Moderators
Tonya Gray, Arizona State University

Featuring the following presentations...

TitleAbstractAuthor(s)
Gendered (Multi)Racial Discourse and the Cultural Production of Multiraciality in Mommy Blogs
Mommy blogs have been recognized as a medium through which mothers challenge dominant representations of motherhood in our society, create community with other mothers, and seek out advice. In this study, I analyze how a niche of bloggers-mothers of multiracial children-construct narratives about multiraciality in the blogosphere. I do so by analyzing the rhetoric, content, and structure of 19 multiracial mommy blogs. I find that (multi)racial discourse emerges in four distinct ways-identity navigation, safety, self-esteem, diversity-and is often gendered. Collectively, each of these discourses simultaneously addresses a familial need while also contributing to the cultural production of multiraciality, multiracial families, and multiracial motherhood online.
CHANDRA REYNA
Developmental Pathways Model of American Multiracial Men
The liminality of multiracial college men leads to microaggressions, lack of engagement, and support that affirms their identity development. Institutions ignore how gender impacts development in which multiracial male-identified students experience college differently. This session presents a developmental pathways model from a grounded theory study which explored the experiences of twelve multiracial college men to identify patterns of gendered multiraciality identity development. Participants experienced three distinct developmental pathways of (1) hegemonic masculine integration (whiteness); (2) subordinate masculinity (fluidity); or (3) protest masculinity (assumed marginality). Implications for increased acknowledgement of multiracial college men are provided through proposed new developmental pathways model.
Pietro Sasso
Derrick Paladino
 

Mixed-race Kanak in 'a world cut in two': contemporary experiences in Kanaky/New Caledonia


This paper interrogates how the profound history of spatial segregation across colonial, racial and cultural lines appears in contemporary narratives of mixed-race people in Kanaky/New Caledonia (K/NC). By tracing the moments that specific spaces, such as "the city" and "the tribe," are mentioned, the paper shows how the colonial divide structures selves, relations, spaces and society and manifests itself in discussions with self-identified métis/ses Kanak-white people, especially in the context of the formal decolonization process K/NC is going through. The primary question this paper seeks to answer is: how does French colonialism spatially determine the lives of métis/ses in K/NC?
Anaïs Duong-Pedica
Mixed-race Kanak in ‘a world cut in two’: contemporary experiences in Kanaky/New Caledonia
08:00AM - 09:00AM
Presented by :
Anaïs Duong-Pedica, Åbo Akademi University
Gendered (Multi)Racial Discourse and the Cultural Production of Multiraciality in Mommy Blogs
08:00AM - 09:00AM
Presented by :
CHANDRA REYNA, University Of Maryland, College Park
Developmental Pathways Model of American Multiracial Men
08:00AM - 09:00AM
Presented by :
Pietro Sasso, Graduate Faculty- Educational Leadership, Stephen F. Austin State University
Co-authors :
Derrick Paladino, Rollins College
08:00AM - 09:00AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
PANEL: Mixed-Race Superheroes
Format : Panel
Speakers
Jasmine Mitchell, State University Of New York-Old Westbury
Greg Carter, Associate Professor, University Of Wisconsin–Milwaukee
Eric Berlatsky, Florida Atlantic University
Sika Dagbovie-Mullins, Florida Atlantic University
Moderators
Sarah Herrera, Edson College Of Nursing And Health Innovation - ASU

