NCID-1332
Yvonne Kwan
Assistant Professor of Asian American Studies
San Jose State University
Education/Degree:
1 Sociology (University of California, Santa Cruz)
About
Dr. Yvonne Y. Kwan joined the Department of Sociology and Interdisciplinary Social Sciences as an assistant professor of Asian American studies in 2017. Prior, she served as a postdoc in Dartmouth College's inaugural cohort of the Society of Fellows Program. Dr. Kwan received her PhD in sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). She also has an MA in education from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research has been generously funded by the American Sociological Association's Minority Fellowship Program and the University of California. She has also served as a mentor for the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Dartmouth's First Generation Mentorship Program, UCSC Education Opportunity Program, and Southeast Asian American Studies Conference.
Current Work
Dr. Kwan’s current book manuscript, entitled Afterlives of Diaspora: Cambodian American Trauma and Memory, explores how social trauma may not be verbalized or articulated, but yet children of survivors can still develop the capacity to both identify with and experience the pain of previous generations. The successive generations bear witness to the pain of trauma, genocide, and relocation, whether consciously or not. Transgenerational traumatic memory then mediates the present with the past and the future, creating bodily intensities in the successive generations that open possibilities for social justice action and coalition building. The main lines of inquiry of this manuscript address 1) ways in which individual models of trauma converge with collective and affective notions of trauma as a collective and transgenerational phenomenon, 2) mechanisms of transference, and 3) implications of trauma for mental health and education — for the first and successive generations.
Research Area Keyword(s)
Asian American studies, critical race studies, critical refugee studies, education, Family, feminist methodologies, law and society, memory, mental health and affect, Mixed methods, Social theory, trauma