A Journey of Engaged Public Humanities with Dr. Lisa Yun

Welcome to “ Confluence: Humanities in the Public Sphere”, an IASH sponsored podcast on public humanities. In this episode, Dr. Lisa Yun, Associate Professor, Department of English and Department of Asian and Asian American Studies, shares with us her unique and engaged approach to Public Humanities. She talks about the role that storytelling plays in a classroom as well as outside, in building communities by bringing people together. 

Transcript

Dr. Yun: So this is kind of a, it's a spectrum this project. There's the class. There's what the students are producing with them. Their stories are part of the archive, then the community stories that we're collecting the public events that we…

Shruti: Welcome to Confluence humanities in the public sphere, an IASH sponsored podcast that discusses various public humanities projects on the Binghamton University campus, as well as outside. Thank you for listening to our podcast. I'm your host Shruti Jain. Today we're joined by Dr. Lisa Yun, associate professor in the Department of English and the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies at Binghamton University. Professor Yun has led several public humanities projects and worked intimately with the Binghamton community for several years. Once again, thank you for being with us. Can you talk a little bit about the public humanities projects you do? 

Dr. Yun: Oh, since spring of 2019, I connected with Katherine Lloyd, who is…she's an amazing educator. And she's the vice president at the Tenement Museum, which is in New York City. And the museum focuses on cultures and histories that emerge from immigration and migration,

which is, you know, what I work on. And she's one of the cofounders of a digital archive that I've really been fascinated with, it's called your story, our story. And it's a unique archive of first person stories that I had been looking at and researching. I had started changing my my pedagogy in my classes, because I realized more and more that the students, at least in my classes, my students needed a more engaged method of learning, of researching and producing their work. And work that would be, I felt, publicly useful. You know, there needed to be some kind of utility for the work that they were doing, umm, which brings a different kind of awareness to students and, and their role and their power as, as producers, you know, as researchers, as emerging Scholars. Wwe began studying very deeply this archive, and treating these first person stories of which they're, you know, almost 10,000 of them buried away in this archive of everyday people who have submitted these micro stories about their experiences and their family's experiences with with migration and immigration. And, and these were, you know, digital type of digital storytelling, this involves text, audio, photographs, and then at the same time, also using this as a model for students themselves to write and produce their own stories of immigration and migration and participate in the archive and do so as as a group in a collaborative way. So using their own stories and histories as something to study as something worthy of studying. The fact that they could view their own family members as historical actors! Then folding into that, the collecting, the interviewing, collecting stories from local community members. You know, this project then grew- started with me connecting with Katherine Lloyd, and then having more and more of these conversations, dialogues, then thinking through things that I'm interested in, you know, conceptually and also in terms of, you know, theories of justice.

How that then shapes this project that I've been working on with students, which is, you know, building these collections, curating new collections, and studying how people's stories get told or are told, are legible or not legible, especially in this digital eco verse. So, since 2019, we had a public exhibit, which was wonderful- a way of, of having this diverse public together, there are many publics and in this case is intersecting public of students. Some of them brought their parents, teachers and local participants came together for this being a wonderful exhibit that we had at the University Union and then COVID hit. because we're doing you know, a lot of work in the digital medium, we did more things with digital storytelling. So in partnership with the museum, they asked us if we could do a digital storytelling campaign using YouTube for the museum. And it's called objects of comfort, which was to address this time of incredible anxiety, and the unknown of COVID. And so we did that. It was a great experience. And we learned a lot of also technical skills in doing this too. And we also produce an Instagram campaign. And all of this involves storytelling, about, you know, our lives our families. Very much though, the common thread here was immigration and culture. So that is part of the book, you know, the book is going to be sort of looking at chronicling how one produces this kind of study, and this kind of research. And it will include collections that have been created by these students in classes. And you know about that too Shruti, you know, you're going to be involved in that. And it's collaborative, digital book projects called Digital for ourselves. And the latest piece of it is this podcast, for which you are a phenomenal host, and CO producer Shruti along with our other collaborator, right, Le Li, who's PhD student in TRIP- the translation program. And of course, with Katherine Lloyd, at the museum to the podcast just brings a whole nother level of voice and intimacy to this project, this other dimension, very, very dialogic dimension, you know, very interactive.

Shruti: Well, thank you so much for the shout out. And thank you also for supporting the project in the way that you have for supervising it for helping us with so many different stages. I also noticed that, and I know this, because of how much we've spoken about this in the past, but you have such a unique understanding of public humanities and issues of social justice, being able to kind of narrate unheard stories, histories that are marginalized. Engaged public humanities, is what you talk about a lot with us. And it would be really incredible if you could share with our listeners how that shapes your project and your interest in the public humanities.