Racial mixedness has long been associated with weakness, abnormality, impurity, transgression, shame, and various pathologies on the one hand, while also ironically connoting genetic superiority, exceptional beauty/physicality and special potentiality. In contemporary discussions, this romanticization of mixed race is linked to the idea of the mixed-race individual as a kind of savior figure who has unique abilities to free us from racial tensions and divisions. As Sharon H. Chang writes in Raising Mixed Race: Multiracial Asian Children in a Post-Racial World (Routledge, 2015), "Painting mixedness as a super power able to undo racial strife turns out to be a shallow form of multiculturalism that avoids the real, continued, and deep oppressions people of color face all over the world." Still, there has been a persistent insistence on seeing mixed race individuals as having superhuman acumen when it comes to race. Consider Ralina L. Joseph's review of Obama's recognized extraordinary abilities in Transcending Race: From the New Millennium Mulatta to the Exceptional Multiracial (Duke UP, 2013): "Even when blatant racism…is thrown in Obama's direction, he does not appear to flinch. He is gifted with racism Teflon. Obama's perceived superhero quality is linked to the representation of his mixed-race." The thematics of racial mixing, both its promise and its threat, have been at the core of superhero stories since their inception and thus a close examination of these thematics sheds significant light both on the discourse around mixedness in (particularly) American culture and on the idea of superheroes themselves. While superhero representations have variably repeated, emphasized, challenged, abandoned, or satirized these foundational discourses of racial purity, white supremacy, and racially motivated vigilante justice, these elements remain part of the fabric of subsequent superhero narratives in a variety of media. This panel seeks to illustrate how mixed-race superhero narratives both perpetuate harmful myths about mixedness and, at times, critique such myths. In the latter case, we hope that these narratives, and our examination of them, are a step toward a more honest engagement with discourses of mixedness, an engagement with the potential to transform these narratives (superhero and otherwise). The idea of the superhero is still tied tightly to past conceptualizations of racial hierarchy and racial purity, while also frequently drawing upon notions of a utopian future resulting from sometimes Eugenic models of evolution. Likewise, the mixed-race superhero narratives discussed in this panel look forward to an alternative mixed utopian future where race does not matter thanks to the mixed superheroic figure who reconciles racial differences. Thus, while the superhero narratives under consideration (Marvel's Ant-Man and the Wasp and Thor: Ragnarok; DC Comic's Aquaman; comic and cinematic representations of Marvel's Hulk and Venom) putatively take place in an "alternate universe" present, they actually put our real-world present in conversation with past conflicts over racial mixing and competing utopian futures, whether racially "pure" or transcendentally mixed, tying into the CMRS conference theme, "Ancestral Futurisms: Embodying Multiracialities Past, Present, and Future." 

  • Panelist 1,"The Ghostly Mulatto and the Transcendent Half-Breed: Ant-Man and the Wasp and Aquaman" Panelist 1 discusses how subtle and more obvious stereotypes about racial mixedness and the post-racial promise of race mixing appear in Ant-Man and the Wasp and Aquaman (2018), suggesting that problematic ideas associated with racial mixedness continue to be recycled in the twenty-first century. 
  • Panelist 2, "Race and Superhero Narratives." Panelist 2 discusses how the origins of superhero stories are substantively rooted in the opposed rhetoric and practice of racial purity and white supremacy, including the link of (white) racial purity to superheroism via the Ku Klux Klan. 
  • Panelist 3, "The Ride of the Valkyrie Against White Supremacy: Tessa Thompson's Casting in Thor: Ragnarok" Panelist 3 reads Valkyrie as a mixed-race queer heroine that challenges white supremacist, colonialist, and patriarchal ideologies, examines the ways in which non-traditional casting can highlight the often unrealized anti-hegemonic potential of mainstream superhero films. Panelist 4, "The Hulk, Venom, and the Warring Blood of Biracial Superheroes" 
  • Panelist 4 provides an account of longstanding discourses of "warring blood" in depictions of mixed-race people and how those discourses are reflected in both the comics and recent films devoted to Hulk and Venom, superpowered antiheroes.
09:15AM - 10:15AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
LIGHTNING SESSION: Mixed Race Activism and Social Engagement
Format : Lightning Session
Speakers
Sarah Barzak, Founder, London School Of Racialized Leaders
Danae Hart, UC Berkeley
Jackie Peng, PhD Student, University Of Maryland, Baltimore County
Pietro Sasso, Graduate Faculty- Educational Leadership, Stephen F. Austin State University
Moderators
Sarah Yang Mumma, Smith College

Featuring the following presentations...

