Invited Speakers:

Nerissa Balce, Asst Professor of Comparative Literature, UMass-Amherst

Lucy Burns, Asst Professor of World Arts and Cultures, UCLA

Richard Chu, Asst Professor of History, UMass-Amherst

Peter Chua, Asst Professor of Sociology, San Jose State University

Robyn Rodriguez, Asst Professor of Sociology, Rutgers University

Jeffrey Santa Ana, Asst Professor of English and American Studies, Mount Holyoke College

Rowena Tomaneng, Assoc Professor of English, De Anza Community College

The symposium will focus on a particular space of crisis and resistance in the era of what the panelists call “Homeland Security racism,” namely the deportation of U.S. Filipinos and its linkages with the “War on Terror” as a project of U.S. Empire. The panelists will examine the urgent concerns of surveillance culture around the globe, racial profiling, sexual discrimination, detention and deportation, and wars in the Middle East, contextualizing Filipino deportation in the larger phenomenon of the U.S. government attacking its own immigrant Asian, Latino and Middle Eastern communities since September 11, 2001. The symposium will also include discussion about the political response of communities under assault by Homeland Security racism through organizing, coalition-building, and protest actions. The panelists, who are members of the Critical Filipina/o Studies Collective, a U.S.-based national network of community-engaged scholars, professors, and educators, will expand on the notion of “Homeland Security racism,” which they have partly articulated in their recently published report, "Resisting Homeland Security: Organizing against Unjust Removals of U.S. Filipinos," accessible here.