Dr. Yun: I have to think about what I've told you guys before. I know how about I start with the personal, and then and then we can instead of talking more generally, you know, I arrive to it through both personal experiences and scholarly interest. My my family, they were immigrants, who arrived to New York, and I was the first American born in the family. So in some ways, I'm still very close to that immigration experience. So the language in my home was not was not just English, you know, their their parents, my parents spoke their native tongue. And my grandmother didn't even speak English, for example, there were members. And so that experience impacted me in a way because my schooling was almost a parallel universe. What I learned and what I saw in school, was not at all related to my experiences in this other universe, which was this other community, this family, you know, these people who were not in the textbooks, we're not in the films that we watched in class, we're not talked about as anything, you know, historical or important, or there was a sense of, you know, I belong, but I really didn't. Stories for me became the vehicle for thinking through how does one belong? How does one exchange knowledge, how does one connect with others? How does that dialogue happen? And it's through this form of the storytelling that we I think that we connect, at least that's how I connected with people was through listening to their story, figuring out how that connects to me, and then learning how to tell my story, which I'm still trying to figure out my family. Now my immediate family is a multiracial, multicultural family that has multifaceted experiences in relation to justice. I have two children. One who is Afro Latina, Asian, was born here in New York, and another who's Chinese and adopted from China. My husband's side of the family comes from Latin America, and the Caribbean. And my side comes from Hong Kong, during the period of British wool, and both sides are immigrant immigrant families. So these are, you know, the diaspora; is very, very complex histories, and different relationships and politics of race and ethnicity. So there, there's that sort of the personal, and then there's the scholarly that sort of came together. So I was introduced by a professor to the narrative of Frederick Douglass, which is the slave narrative. I was really fascinated with how voices get to be heard, and in what way. And through this course of study, I learned that the slave narrative was a particular genre. So it was how to tell the story that then got me really interested. And then the second thing that happened, while I was doing this study, and learning from this professor, about the slave narrative, was me beginning to wonder about the cooling narrative. Right, because my grandmother had, she's a saint, she had this like, folk song that she would sing, and it was a song, a village song, really village song about people who would leave the village and go to this place called Cuba, and leave people behind and how the women would weep, knowing that the men would never likely return. So there's a song that you can sing to me and you know, you're telling me about these ancestors, but did they ever speak? And I thought, well, this somewhere here, they must have told their stories. Because if we get beyond sort of thinking of them as well, they were victims, they were tricked into, you know, indenture and, and there is a lot of that, that is true, also, but, but these were, you know, peak resilient people who somehow left behind vestiges of their experiences or, or some kind of narration. So I went on this, you know, hunt for these Puli testimonies. So there was a commission report, and this report excerpts, these testimonies by these, quote coolies. So these quotes are in the burry, you know, they're in this commission report. And so I thought, okay, they extracted it from somewhere. So there must have been testimonies, and where are they? That the whole testimonies, so I really went on this long and it was just this really, I felt like I was looking for the golden fleece or something I was I was the needle in the haystack. And I did find, so I found write extant copies. But these narratives were so interesting, because then I discovered these were people who wrote beyond the confines of the testimony form. So that's, you know, the idea of voice and how people still take what is available, the vehicle that's available to them, or the form that's available to them, and use it and sort of refashion it in a way so that they can tell their stories. And that was buried in the archives. And so that was my book The Coolie speaks in which I sort of brought those out and read them as primary sources themselves, but the step into engage public community so what I'm talking about is really more about how does one reach into the archives and a find a way to excavate what is already there. They were speaking what's also happening in this moment in time when I'm doing this work is so then I met this amazing woman named Suzanne Anne who was a doctor, you know, Korean American doctor, and she was an active

asked, and she would have these retreats. And she she got me involved in those retreats and she would bring in people like Dale Minami and John Tateishi. So Dale Minami is

one of the most important civil rights and law activists who worked for example in the Korematsu case. And John Tateishi, wrote a book called “And justice for All”  which collected the stories and the testimonies of people who were interned of Japanese Americans,these were first person stories. It is possible to bring about a certain kind of justice by having those stories recognized in the public. But so those stories were incredible in this book “And justice for All”. So that's when I started thinking about the public, I started thinking about the importance of having stories told and available to the reading public, having the public engaged in that, not just reading that, but also having dialogues about it, and having a space to do that, to reflect on it and and do it as a as a public audience together. Collaborating. So…

Shruti: That's fabulous. Amazing. I mean, I can't thank you enough for being a part of this podcast, but also being so generous in sharing so much and so intimately

about the interest over the project and what really does seem to be like a lifelong commitment to telling the stories. 

Dr. Yun: Thanks Shruti