TitleAbstractAuthor(s)
Personal "Reservations:" Selective Invisibility in Multiracial First Nation Students
Historical erasures of presence re-emphasize enduring deleterious legacies of settler colonialism where representation of ancestry is challenging for multiracial persons with Native American heritage. From a descriptive psychological phenomenological study, there are distinct patterns of negotiating whiteness and self-identity in multiracial Native American college students. Participants engaged in selective invisibility to avoid monoracialism or intentionally felt invisible to their institution. They inhabited multiple racial locations in which they expressed personal reservations about the authenticity of their Indigenous heritages due to consistent questioning by others. Practitioners can use these experiences to inform research and practice about multiracial Native Americans.
Pietro Sasso
Ashley Jeffers
Parenting Mixed Black-Asian Children During COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter
Given anti-Black and anti-Asian racism, there is a need to understand how parents of mixed Black-Asian children socialize youth to navigate their racialized experiences. Grounded in Critical Multiracial Theory (MultiCrit), this study examines the impact of Black Lives Matter and COVID-19 on the racial ethnic socialization (RES) process in a dual-minority (Black and Asian) family. Drawing on the experiential knowledge of parents and their children, this study adds to the conversation on child rearing practices that enable RES to be a protective factor that lessens the effects of racism-related stress for mixed-race youth.
Jackie Peng
#Creole: The Radical Potential of Louisiana Creole Politics in the 21st Century
Creole identity within Louisiana emerged as a result of French colonization but developed into a cultural identity specific to the lived experience of residents of Louisiana. An often-overlooked aspect of Creole identity is its role within the formation of activist networks and resistance within the American South. Resistance is inherent in the formation of Creole identity because it complicates racial politics that are predicated on reductionist singular conceptions of racial identity. An understanding of Creole identity as a challenge to the racial binary imposed within Louisiana illuminates the larger legacies of colonialism, slavery, and systems of inequality within
Danae Hart
Half \'Asian\' / Half \'Arab\': Reconciling with my Palestinianness
In response to rampant settler-colonial violence in Sheikh Jarrah, Palestine, and I am proposing to read a love letter I wrote for my Palestinian Baba which explores my contentions with claiming Palestinian identity as a mixed-race woman who is not read as 'Arab'. The personal essay explores themes of collective trauma, ethnocentrism, intergenerational trauma, classism, and mixed-race diasporic identity. The essay references my visit to Gaza in 2006 and touches on transnationalism and the power of the blue passport. This deeply personal essay was my method of grieving and healing during these dark times.
Sarah Barzak
Personal "Reservations:" Selective Invisibility in Multiracial First Nation Students
09:15AM - 10:15AM
Presented by :
Pietro Sasso, Graduate Faculty- Educational Leadership, Stephen F. Austin State University
Co-authors :
Ashley Jeffers, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Parenting Mixed Black-Asian Children During COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter
09:15AM - 10:15AM
Presented by :
Jackie Peng, University Of Maryland, Baltimore County
#Creole: The Radical Potential of Louisiana Creole Politics in the 21st Century
09:15AM - 10:15AM
Presented by :
Danae Hart, UC Berkeley
Half \'Asian\' / Half \'Arab\': Reconciling with my Palestinianness
09:15AM - 10:15AM
Presented by :
Sarah Barzak, Founder, London School Of Racialized Leaders
09:15AM - 10:15AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
WORKSHOP: Transracial Adoptee and Multiracial Solidarity: Exploring Identity Interconnections to Inform Aspiring Allyship and Coalition-Building
Format : Workshop
Speakers
Lisa Delacruz Combs, The Ohio State University
Aeriel A. Ashlee, Assistant Professor, St. Cloud State University
Moderators
Kelly Jackson, Associate Professor, Arizona State University

As an interdisciplinary field, Critical Mixed Race Studies (CMRS) offers expansive–and liberatory–perspectives on dominant conceptions of race. CMRS scholars explore the fluidity of race and its contextual nature as a social construction. By examining how power shapes racialization and racial stratification, CMRS scholars invite critical and poststructural analyses of the social, cultural, and political implications of monoracism as a tool of White supremacy (Johnston & Nadal, 2010). This examination has implications not only for multiracial people but for all racialized bodies, including those (like transracial adoptees) who challenge and transgress the rigidity of monoracial constructions of race (Ashlee, 2018).

