Navigating Hostile Terrains, Building Across Difference: AB 1460 and the SJSU Ethnic Studies Collaborative
by Yvonne Y. Kwan, Soma de Bourbon, and Christopher Cox
ABSTRACT: Situated with the passage of California Assembly Bill 1460 (AB 1460), this practitioner paper discusses how faculty at San José State University (SJSU) have built coalitional networks to respond to pressures from the neoliberal university for a quick, but not necessarily Ethnic Studies-expertise-informed, implementation. Unlike campuses that had more robust standalone Ethnic Studies departments, SJSU did not have equal footing across all the different units: African American Studies (AFAM) and Chican@ Studies (CCS) have departmental status, but tenure-line faculty density for both are disproportionately low compared to other departments in the College of Social Sciences (COSS). Additionally, Asian American Studies (AAS) and Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) exist as programs housed in the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences, with AAS as a minor program and NAIS as a nascent program. To address how we worked together to implement AB 1460, fulfill the need to offer CSU General Education (GE) Area F courses, and build capacity across differences, we address three main points: (1) the promises and pitfalls of GE in a neoliberal university system, (2) strategies for coalition alliance between the programs of AAS and NAIS, and (3) opportunities for growth and expansion.
Article Citation: Yvonne Y. Kwan, Soma de Bourbon, and Christopher Cox (2024) Navigating Hostile Terrains, Building Across Difference: AB 1460 and the SJSU Ethnic Studies Collaborative. AAPI Nexus: Policy, Practice and Community: 2024, Vol. 21, No. 1 & 2.