[AAAS 2026] Creating Reciprocal and Relational Spaces in Asian American Refugee Storytelling

 Asian American refugee storytelling aims to create spaces where refugees voice their traumas and concerns, challenges and successes. The premise of this panel is the disjunct between the purported aims of refugee storytelling and the concern that in these hypervisible stories, individual refugees continue to be invisible, their stories reduced to predictable arcs of trauma and resilience, and their everyday struggles deemed unworthy of attention. This panel seeks to explore methodologies and theories that help us understand Asian American refugee storytelling as riven with power dynamics, such that the storytelling is more focused on the audience’s needs of feeling righteous empathy rather than on the refugees’ expressions of what matters most to them. The panel, then, takes seriously Amitava Kumar’s call: “Any story ought to be surrounded with other questions. Whose story is it? What ends does it serve? Does it affirm or contradict other stories?” (6). In other words, the panel wants to rethink the very purpose of Asian American refugee storytelling: to ask whom these stories benefit, and to articulate the questions we are not asking in our unalloyed enthusiasm for refugee stories as fostering empathy and belonging, connection and welcoming.

 By questioning how the spaces of Asian American refugee storytelling work, we are trying to understand the role and possibilities of oral traditions, the conditions of legibility for refugee stories, and ultimately, how we can create spaces of refugee storytelling that are relational and reciprocal. In other words, how do we shift refugee storytelling from extraction to collaboration? Or, taking it further, how can we as scholars better serve the stories, the knowledge they convey, and the storytellers' reasons for sharing their knowledge? How do we create and foster storytelling spaces that take Asian American refugees to be political and historical actors in their own right and that do not defuse the confrontational politics against forces of white supremacy and U.S. national hegemony, even when they appear in a benevolent guise? How can refugee storytelling be a space of meaningful Asian American solidarity across hierarchies of class, religion, and nationality?

 Possible topics for individual presentations include:

• Refugee storytelling and power structures/conflicts
• Methodologies for creating relational and reciprocal storytelling spaces
• Listening praxes for relational and reciprocal refugee storytelling
• Critical reflections on “refugee” as a marker in storytelling
• Refugee storytelling and inclusion in the U.S. body politic
• Oral traditions and storytelling
• Storytelling and in/visibility of refugees

 Presenters will be given 15 minutes each to present their individual papers, followed by a 20-minute Q&A session for all.

 Submission Guidelines

Please submit a 250-word abstract of your presentation along with a short biography to Surbhi Malik (svm17189@creighton.edu) by October 17, 2025. Presenters will be notified by October 18, 2025.

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Work Cited:

Kumar, Amitava. A Time Outside This Time. Knopf, 2021.