A transracial adoptee of color (who was raised in and by a White adoptive family) and a multiracial womxn of color (who was raised in and by a White and Filipina family)will co-facilitate this session. Together, facilitators and participants will examine and complicate imposed cultural and institutional conceptions of race that reflect limited and limiting monoracial categories (namely that racial identities are inherited and discrete), which uphold white supremacy. We will discuss the dehumanizing effects of monoracism and biologism (or adoptism) and consider how our similar–and different–racialized experiences can inform aspiring allyship and solidarity between transracial adoptee and multiracial communities (Ashlee et al., 2021; Combs & Ashlee, 2020). Using Keating's (2013) theory of interconnectivity, we will connect through difference, explore our radical interrelatedness, and listen to one another with raw openness.

While there is profound opportunity for coalition-building through shared scholarship and fostered kinship between transracial adoptee and multiracial communities, it is imperative that we pursue coalition-building with compassionate caution. This means tending to both how our racialized experiences may be similar and examining how they are distinctly different. As such, we must be willing to confront and explore how we may be complicit (consciously and unconsciously) in one another's oppression and make a commitment to actively unlearning and dismantling how power is distributed/shared and (re)imagined across race.

References
Ashlee, A. A. (2018, March). Exploring Transracial Asian American Adoptee racial identity
through a multiracial lens: Kinship between racial border crossers. Paper presentation
at the annual Critical Mixed Race Studies meeting, College Park, MD.

Ashlee, A. A., Combs, L., Bettencourt, G., Olson, A., Prieto, Alvarado, A., & Cepeda, R. (2021, March). Exploring identity interconnections: A practical approach to facilitating empathy & connectivity in a time of division and pain. Session presented at the NASPA Student Affairs Educators in Higher Education Virtual Conference.

Combs, L., & Ashlee, A.A. (2020). Different like me: Building empathy within multiracial and transracial adoptee communities through identity analogies. 2020 Knowledge Community Publication, 56-58. NASPA.

Johnston, M., & Nadal, K. (2010). Multiracial microaggressions. Microaggressions and marginality: Manifestation, dynamics, and impact, 123-144.

Keating, A. (2013). Transformation now!: Toward a post-oppositional politics of change. University of Illinois Press.

09:15AM - 10:15AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
PANEL: Shadow Saviors, ‘Sun Summoners,’ and Radical Hope: Mixed Race Roles in Speculative Fictions and Academia
Format : Panel
Speakers
Juliana Villegas, University Of Washington, Seattle
Melissa Eriko Poulsen, Assistant Professor Of English & Literature, Menlo College
Wei Ming Dariotis, San Francisco State University
Moderators
Tonya Gray, Arizona State University

Rooted in ancestral, present and future concerns, speculative fictions allow indirect, yet powerful counternarratives in which mixed race characters often play significant roles as traitors, saviors and survivors. This panel uncovers the pitfalls and possibilities of reimagining, through these representations in speculative fiction, our roles as mixed race women working in academia from traitor-translators (Anzaldúa 1987) to visible activist-leaders. How have mixed race characters been portrayed in speculative fiction; and, in the current focus on anti-racism in the academy, how are mixed race women academics trapped by similar images-and how do we emerge from the trap? How might speculative fiction provide an opportunity to decolonize and reimagine mixed race representation and to guide mixed race women in academia through these turbulent borderlands (Anzaldúa, 1987) as academia attempts to become anti-racist (Kendi, 2019)? Our panel brings together three distinct approaches to speculative fiction and mixed race women's roles in academia in order to begin answering these questions. 

