Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American Mental Health
Department: Minor in Medical Humanities
Date and Time: May 16, 2017 | 12:00 PM-6:30 PMEvent Location: Humanities Gateway 3341 & 1030
Event Details
Open in Emergency: A Special Issue on Asian American Mental Health is an arts and humanities intervention to decolonize mental health, designed by Mimi Khúc. This multi-piece issue includes an original deck of tarot cards, a hacked DSM: Asian American Edition, a stack of handwritten daughter-to-mother letters, a foldout testimonial tapestry, and a treated pamphlet on postpartum depression. Together, these five pieces offer a critique of existing, calcified, approaches to mental health while also generating new possibilities for thinking about and practicing wellness.
Parking is $10 in the Student Center Parking Structure
Part 1: 12-1:30 pm
Humanities Gateway 3341
Lunch is Provided
Teaching Asian American Mental Health: A Pedagogy Workshop on Open in Emergency
How do we teach the ways that historical legacies, ongoing structural violence, and experiences of loss shape the psychic lives of Asian Americans? This workshop offers mental health as a pedagogical frame, and explores strategies for teaching mental health and Asian American studies using the materials in Open in Emergency. Workshop participants will explore the special issue and generate teaching strategies for their existing courses. We will discuss the DSM: Asian American Edition and the Asian American Tarot Cards in particular.
Part 2: 5-6:30 pm
Humanities Gateway 1030
Hacking the DSM: Asian American Mental Health
What does it look like to “hack” how we approach mental health? This presentation explores Asian American mental health in the hands of artists, writers, humanists, community members–thinkers and creators producing knowledge and resources often illegible to the psychological establishment, offering new approaches that locate mental health in the context of social structures and ask us to dream new ways of understanding our unwellness and tending to it.
Bio: Mimi Khúc is a scholar, teacher, and writer on issues of race and mental health, queer of color feminist politics, and Asian American motherhood. She is currently a lecturer in Asian American Studies at the University of Maryland, and is the guest editor for the recently released Open in Emergency.
This event is cosponsored by the Medical Humanities Initiative, the Department of Asian American Studies, the Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies, the Asian Pacific American Student Association, and Healing Through Humanities