{"id":16125,"date":"2011-09-07T01:02:27","date_gmt":"2011-09-07T01:02:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=16125"},"modified":"2015-10-24T22:04:47","modified_gmt":"2015-10-24T22:04:47","slug":"an-interview-with-uws-lynet-uttal-making-the-asian-american-experience-visibul-through-learning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=16125","title":{"rendered":"An Interview with UW’s Lynet Uttal: Making the Asian American experience visible through learning"},"content":{"rendered":"

An Interview with UW’s Lynet Uttal: Making the Asian American experience visible through learning<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Asian Wisconzine<\/a>
\nVolume 7, Number 9 (September 2011)<\/p>\n

Heidi M. Pascual<\/strong><\/p>\n

Part 1 of 2<\/em><\/p>\n

It was \u201cquite an accident of fate\u201d that Lynet Uttal<\/a> became the director of the\u00a0 University of Wisconsin-Madison\u2019s Asian American Studies Program<\/a>. Although Uttal has been a faculty affiliate of Asian American Studies since 2003, she never considered being in that position.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was in Mexico on sabbatical when I received an email from then director Leslie\u00a0 Bow<\/a> asking me if I would consider being the next director,\u201d Uttal said in an interview with Asian Wisconzine<\/em>. \u201cAlthough I teach about Asian Americans in my courses, yet I never considered myself as doing research about Asian Americans or being part of the field of Asian American Studies.\u201d<\/p>\n

Four years into her position, Uttal has loved her work as she learned the importance of the program in terms of education offering and how it also helps her grow professionally.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love being the director of the Asian American Studies Program because the program is very important for the mission of the University as well as for my own professional growth as a race scholar,\u201d she explained. \u201cI have grown in the last four years to believe that the Asian American Studies Program is important because Asian Americans are a racialized group in the United States that is invisible in the practices and understanding of race in the the United States. For example, although it was Asian American graduate students who were extremely active in creating all of the ethnic studies programs and ethnic studies requirement at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, very little has been done to acknowledge their activism and contributions.\u00a0 Yet, Asian Americans have a history in U.S. society parallel to African Americans in terms of having experienced legal exclusions and discrimination on the basis of race.\u201d<\/p>\n

Uttal has a mixed racial, cultural and national background, with a Japanese American mother and a Russian American Jewish father, but according to her, neither of these cultures (which were not mainstream Euro-American) was used to create a sense of ethnic identity in her parents\u2019 home.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mother is a Japanese American who grew up in Japan from age 9-23 years and returned to the U.S., almost as if she were a Japanese immigrant,\u201d Uttal said.\u00a0 \u201cShe raised my two sisters and me to think of ourselves as American, because according to Japanese standards we certainly were not Japanese.\u00a0 But we also were not Japanese American.\u00a0 The cultural and socialization values in the home I grew up in reflected my Japanese grandparents’ values as well as my mother’s transnational identity ideas, and also father’s upbringing as a Russian American Jewish father.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An Interview with UW’s Lynet Uttal: Making the Asian American experience visible through learning Asian Wisconzine Volume 7, Number 9 (September 2011) Heidi M. Pascual Part 1 of 2 It was \u201cquite an accident of fate\u201d that Lynet Uttal became the director of the\u00a0 University of Wisconsin-Madison\u2019s Asian American Studies Program. Although Uttal has been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,16,1245,8,20,25],"tags":[7476,7474,7475,3203,7477,4720],"class_list":["post-16125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-asia","category-biography","category-media-archive","category-usa","category-women","tag-asian-wisconzine","tag-heidi-m-pascual","tag-heidi-pascual","tag-leslie-bow","tag-lynet-uttal","tag-university-of-wisconsin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16125"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43456,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16125\/revisions\/43456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}