  • As Panelist 1 explores in the paper "Eurasian Shadow Savior Syndrome in Sci-Fi/Fantasy and Academia," mixed race characters and actors are often co-opted in science fiction and fantasy to play the role of saviors, a role that mirrors longstanding expectations, especially of part white mixed race women faculty and administrators in academia. Yet, as panelist two's paper "Monstress Knowledge: Violence and Mixed Race Resistances" explores, mixed race authors writing speculative fiction confront and resist these limiting representations. 
  • Panelist 2 unpacks how speculative writing can attend to the problematic representations of the genre by reasserting mixed race pasts and reclaiming mixed race knowledges. 
  • Indeed, as Panelist 3's "Mestiza Consciousness and the Racial Shadow in Borderlands Pedagogy" argues, speculative elements allow readers to consider and bring together multiple epistemologies to center historically-marginalized ancestral stories. 

Through these three papers, our panel begins a much-needed conversation on mixed race in speculative fiction, one that considers how speculation-at its very best-allows authors to confront the present, attend to unspoken pasts, and imagine alternate futures. We imagine these fictions as radical hope lighting the path through the crisis in which academia currently finds itself as it confronts its own dominant narratives about race, mixed race, and the borders between them. 


10:30AM - 11:30AM
CMRS Virtual Conference
CMRS GENERAL COUNCIL MEETING
Speakers
Kelly Jackson, Vice President, Critical Mixed Race Studies
Rudy Guevarra Jr., CMRS President, Arizona State University
Moderators
Chandra Crudup
11:45AM - 01:00PM
CMRS Virtual Conference
LUNCH BREAK
01:00PM - 02:00PM
CMRS Virtual Conference
WORKSHOP: Helping Hafu womxn to celebrate their “nonnative” multilingual skillsets
Format : Workshop
Speakers
Yuki Yamazaki, Fordham University
Aurora Tsai, Project Assistant Professor, University Of Tokyo
Moderators
Alexandrina Agloro, ASU/ CMRS E Board

Mixed heritage individuals (MHIs) often encounter ideologies where they are expected to speak their heritage languages in the same manner and fluency as 'monoracial' native speakers of the language (Tsai et al, 2021). These are often referred to as monoglossic ideologies (Garcia & Beardsman, 2009) which view bilinguals as linguistically deficient if they do not equate to two monolingual speakers in one person. Although many MHIs use knowledge of their heritage languages to 'prove' their ethnoracial identities (Tsai et al., 2021), little is known about how to support MHIs' pride in their multilingual skillsets among such ideologies. Therefore, this study examined online language exchanges among a group called "Hafu Ladies Community," a group of mixed heritage Japanese womxn with different language backgrounds and experience speaking Japanese. We asked 20 participants to write weekly reflections and meet once a week for 90-minutes (over four weeks) to discuss various themes related to language, identity, and mental health. Because most participants residing outside Japan, womxn used the meetings as an opportunity to practice Japanese while discussing topics related to language, gender, cultural, and ethnic identity. This study utilized observations, field notes, written reflections and transcriptions of audio-recorded meetings to explore how multiracial Japanese women 1) describe the relationship between their heritage languages and ethnoracial identity and 2) use language exchange meetings as a place for emotional healing from oppressive ideologies. A combination of thematic analysis (DeCuir-Gunby, 2011) and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough & Wodak, 1997) were used to investigate the questions. Findings revealed many instances where Hafu women used a combination of English and Japanese to share experiences of microaggressions that excluded them for not looking or speaking like 'monoracial' monolingual Japanese speakers. These experiences of marginalization served as a strong motivator for them to improve their Japanese skills. However, many recognized that even native-like Japanese skills would not guarantee them acceptance within monoracial Japanese communities. Nevertheless, they celebrated their multilingual skillsets as they became comfortable translanguaging (Garcia & Li, 2014), or using a mix of Japanese, English, and other languages to find solidarity with other Hafu womxn. During the presentation, we explain how the findings can inform language learning and counseling settings, and ask the audience to engage in a discussion about other applications of the findings.


