Resisting Asian American Invisibility: The Politics of Race and Education - Paperback

by Stacey J. Lee (Author)

Resisting Asian American Invisibility highlights one group's struggle for educational justice. Based on in-depth ethnographic research in formal and informal educational spaces, this book argues that Hmong American youth are rendered invisible by dominant racial discourses and current educational policies and practices. The book illustrates the way that Hmong American students are erased by the Black and White racial paradigm and the Asian American pan-ethnic category that perpetuates the model minority stereotype. Furthermore, Lee and a team of Southeast Asian American graduate student researchers explore how current educational policies around English learners marginalize Hmong youth. Far from being passive or silent victims, Hmong American communities actively resist their invisibility through various forms of educational advocacy and community-based education. In the tradition of critical ethnography, the author and her research team also look at what these individual and local stories expose about larger social forces, norms, and institutions.

Book Features:

• Focuses on a Southeast Asian American group that has gotten little attention in education literature.
• Highlights the unique histories and educational experiences, concerns, and challenges facing Hmong American students in a Midwest city.
• Examines both school and community-based educational spaces.
• Draws on research conducted as a follow-up study to the author's book, Up Against Whiteness: Race, School, and Immigrant Youth.

Author Biography

Stacey J. Lee is the Frederick Erickson Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) Professor of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is the author of Unraveling the "Model Minority" Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth (2nd ed.) and Up Against Whiteness: Race, School, and Immigrant Youth.