DeCuir-Gunby, J. T., Marshall, P. L., & McCulloch, A. W. (2011). Developing and Using a Codebook for the Analysis of Interview Data: An Example from a Professional Development Research Project. Field Methods, 23(2), 136–155.
Fairclough, N., & Wodak, R. (1997). Critical discourse analysis. Discourse as Social Interaction, 2, 258–284.
García, O., & Beardsmore, H. (2009). Bilingual education in the 21st century: A global perspective. Wiley-Blackwell Pub.
García, O., & Li, W. (2014). Translanguaging: Language, bilingualism and education. Palgrave Macmillan.
Tsai, A., Straka, B., & Gaither, S. (2021). Mixed-heritage individuals' encounters with raciolinguistic ideologies. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 1–15.

01:00PM - 02:00PM
CMRS Virtual Conference
PANEL: What is “Authentic” Casting to a Mixed Race/ Multiracial Theater Artist?
Format : Panel
Speakers
AnaSofía Villanueva, Director Of Creative & Civic Partnership At Artists Repertory Theatre Creative Producer At The Alliance Of Latinx Minnesota Artists
Mathew Sandoval, Senior Lecturer, Barrett The Honors College @ Arizona State University
Lisa Marie Rollins, Crowded Fire Theater, San Francisco And Department Of Theater And Dance At Colorado College, Colorado Springs CO
Fanshen Cox, TruJuLo Productions
Chandra Crudup, Conference Manager, Critical Mixed Race Studies
Moderators
Chandra Crudup

Panel Summary (1000 words): The American theater industry, rooted in racism and white supremacy, continues to over-represent white narratives and identities. Those belonging to racialized populations have long since called for greater representation. The theater industry has implemented different approaches to casting to appease these demands, all of which have been filtered through a white and/or monoracial lens. An early approach was colorblind casting: casting based on the best person for a role without consideration of their racial presentation. It denies that we do see race and we do prescribe meaning to race. As such, colorblind casting often results in a perpetuation of racist ideology. High-profile examples include the 1989 London production of Miss Saigon, where a white actor portrayed a mixed-race Vietnamese character in yellowface, and the whitewashing of the 2015 production of The Mountaintop, where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was cast as a white man. Given its many failures, progressive theater workers have moved away from colorblind casting , although it routinely shows up in educational and professional institutions in harmful ways. Then came color-conscious casting, which is the intentional application of a person's racial presentation when casting. The most notable recent example of this is Hamilton, where the Founding Fathers are deliberately cast with predominantly Black and Latinx actors. Yet rather than using this awareness of racial presentation to challenge stereotypes, Hamilton capitalizes on colorism and this country's often unconscious anti-Black racism. The musical reinforces a hierarchy in shades of visible race where Latinx characters are whitewashed and Indigeneity is erased. So, recognizing that we see race in itself does not necessarily disrupt or dismantle racist practices or thought. While color-conscious casting is still routinely implemented in the industry, it is no longer lauded as the progressive corrective. The idea of an authentic casting has been the latest approach for expanding representation and complexity in character on stage. It attempts to go one step further than color-blind casting by requiring an actor's identity, racial or otherwise, to be in congruence with the character they are portraying. Therefore, plays that specify a characters' racial presentation are expected to be cast by an actor who also racially presents as such. Theaters that produce a play with Chinese characters, for example, have implemented marketing campaigns to showcase their authentic casting of all Asian American actors. While there has been some push-back to be more specific with the application of an actor's racial identity, such as having a Chinese character portrayed by a Chinese actor, authentic casting has been viewed largely as a success, even by racialized populations. With the articulation of anti-racist demands of the "We See You White American Theater" document, the application of authenticity has been adapted beyond the stage. It looks to become the new industry-wide standard to apply an authenticity lens in the commissioning or hiring of playwrights, dramaturgs, directors, cultural consultants, and even high-profile or visible leadership positions. Yet, these notions of authenticity are premised on dominant and monolithic conceptions of race, gender, and other identity categories. By offering critical mixed-race perspectives on what authenticity means and implies, the theater artists of this panel will address questions such as: "Is authenticity attainable?"; "Through whose lens is authenticity being 'quantified,' or being determined?"; and "Does the new authenticity model really work to dismantle racism and white supremacy?" and "What other methodologies of creative and production team curation can support the goal of an American theater that showcases the complexity of global majority populations in the US and beyond?" 

  • Panelist #1 Title: "Let's have a moratorium on Whyte cis-male actors" Description: While opening doors to racially marginalized actors, it's just as important to reflect on - and attempt to reduce - the overrepresentation of Whyte cis-male actors. I'll talk about how theaters might adopt the Inclusion Rider principles to hold themselves accountable for reducing those who have been overrepresented while increasing those whose voices/stories/representations are lacking - including people of mixed racial/cultural heritage. 
  • Panelist #2 Title: "Centering Artist Safety in Practice: or Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is" Description: What exactly do accountability practices for Regional and LORT theaters look like? What is a model of language support for playwrights, actors, designers as we navigate a post-covid theatrical landscape? How do we push back against a "return to normal", when normal wasn't working? An offering of a model created by Crowded Fire Theater in San Francisco, CA toward a theater that is humane, anti-racist and strives toward centering the artists who make our American Theater successful. 
  • Panelist #3 Title: WTF is Latinx Authenticity? Who Determines that Shit? And What Do We Win/Lose by Adhering to It? Description: Basically, I wanna dive into the complexities of casting within Latinx nationalities and ethnicities (Mexicans cast as Dominicans, Nuyoricans cast as Chicanos, etc.). I also wanna examine the implications of authentic casting on theories of performance. If the role of the actor is to embody as authentically as possible that which is NOT themselves (ie the character) then does the desire for "authentic" casting force us to re-theorize the function of acting? And what might a new theory of acting look like? Panelist #4 Title: Authentic Diversity in Theater: Displacing the Authentic Identity Model Description: 
  • Panelist #4 will trouble the idea of "authenticity" in theater, finding that authenticity has become a symbolic act of representational diversity. As a mixed-race Latina, the panelist is wary of narratives of authenticity because they are inherently exclusionary and based on dominant conceptions of racial identity. As such, the panelist will call on theater makers to embrace an authentic diversity that is reflective of a multitude of people with an array of heterogeneities: diversity within diversity.
01:00PM - 02:00PM
CMRS Virtual Conference
PANEL: Disruption, (Dis)location, History and the Afro-Indigenous Gaze
Format : Panel
Speakers
Kimberly Knight, Black Indians NC
Andrew Jolivette, University Of California San Diego
Shonda Buchanan, Loyola Marymount University
Moderators
Kelly Jackson, Associate Professor, Arizona State University

Moderator's paper title: "Disruption, (Dis)location, History and the Afro-Indigenous Gaze," Shonda Buchanan, Loyola Marymount University - My panel will explore how white colonization disrupted our lives and culture(s). Title: "From Indian to Mulatto: The Effects of Reclassification and Reconnection for Southeastern Woodland Afro-Indigenous People," Kimberely Knight, Founder, Black Indians NC - This paper will explore the Southeast Indians multiple relabeling that attempted to erase their identity, steal land and corrupt communities. Title: "Dig Up Custer And Kill Him Again: The Need For Merciless Indian Savage Intellectuals," Okera Adofo, Educator, Consultant - This paper will explore how white U.S. war heroes wreaked havoc on our lives and disrupted our communities, families, and nations. Title: "Queer Afro-Indigenous Futurity Thrivance," Andrew Jolivette - This paper will explore the queer Afro-Indigenous gaze has been disrupted yet how our communities can envision a future with pluralistic identities. Title: "Black Indian Intersections," Steven Gayle - This paper will talk about the spaces where Africans, African Americans and American Indians came together to make community dispute European disruptions. Panel Summary: The oral history of African Americans, American Indians and Black Indians have provided the cornerstone for our connection to the past, to our traditions, to our cultural knowledge and family lore that forced migration, a mental, physical and spiritual disruption, tried to erase. The disruption of forced migration includes the Trail of Tears, the Middle Passage where millions of Africans were deposited in America like dimes in a bank, or any act of physical removal, or relabeling of a people. But stories keep us alive. Stories about ourselves are the sinew that binds and protects our survival. The notion of "migration" for Black Indians and Free People of Color included land grabs or stealing by white settlers and lawn enforcement, being forced off of our ancestral lands or farmland we'd purchased or inherited by threat of death or other Black code restrictions. Hence, the telling and retelling, the writing and rewriting of our own stories, the reclaiming and sharing of these narratives created the Afro-Indigenous Gaze that has cultivated a sense of authority and given us back our cultural connections, validating our survival, resistance and resilience. However, it's a sociological truism that once you have a name or an orientation of something or someone, you think you understand it/them. Toni Morrison wrote about this in her pivotal book, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Even, no, especially if you create your own name for that thing, people, landscape, like "earth" as opposed to Turtle Island, or America as opposed to Indian Country or First Nations, or Tasmania or Australia as opposed to the name its original inhabitants, not "Aboriginals," gave it. If you stamp a name on something, Mulatto, Colored, Black, and can orient that thing, or person, or "unknown" territory in relation to yourself, it makes you feel comfortable. At ease. A little safer. Not so afraid. You feel as if you have a kind of familiarity that in some sense gives you, the interloper, power. Consequently, every time Lewis and Clark mapped "unknown" "to whites" Indian land, calling valleys, lakes, mountains, bluffs, what they wanted, they led white people first mentally, psychologically and then physically through previously treacherous terrain that whites had never seen before. Then whites felt safe enough to build homes, little Western townships, led wagon trails across Apache, Nez Perce, Aaninena, Dakota, Lakota, Cheyanne and Arapaho lands, which is why the first nations fought back and murdered trespassers. The power of naming a place, the indigenous tribes, made whites feel safe. This same kind of disruption, dislocation, relocation happened in Africa, in India and Southeast Asia with the British, in the Hawaiian islands, etc. That list goes on. Classifying a thing, people or place is how one history or narrative is erased and another begins on top of it. This is colonization at its core. Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee explores this more thoroughly. In the case of European oppression of people of color in this country, and around the world, the naming always came first. Then the newspaper articles created a myth of "The Wild West," then the white bodies, en masse. The West was never "won," it was rewritten. Writing, particularly by people of color and our allies who address these issues, attempts to undo the damage of colonization. Through our defiance as writers and educators we are allowed to challenge this country in how they classified our people, once called Free Blacks or Free People of Color who mostly were Mixed Bloods, then Coloreds, then Negro, then African American. Why so many classifications for us? In my experience and research, I've learned that the oppressor attempts to label you to not simply count, classify or demean you, but also to control. Then not just to corrupt our ways of life, our families, cultures and communities with the ultimate motive of not simply controlling but to erase you. It has happened to so many American Indian nations that are now extinct due to colonization. It has happened to free mixed communities of color, Black and Indian communities who were simply trying to make a living for themselves and their children. Moreover, this is the heritage of today's gentrification. This is why it's so important to use our poems, narratives, our academic degrees, our songs, our art, any kind of public and private discourse, to fight all the isms that would disrupt, dislocate and erase us.

02:00PM - 02:15PM
CMRS Virtual Conference
CONFERENCE CLOSING
Speakers
Rudy Guevarra Jr., CMRS President, Arizona State University
Moderators
Sarah Herrera, Edson College Of Nursing And Health Innovation - ASU
Chandra Crudup


Thank you to artivist Favianna Rodriguez for commissioning her beautiful artwork for the conference and Keynote Aisha Fukushima for her amazing performance!

Finally, love and thanks to members of the various committees and all the volunteers who helped support CMRS 2022!



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